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UK: #PoppySmart and the Influence of Media Representation

June 24, 2015 By Correspondent

Emma Rachel Deane, UK, SSH Blog Correspondent

For anyone who follows events surrounding women’s public safety, her story was impossible to miss. Towards the end of April this year, Poppy Smart, a 23-year-old digital marketing coordinator in the UK, had reached her limit on the amount of harassment she could bear from the staff of a nearby construction site. After seeking help from a nearby police station to put a stop to it, a local newspaper ran a front page story identifying Smart by name and stating that wolf-whistling builders were facing an investigation after her complaints.

Within days of the article’s publication every major newspaper in the UK had reported the story, her social media accounts were flooded with messages and the hashtag “#PoppySmart” was created for twitter uses to vent their anger at Smart for her actions. I interviewed her to hear about it from her.

“It was a really difficult week, I’m still in Worcester and a lot of people here got very angry about the whole thing,” Smart said. “I’ve been told what was being said about me online, but I don’t really want to look at it… I’m still concerned about how extreme some of the reactions were. I still think about it quite a lot.”

Extreme is right. In the interest of not allowing a breathing space for misogynistic Twitter rants, I won’t display any of the #PoppySmart commentary in this post. Suffice to say, it was painfully clear that many people had judged her actions to be disproportionate to the situation and an unworthy use of police time.

Not content to just condemn her actions, many Twitter users vilified Smart on a personal level, publicly attacking every aspect of her persona, from her appearance to assumptions about her sexuality and lifestyle to basic derogatory name calling and abuse. The most noticeable, and perhaps most problematic aspect of the whole saga, is the incredibly uninformed and reactive nature of each headline-fueled “anti-Poppy” tweet. Instant judgements were made from click-baiting headlines which were designed specifically to provoke a negative reaction, causing her experiences to be dismissed and her actions casually criticised without any real insight into the situation.

In Smart’s case, the information lost from the headlines was that she had endured embarrassing and lewd comments about her body from a group of around 10 construction workers for almost a month while trying to control an anxiety disorder which had worsened following a physical attack by an intoxicated male last year. Her harassment from the construction site turned to intimidation when one of the men stepped in front of her and sneeringly blocked her path to work, an act one would struggle to find any purpose or meaning in other than a display of physical strength and ownership. Given her past ordeal and daily struggle with her own mental well-being, she had reached breaking point.

In addition to missing out vital information many media outlets also embellished Smart’s actions to an incredibly unfair degree. “To read the headlines you’d think I’d dialed 999 the first time it happened,” she told me.

Judging by the social media furor, it appears as though that’s exactly what readers did think. In fact the people dealing with her complaint were not even police, but voluntary community support officers, a far cry from the “police probe” reported by many publications. Even media outlets Smart was led to believe she could trust misrepresented her experiences.

“I read the BBC newsbeat article online and even though they actually spoke to me for the piece, they still chose to call my harassment ‘wolf-whistling’ in the headline, which really trivialised what I was going through. They didn’t mention the lewd catcalls, or the man who had invaded my personal space. When I spoke to the journalist I was under the impression that the article would get across the fact that wolf-whistling wasn’t the issue.”

Some news sources even began claiming that Smith had likened her experiences to racial discrimination. “My family was concerned it would ruin my reputation. I wouldn’t compare my harassment to any other forms of bigotry, each is a separate issue. What I said was that we don’t have national debates about whether it’s okay to yell at people in the street on the basis of their skin colour or religious dress so I don’t understand why we were having one about unsolicited comments on women’s bodies. They did it to get people riled up so they had another week’s worth of news.”

In addition to the careless representation of her experiences, The Daily Mail and The Sun ran opinion columns suggesting that women intimidated by lewd catcalls were somehow weaker than women who were accepting of it. In addition, The Sun took the already dismal situation a step further, almost praising Smart’s harassers for their actions. They claimed a recent study showed that “54% of women love being wolf-whistled” and that “objecting to wolf-whistling is a sexist double standard” because some women “publicly perv over David Beckham’s pants ads.” A story about an elderly couple, neither of whom “would have been born if it wasn’t for catcalling” was also printed under those statements.

Most news sources also pulled photos from Smart’s social media pages without permission before she had a chance to make them private. “The photos pulled were selfies, and because of that people were saying I was vain and that I must have been enjoying the attention. People were saying I was asking for it. I think it should have been a faceless story, how I look is irrelevant, I still shouldn’t be be subjected to harassment. They focused too much on me personally and set the stage for people to attack me on a national scale.”

