Stop Street Harassment

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USA: “What is this Crap?” Media and Messaging

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Equinox

By Sara Schwartzkopf, Colorado, USA, SSH Correspondent

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between women and the media. There are the unavoidable Halloween ads and subsequent discussions on costumes for girls and women. Then there’s the fact that I recently re-watched Miss Representation (if you haven’t yet, it’s up on Netflix now and has some great interviews and points). Oh, and then I got online today and came across this headline about Equinox replacing photographer Terry Richardson for their campaigns. If you’re not familiar with Equinox, guess what they’re promoting with the following ad.

Did you guess fitness? No? Well that’s unfortunate, because Equinox is actually a high-end gym.

Now ad campaigns like this are par for the course – tall, thin, scantily clad, posing for men, often missing their faces. It’s so much that we often just accept it as part of the landscape of our existence. Maybe if we never absorbed much media, or weren’t affected by it, this wouldn’t be such a huge issue. Thing is we do. The average teen is exposed to about 10 hours and 45 minutes of media per day. That’s TV, music, movies, magazines, and Internet. Media is culture transmission, teaching us how to act and informing our viewpoints. If it had no effect, then there would be no point to either advertisements or a Federal Communications Commission.

I used the example of the Equinox ads because they strike me as a perfect example of not only promoting sex over a product, but also of established gender roles. The women in the ads are performing (quite literally) for the pleasure of men. Especially in the first ad, the man is the more powerful one.

It’s worth noting that media promotes these roles. Men’s masculinity revolves around having women. Not loving them or connecting with them, but obtaining them and getting them to do what they want. Women in films are frequently seen as having their lives revolve around men. Despite how ridiculously simple the Bechdel Test is, it’s still estimated that 75% of films fail it. Meanwhile men are rarely shown as depicting emotions that deviate from anger, competition or humor.  Even in romantic comedies, there’s still a trope of women liking men who come off as jerks. So while women’s lives are seen as being about satisfying men, men aren’t supposed to cater to women’s needs.

I find it hard to believe that these overriding cultural messages don’t trickle down to the street level. Men are taught that powerful men get women. Women are taught to cater to men, and that men care about their appearances. It’s not such a surprise then that men think of catcalling as a method to get dates and assert themselves. It’s also not a surprise that women find such behavior to be a compliment, or something that they should just let slide.

There’re a lot of cultural narratives that try to simplify men and women down to basic creatures. The thing is, we’re incredibly complex. The beauty of culture is that it can change. It changes when we speak up, when we act in way that we want to see and when we hold others accountable to higher standards. Expect more out of your media, and expect more out of the people in your life.

Sara is a recent graduate of the University of Denver where she majored in Sociology, International Studies, and minored in Japanese. She has previously written on issues relevant to the Native American community at Le Prestige Du Monde, pulling heavily on her experiences as a mixed-race Kiowa and Chickasaw.

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A Study for the People, Funded by the People

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Nov. 2001, my 1st semester in college, a man grabbed my crotch as I stood on the sidewalk outside a friend’s house after this party (I was waiting for another friend).

College is when I experienced the most street harassment. Some days it seemed like I faced hoots, hollers, honks — and worse — whenever I left campus. When I went running, walked to volunteer at a domestic violence shelter, or took the bus to restaurants or the mall with friends.

Despite the fact that I was part of the social justice organization at my school and I picked up a second major in women’s and gender studies, I did not know the term “street harassment” then, nor what to do. Instead, I just felt frustrated, angry, and upset a lot and eventually changed my life to try to avoid it.

That was nearly a decade ago, and fast-forward to today, and it seems the term street harassment is much more commonly understood and there are so many groups speaking out against it now, including even the United Nations!

In the last eight years, many countries across the world have conducted studies on the topic, including in Egypt, Yemen, India, Peru, France, and the UK. They are using the study findings to better address the problem and to gain more widespread support in stopping it.

In the U.S., however, this is not happening. More than 15 years ago, there were two academic studies conducted in Indianapolis and the California Bay Area showing that 100 percent of women experienced street harassment. In 2000, there was a quick phone poll showing that at least 80 percent of women across the nation had – with no significant difference if they lived in urban, suburban or rural areas.

But the U.S. has no national comprehensive study looking at the types of harassment that happens, how often, its impact on people’s lives, or why people harass. And, there is no national study that surveys both women and men on these topics or includes harassment based on sexual orientation or gender expression.

