By: Tilly Grove, London, UK, SSH Correspondent

I remember being jealous of my friend who confessed to being wolf-whistled by the waste collectors she passed on her way to school, regardless of the fact that it clearly distressed her and she was lodging a complaint with the council.

We were fourteen or fifteen years old then. I had already swallowed whole the idea that street harassment wasn’t just something that we had to accept, but it was something that we should appreciate, something that we should want, something that we should envy other victims for. At the same time, these men were harassing a girl in her school uniform. Whether they were behaving in the way they did because they found her sexually attractive, because they wished to intimidate her, or both, they could be fairly safe in the assumption that they were dealing with a child. Clearly, it didn’t stop them. Maybe it encouraged them.

As women, we are acutely aware that street harassment is an accepted part of our lives. In many ways, though, it is more than that; it is the rite of passage we must undertake to be considered women. The moment a girl receives her first catcall, her first wolf-whistle or her first grope, she can consider herself well on the way to adulthood – no matter how unwanted the action was, and no matter how uncomfortable it made her. Such is the brainwashing of our society, she feels that she should be grateful, because it’s a compliment.

If she dares to pluck up the courage and tell someone – a parent, guardian, or teacher, perhaps – she may find her concerns brushed off on the basis that, “It’s just something women have to put up with,” so she needs to get used to it. If she tells her friends, she might find her complaints rejected because, “You love it really!” They’ve been taught to view it as a compliment, too.

The entitlement that men perceive themselves to have over women, their bodies and their lives knows no boundaries, age-related or otherwise. When I tweeted out a request for girls and women to share their earliest memories of street harassment, the majority recalled that it started before they were even teenagers. The eleven-year-old catcalled by builders on her way to get ice-cream, the thirteen-year-old beeped and hollered at by men in cars for wearing shorts, and the sixteen year old who can’t leave the house for even five minutes in a skirt without a man passing comment, all learned that the hard way.

Men began to intimidate them and reduce them to sex objects the moment they hit puberty. That’s the initiation into adulthood.

One thing above all else sticks out as being universal in the stories I heard, though: from the moment these women had their first experience of childhood street harassment, that harassment immediately became a constant part of their lives, and remains so to this day. They graduated into womanhood.

Tilly is studying for a BA in War Studies at King’s College London, where she is writing her dissertation on the effect that perceptions of gender have on the roles which women adopt in conflict. You can follow her on Tumblr and Twitter, @tillyjean_.

By: Taylor Kuether, Minnesota, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Last night I was walking to a friend’s house for her housewarming party. It was a Saturday night and I was dressed to go out – not that that should be relevant. I had done my hair and put on makeup, and I thought I looked pretty good.

I was walking alone, which in my mid-sized college town of about 65,000 people, I’ve always felt safe and comfortable doing. I was walking down the sidewalk on a well-trafficked street full of popular bars. Two men walked around the corner, turning onto the street I was walking along. Instinctively, I quickened my pace and averted my eyes as I walked past them, as I do when I pass anyone on a narrow sidewalk and I’m walking alone.

As I passed them, one of the men said (and these really are his exact words), “Well aren’t you just the prettiest little lady in the whole wide world.”

I had not expected that. I don’t know why I was so caught off guard – maybe because I’d been lost in thought as I walked to my friend’s house, maybe because I’d walked far enough down the street that I was no longer in the heavily-trafficked area and I hadn’t expected to run into anyone, maybe because his words were something straight out of a movie. I mean, who says that?

Taken aback, I laughed. I actually laughed! And it gets worse – I laughed and said “thank you.” What?! Why did I do that? I write for a blog that aims to combat street harassment (thanks for reading, by the way!), and I THANKED a harasser for his comment.

That’s why I’m writing about this. How does one respond to street harassment? What should I have said? I know I handled it all wrong, and I’ve been kicking myself for responding with a laugh and a smile instead of a terse retort in – probably vain – effort to quell his future comments. But I didn’t. I’d been so caught off guard and so surprised by actually hearing such a cliché catcall in real life that my first natural reaction was to laugh.

So, readers, what should I have done? Tweet me @taylorkuether with your thoughts!

[Editor’s Note: There is no “right” or perfect response to street harassment! It’s okay if we don’t always speak out against it, there may be a million reasons why. At SSH we hope people know there are a range of responses to try out and that ultimately the choice is YOURS.]

Taylor Kuether is a senior journalism student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconsin. She has previously written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, worked as a reporter at her city’s daily newspaper, The Leader-Telegram, and its arts and culture publication, VolumeOne, hosted a local-music centered radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio, and worked as Editor-in-Chief at her student newspaper, where she enjoyed writing biting, slightly rant-y columns about feminist issues.

By: Molly Redding, San Francisco, CA, USA, SSH Correspondent

My last blog post was about Carolyn Criado-Perez, who was harassed on Twitter after fighting to get a woman on British bank notes. I’m sad to say that Carolyn has since decided to shut down her Twitter account due to the barrage of threats she received. I’m incredibly upset by this, an action that says to me that we are a culture that can’t tolerate other people and their different beliefs. I only hope that Carolyn continues her fight for women’s rights both on and off the Internet.

Her story, and two other recent incidents, demonstrates how sexism in the tech sector is strong and how it can influence daily behavior, specifically, street harassment.

First, earlier this month, at the start of one of the biggest tech conferences of the year called TechCrunch Disrupt, two men from Australia kicked off the conference by introducing their new app called, ingeniously, TitStare. It was meant to be a parody, but all it did was highlight the idea that women’s bodies in public are men’s property.