The language used in articles and phrased for headlines is not accidental. It is carefully considered and exists purely to pull a reader into a story, causing a newspaper to be bought or a link to be clicked containing valuable advertising revenue. Once that button has been pressed it needs to deliver information to the reader as fast and sensationally as possible so that it warrants being shared on social media for another person to click and so on. It would be beyond naive, for example, to believe that news sources would be blind to the effect of choosing her selfie in a low-cut top to accompany a story about her complaints regarding lewd comments on her body.

I’m not suggesting that the people raging about Smart’s actions are helpless victims of media brainwashing, there is clearly a lot of ingrained misogyny there, but it seems undeniable that the reporting surrounding her story was designed to provoke the very worst reaction from people with no regard for her personal safety or well-being. Aside from the obvious oversimplification and embellishment of her experiences, it’s certainly worth noting the familiar shift to the masculine perspective. We see headlines such as “Builders Face Police Probe” instead of “Woman Faces Harassment.” We see countless comments arguing that Smart should have just asked her boyfriend/brother/dad to “sort it out” instead of questioning a culture in which her voice alone isn’t as powerful.

Far be it from Smart to dwell on the negatives, she is currently planning to collaborate with a technology enterprise in the hopes of developing an app to enable women to report places in which they have felt unsafe, allowing police to identify hotspots. “I’m worried that other women will see what happened to me and feel like they can’t speak out about their experiences, but I really hope that’s not the case. I would do it all over again. People have the right to seek help when they don’t feel safe. The more we report it the clearer it is that it happens so frequently. So many people contacted me to tell me it happens to them every day.”

You can follow her blog here.

Emma Rachel Deane is a London-based retail manager for a fast growing women’s lifestyle brand and an outspoken advocate for women’s social justice issues. She can be found blogging on Raging Hag or tweeting @emmaracheldeane.

USA: Street harassment and the generational divide

June 23, 2015 By Correspondent

Laura Voth, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

On my drive to work the other day, I caught a news segment in between pop songs. The hosts were two middle-aged individuals, one a man and the other a woman. They began chatting about the 90% statistic—that 90% of women worldwide report having experienced what the hosts referred to as catcalling. They defined catcalling as “whistling” and, more vaguely, “comments.”

The male host didn’t have much to say on the subject, but I was interested to hear the woman’s take. To my surprise, she said, “I wish someone would catcall me! It’s like I’m invisible since I got older! It would be a compliment.”

When I hear older women make claims such as this—that they miss being catcalled on the street—I always wonder what harassment they experienced when they were younger. Surely they never had obscene words and gestures thrown their way, as women do now. Surely they were never followed, grabbed, groped, or photographed by strangers.

I can’t speak to any woman’s experience other than my own, but I don’t think anyone truly takes a stranger’s yell of “come suck my d*ck!” as a compliment. And perhaps that’s the root of the generational disconnect where street harassment is concerned. Maybe today’s women were raised with the belief that they are deserving of respect not in spite of their gender, but because of their humanity.

The truth is that, whether or not street harassment is frightening, it is harmful and demeaning. It sends the message that women—not only the woman involved, but others—are not welcome in whichever space and that they do not deserve to be viewed as people. It reinforces the idea that woman’s worth is based on her perceived f***ability. If someone gets that message often enough, they will start to believe it.

The idea that women over a certain age aren’t worthy of being acknowledged—acknowledged, mind, not harassed—is a continuation of that idea. Once a woman doesn’t look a certain way, she almost disappears. And despite the negativity of the attention she once received, she might in a way miss the whistles and catcalls, because at least they affirmed that she had some kind of worth.

Would you rather be invisible or devalued? Unseen or disrespected? Knowing that you don’t matter to strangers, or aware that the men who pass you by don’t even think of you as a person?

We deserve to be afforded respect and recognition for who we are as people—for our actions, our strengths and weaknesses, and our humanity—not for our looks.

If women have come from a point when they weren’t able to take a stand against street harassment to today, when blogs like this one show that we feel comfortable with speaking out, there must be a way to get to a point where women’s bodies and selves are not seen as objects reduced to whether a stranger believes they are worthy of unsolicited commentary.

We all want to be seen as who we really are—people. A comment from a stranger on the street serves as a vicious denial of our personhood, and eventually we start to believe it. A little respect goes a very long way.

Laura is an emerging adult-slash-college student studying to enter a healthcare profession. In addition to studying and writing, Laura works at her university’s women’s center where she helps design and implement programs on all things lady.

