Brittany Oliver, Baltimore, MD, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
Fighting street harassment was never an easy job.
In case you missed it, Feminista Jones, a popular blogger, Black feminist and creator of the #YouOkSis hashtag, faced harsh backlash from Internet trolls for starting a discussion on how Black men should support Black women to combat street harassment. As motivating as this sounds, some people just couldn’t handle women speaking out and it took a turn for the worst.
With what was supposed to be a virtual space to express our frustrations to create dialogue, men immediately attacked Black women and their allies. At some point, I decided to join in on the conversation and the same thing happened to me.
How bad was it? You be the judge.
In defense of the movement, I tweeted back at trolls and was called an “angry Black feminist” who was on a mission to help organizations like Stop Street Harassment (SSH) put Black men in jail.
Really? Is that the best they could come up with? The work I do during the day consists of upholding racial equality and combating racism in all forms, especially within the criminal justice system. And believe me, the LAST thing I want is for the prison population to increase. That made absolutely no sense and is a cop out from the real problem: men not taking responsibilities for their actions.
This debate made me think about a film I saw in college called “Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity,” which is headlined by activist and educator Jackson Katz. Katz argues that the epidemic of male violence that plagues American society needs to be understood and addressed as part of a much larger cultural crisis in masculinity and I couldn’t agree more.
We live in a society that tells women and girls to dress a certain way to avoid unwanted attention and abuse. It blames victims first and asks questions later. It teaches men that they are entitled to women’s bodies and showing aggression is the “American” way.
Because the hashtag #YouOkSis wasn’t about the trolls, they were determined to ruin a time of solidarity. What people need to realize is that Stop Street Harassment has given me more support than any man ever has. Now, let that sink in for a minute.
If street harassment didn’t exist, why are organizations like SSH and Hollaback! Baltimore doing work on these issues? Why is visual artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh traveling around the country to wheat paste portraits quoting things women want to say to their harassers? Street harassment is not an illusion and these are real issues and challenges we face every day.
In 2014, SSH commissioned a 2,000-person national survey in the USA and found that 65% of all women had experienced street harassment, while 25% of men were harassed. With all of the research it took to get these results, why would anybody make this stuff up?
Instead of Black men supporting Black women on this issue, sadly some of them let us down once again. When was the last time you heard a woman deny a man’s experience of being stop and frisked by the police? Most likely never.
And although anti-women trolls hijacked the #YouOkSis hashtag, they proved exactly why the fight to ending street harassment continues.
So, what’s next? Continue to stress the importance of ending street harassment among your family, friends and allies in your community because as you can clearly see, the work is far from over.
Brittany Oliver is a recent graduate of Towson University and works in the non-profit communications sector and supports local anti-street harassment advocacy through Hollaback! Baltimore. She blogs at http://btiarao.wordpress.comand publicly rants on Twitter, @btiarao.