The fact that (1) these guys thought up this app, (2) they not only thought it would be hilarious, they thought MANY other people would think it was hilarious and (3) whomever was approving the sessions ALSO thought it would be hilarious, demonstrates just how numb to the idea that women’s bodies on display are public property our culture has become.

Not only that, but it propagates the idea that being ogled is something to be taken lightly and laughed at, as well as accepts men’s behavior as “boys being boys.” All of these ideas, even in subtle humor, continue to perpetuate the acceptance of street harassment in our culture.

To add insult to injury, a 9-year-old girl was in the audience excited to give her own presentation on an app she had created. What kind of messaging about her body, at an incredibly vulnerable age, do you think she received?

(To be fair, TechCrunch has since issued an apology.)

Second, there’s this video: “Sweeping Women Off Their Feet.” In this video, which has been viewed more than one million times, two men walk around their campus grabbing women they don’t know and carrying them off without permission– under the guise of being “gentlemanly.”

This behavior reinforces strict constructs of masculinity and femininity, and what does it say about our culture that these men feel that it is their right to get into a woman’s space and pick her up without her permission? If this isn’t an example of women’s bodies being assumed as public property, I’m not sure I know what is.

Since this was done in a building on a college campus, the women, I assume, felt relatively safe. What if this had been done on a random street corner? At night? What messages are people who watch these videos consuming?

But technology and the Internet aren’t all bad. Websites like stopstreetharassment.org are using the power of Internet messaging to try and spread the opposite message, to try and make people stop, think, and discuss what appropriate interactions in public spaces are.

This week, I was excited to see Jezebel post about a woman who used the “missed connections” section of Craiglist to fight back against her harasser. She employed the power of language to make herself more “human” to her harasser,  an important idea when many of our interactions online and offline are anonymous, allowing harassers to separate their own humanity from the person they are harassing. The harassers never see their victim’s emotions, and so can ignore the fact that they have the same human feelings we all do.

Finally, if you’re like me, you might think that Tumblr posts are an amazing tool for disrupting the social world. Lucky for you, there are many Tumblr sites devoted to combatting street harassment:

http://stopstreetharassment.tumblr.com/

http://fuckyoustreetharassment.tumblr.com/

http://streetharassmenttumblr.tumblr.com/

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/street-harassment

I love that these sites use a combination of pictures, words and videos to contest “normal” social order, help victims realize they are not alone, and provide many, many options for making women’s place in the public world just a little bit easier, and a little bit safer.

Just like the street, the internet is a public space where women can easily be harassed and shamed, but they can also claim the space for their own. So let’s keep claiming – keep writing, keep tweeting, keep posting!

Molly received a graduate degree in International Development and Gender from the London School of Economics in 2011, where her dissertation focused on websites allowing victims of harassment to post about their experiences. She has worked in the non-profit sector for over 10 years. You can follow her on Twitter, @perfeminist.

By Britnae Purdy, SSH Correspondent

My boyfriend and I live near a great little college town. It’s not the party center of Virginia, but there are plenty of fun bars, unique restaurants, and quirky shops within walking distance, and one of our favorite things to do on free nights is to wander around, enjoying the warm weather and nightlife.

The last time we went out, I was feeling particularly hot – you know that feeling, when your hair is, surprisingly, just right, your outfit strikes that perfect balance, and you’ve applied your makeup without stabbing yourself in the eyeball with your mascara wand. We were going to a small show downtown, and I was happy.

As we walked, a pick-up truck pulled up beside us. A man (Boy? Guy? Dude? Man carries a connotation of respect of self and others that I typically don’t think applies in situations like this) leaned out and leered, “DAMN, girl!”

Let’s be clear here: I was feeling pretty DAMN girl! that night. My boyfriend probably agreed. Heck, in my mind everyone in town that night should have agreed. But hearing that call, in a stranger’s slightly slurring drawl, made me immediately want to go home, scrub clean, and burn my clothes.

As he drove away, my boyfriend muttered a curse, and feeling on edge already, I got angry. Why couldn’t you have said that to his face?! I thought. Throw a punch? Defend my honor (whatever that means)? Make him pay? And on that note, where were you the last time this happened to me? Why can’t you make it stop? I thought I was at least safe from getting harassed when I was with my boyfriend!

Hold up. Wait a second. What is it about street harassment that suddenly gives me princess syndrome?

As in, where is my knight in shining armor to rescue me?

No, I don’t want my boyfriend to start a fight with my harassers. I cannot react to one misplaced display of supposed hyper “masculinity” with another.

Nor am I asking my harassers to suddenly turn into the epitome of chivalry, lay down their coats so that I may walk over puddles and whatnot. But clearly something needs to change. Where can we start?

Before we had even left our apartment that night, I had brought up the problem of street harassment. I had said to my boyfriend, “I really want to wear my cute new heels. But I really don’t want to get yelled or honked at when we go out.”

He seemed very sad all of a sudden, and looked at me and said, “I really wish you didn’t have to deal with that.”

YES. That’s it. We don’t need princes. We don’t need every male to suddenly become feminist (though really, how great would that be?) What we need is for more and more men to realize, in similar moments of wrenching clarity, that their girlfriends, sisters, mothers, are facing sexually-based threats and harassment every single day, and that that simply should not happen.

For our part, women need to stop fooling themselves into thinking that street harassment, because it is so common, should be the norm, or that being sexually objectified by strangers is somehow a compliment. We need to insist on holding men to a higher standard, and we need men to rise to the occasion.

This is a united effort – no room for princesses here.

Britnae is a graduate student at George Mason University, in Virginia, where she is pursuing a Master of Arts in Global Affairs with a specialization in Security and Conflict Studies. She also writes for First Peoples Worldwide and you can read more of her writing on their blog and follow her on Twitter.