I’m harassed at my university library

June 23, 2015 By Contributor

Street harassment is an important issue for me. As it happens all the time, and as I have been opposing the behavior since my youth, and am still, for a while longer, committed to writing about it (creatively, in a way that fully involves me psychically and emotionally), I have many stories of challenging harassers. A woman who fights back has to be careful, as those who wish to suppress the outing of problems of inhumanity, lack of empathy, disrespect/impropriety, will limn her as problematic, for speaking, for speaking more than once, when occasion arises, whenever she feels called to say no to something wrong. They will twist and ignore the reality that she is only awake to something pervasive, structurally condoned, and constant.

I have recently completed doctoral work at the University of Missouri-Columbia. About three years ago, a librarian in the main campus library looked at me in a way that was not right- not lustful, but lofty and very hostile (and absurd, strange, without logical/sensible motivation- however, familiar, for females)- for, it could only have been (he was a pure stranger), my manner of dress that day- which was “provocative” by some standards (not by mine, of course). Two more times I had a similar interaction with this man, until one day, maybe having been harassed on the street earlier in the day, and fed up, I basically said, What? What is the problem? If you are objecting to my manner of dress, please understand that I can wear what I wish to.

This man, in the small town (for me, a New Yorker) of Columbia, Missouri, an employee of that library for maybe decades, got his male friends in the library, as well as his women friends in the library to harass me in petty ways from then on, as he committed himself to doing. (The women were willing to assume about a stranger based on their male coworker’s say-so and were willing to spit on a woman’s anger in response to a man’s intrusive, reductive gaze being put on her.)

I’m writing about all this and won’t go into much detail here, but these strangers, first men, then the follower women, became hostile to me. To be pointed at, whispered about, and laughed at by strangers, to be glared and scowled at, for people to refuse to look me in the eye when I would have need to talk to them, all of this happening in a place I would visit almost daily, for years, a place that exists for students to work in peace– all of these things I would not do to another, and I certainly would not punish a younger female who said no to a man’s impropriety in such a way. I’m a person especially sensitive to any mob effigizing me, as in college (an elite college)

I was raped by a young man and the boy went on to tell his buddies that I had simply given it up fast, that I was ‘easy’, a ‘whore’. This memory is fresh in me, it is with me every day, as I have not done all the creative work I want to with it (i.e., I am not done with remembering that time in my life, trying to vivify and tell it out in my work). I went to Columbia to do that writing, as a creative writing PhD student; thus that trauma was with me every day that I was there. That injustice, from years back, that I have carried with me, scarred me, and I do not abide the unethicality of being savaged verbally by strangers; I resist it, I try to stop it and fix it (this quixotism, yes; but I did my best, I asserted my language).

I fought what was happening in the Missouri library for three years, never making anything up to strengthen my case, only telling the truth, about a hostile work environment for me, about daily malice, gestural aggression, maligning. -As the director of the library and the head security guard of the library were two involved in bothering me, the last time I complained, I was barred from entering the library.- A campus cop called me on their behalf and spoke to me deplorably, having taken in their story (another stranger hostile to me- truly angry toward me- based on the words of people who do not know me, people covering themselves); he told me the library was not a public space I could enter anymore, because “you think you’re right and they’re wrong.” (They were mad at me, I had fought for myself, I had defended myself, and they sicked an extremely disrespectful cop on me, to tell me I could no longer get books. I am a graduate student in writing and literature…)

I am posting this story to ask anyone reading to please defend me, as I have defended myself for years with little help, with little progress, with this culmination. Please call the Assistant to the Chancellor of the University of Missouri-Columbia, at 573-882-3380, and request that I be allowed to get books from the library. You don’t have to say where you read my story (since then they may search out this posting, read it, and get angrier at me; I think I have free speech- if I am not lying, and not even making an accusation of unlawfulness (just ugliness, just interference with my peace, work, integrity)- but, they have tried to tell me otherwise; they told me not to ask anyone again for help on the matter, implying I would be charged with harassment if I did; and I know, the angrier they get at you, the more you insist (on the ethical), the more they may come after you). Please take a moment to convey a word in support of me to the university chancellor. The chancellor knows about the issue but did not deign to speak to me and left the matter fully to the library’s director- one of the men who (not unlawfully) was disrespectful/harassing to me, on two occasions; otherwise, the director simply did nothing to help me and refused to speak to me too, as the man who began it all is his buddy. We know that street harassment is not against the law; when I say “harassment,” I mean it; but I have to be careful with what I say, and spell out that I am not making a criminal accusation, since those people could use anything to harm me further, I am still technically a student there, though done with my work. It has been very, very hard for me to be treated as I have been treated by my institution.
The information here describes what I complained about, what they did not help me with- beginning with a sexist provocation by a man.

There is also a great and relevant journal article called “Gender and the Gaze: A cultural and psychological review,” by Alison M. Heru.

That my institution did not help me, and punished me for asking for help, was, honestly, a repetition of trauma for me. My experience in college caused me to gear my life to defending myself, and others, to righting in some way what happened then, to outing the reality that my young self lived. I saw my past situation repeating at MU, and I wanted to take back my school/my surroundings, this time, as I had not done as a college girl. They did not let me. They silenced me, they have treated me as if I am crazy and a criminal. Those debasements are old hat for women, and for Latinas (I am Latina), and I am deeply disappointed.

I’m still trying to feel better; when they first banned me, and treated me in such an ugly way, not engaging with me in a human way at all (the way I was taught, as an instructor there, to deal with my students), being so disrespectful to me, when I had not lied and had only sought their help, disrupted my sleep, until I finally had to go to the hospital, for being so exhausted and frankly on the point of a breakdown. They treated me so badly. and for what; just to not tell their friends/those empowered: behave, leave her alone.

They invited me to that school, that program, putatively because of credence in me and to support my speaking/my writing; and I am grateful I got to do my graduate work; but in other ways, certainly with this situation, I feel that they spit on the person they invited to their institution.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and please call and ask them to let me (Lia) get books from the library again (just that; since I asked them to make the employees stop- and they will Not help me with that).

Thank you,
Lia

“Lost my urge to grope women”

June 23, 2015 By Contributor

Lost my urge to grope women on the subway when I was 17 after some tall blonde 35ish year old lady found it necessary to slam her knee into my junk. That one hurt like a MF. Now, whenever I get the urge to grope, the memory of that knee rings “stop” like a siren ringing in my brain.

Years have passed and now I have a wife, two daughters, a son and two nieces. I tell them this story and why I deserved it. I say, “Don’t be afraid to give the bastard pain because that’s the only way he’ll ever learn to respect you!”

I still respect the tall blond mature woman who kneed me in the junk when I was 17 years old. For the sake of my wife and daughters, I’m glad she stopped me……..

Optional: What’s one way you think we can make public places safer for everyone?

Since city budgets are in the red, the cops won’t be able to help you. If a guy follows you, or gets in your face, then you’ll have to give him pain. Or else he might give you some pain. Only when enough strong women fight back will this problem ever end.

– Anonymous

Location: NYC

Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea

“I am unable to leave my house as I simply can’t stand it any more”

June 22, 2015 By Contributor

I am a 34-year-old woman living in Melbourne, Australia. I have been harassed by men in public for my entire adult life. At this point in my life I feel utterly worn down and broken by it.

Today for the first time I am unable to leave my house as I simply can’t stand it any more.

Countless times men have followed me, made rapey comments about my body, yelled sexual threats out of cars, and whispered them in my ear. I simply have too many stories to pick just one. Literally hundreds. I brace myself every time I step out of my house, and can never fully relax in public spaces wherever men are around.

Young men, old men, white men, Indian men, refugee men, disabled men, men alone, men in pairs, men in groups. Men of all ages and races.

Never can I leave the house without being relentlessly reminded of my female biology in the most degrading and vile ways. I have lived in four cities and it is the same everywhere. I will be out in public somewhere thinking about what I have to do that day, about work, about a friend I am going to visit, about my next creation as an artist…..not thinking about my biology until suddenly a man yells some sexually aggressive abuse at me to remind me that I am a woman and thus a subhuman object.

I dream about being able to go out in public without being constantly forced to think about my biology instead of what I am doing in the world that day. After 16 years of abuse from male strangers I am ready to bind my chest and shave off all my hair. I have an ʺhourglassʺ shaped body and it is hell to wear this body wherever men are, particularly living in a porn sick culture where large breasts are so intensely fetishised.

I wear no make up and no revealing clothing and shave half my head, but no matter what I wear or how I cut my hair I can never not wear this body. I am met with disbelief when I describe all this to some people. The only thing I can do to try and reduce the male harassment is attempt to save money to buy a car so I never have to walk on footpaths. Ever again.

– Anonymous

Location: Australia

Share your street harassment story for the blog.
See the book 50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers for more idea

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