After studying, writing about and speaking about this topic for more than six years, I feel SO strongly about the need for this study that I spend a lot of my “free time” (outside  of work and family time/obligations) trying to raise $47,000 to be able to fund this comprehensive national study so I can use the best surveying firm available. We’re nearly half-way toward that amount.

I have also spent my free time and my own money traveling and conducting focus groups to bring forward under-represented voices. This includes paying my way to places like South Dakota, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and New York City to conduct them with groups like Native Americans, queer women of color, and GBTQI men of all races.

I REALLY REALLY believe we need this study to better prove this is a problem and to galvanize more support for stopping it and also so we as activists can create more targeted awareness campaigns, educational materials, and work to prevent it from happening in the first place.

I say all this to ask you to please donate what you can (minimum $10) to make this study possible. I cannot do this alone. If you have been harassed, please consider making a donation. If someone you know has been harassed, please consider making a donation.

This will be a study about the people, for the people… funded by the people. There are no big foundations or granters, this is about us, our experiences, and our desire to make a change for us, for the next generation, and for the betterment of our country.

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USA: Halloween Costume Review

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By Angela Della Porta, SSH Correspondent

Deciding on a Halloween costume is a pretty arduous task – you want to be original, and of course you want people to get it. Well, that task is especially hard for women! We have to balance having a great costume with not “asking for it.” I mean, I want to get trick-or-treat fun, not harassment or assault! So, I went to iParty to find the perfect costume, but I had a bit of a hard time finding an outfit. I thought I’d share a couple of my final contenders.

Going as Someone Else’s Culture

 

It’s a classic, right? Go as a Native American. The year before, I went as an African American and next year I’ll go as Latino. That makes complete sense!

If Native American didn’t work, I could always try wearing this flowy nightie that no one in India wears as clothing. Ooh, and you’ve got to love the double entendre of “Taj”ing one’s “Hall,” whatever that means.

The Criminal Justice System

I’m pretty sure this is what women have to wear in prison. I mean, it fits – since women in prison are pretty much sentenced to sexual assault from guards and medical officials the moment they enter the prison industrial complex, this outfit will be perfect.

 

I’m sure an outfit like that makes it easy to run after criminals and protect society. I wonder, though, where does the costume designer think she should put her gun?

Childhood Fun

Now, I remember Spongebob as a harmless cartoon, but it takes a lot of work to sexualize a woman by making her a sponge. You’ll see in the bottom right-hand corner that Nickelodeon, a children’s TV station, is the company selling this. Cute.

This is an ACTUAL children’s costume. It’s a children’s size 4/6, but it’s a cropped-top spandex devil outfit called “Red Hot” where the model in the photo is wearing platform stilettos  You can see in the photo that it says, “Children’s Size Costume.” They tell you it’s for children so many times because you can’t believe that six year olds, the average wearer of a children’s size 4/6, want to be sexy devil for Halloween. But they do, or it wouldn’t be there.

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Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t do this review because I think there is something inherently wrong with sexy women’s costumes (well, I’m not a fan of the cultural appropriation in the first two, but that’s another post). I’m just not sure what women are supposed to do. If they buy any of these costumes, the only ones on the shelves for adult women, then they are left to be scrutinized and judged for “asking for harassment or assault.” If something were to happen when in this costume, they would be blamed.

Women, wear whatever you want on Halloween, and on every other day of the year, for that matter. But it’s a catch 22 – want to wear something sexy? Get harassed. Want to wear something not-sexy? If you can find something, you still face judgment for not ascribing to someone else’s idea of femininity. So what do we do?

You can let people know their comments and judgments aren’t okay. You can call out rape culture and sexism in your own life.

Angela Della Porta is a recent graduate of Clark University in Worcester, MA. She will join with Teach for America in Detroit in the fall. Until then, she’s spending her time in rural Maine. Follow her on Twitter: @angelassoapbox

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USA: Placing the Shame Back on the Harasser

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By Lauren McEwen, Washington, D.C., USA, SSH Correspondent

In my months as a Stop Street Harassment correspondent, I’ve focused heavily on different ways I respond street harassment (harassment from elderly men and intra-racial street harassment, et cetera), but today, in my final, official post as a blog correspondent, I want to focus on a time when I failed to shout back loud enough. A time that I continue to look back on, disappointed at my own inability to thoroughly stand up for myself.

First, let me begin by saying that there is no “correct” way to respond to street harassment. I think we should always try to respond in a manner that 1) keeps us safe and 2) keeps our dignity and self-esteem intact, but there will always be those moments in which we, personally, feel that we could have done a better job. Those moments that we mull over long afterward, cursing ourselves for not saying the right thing, or failing to report the harassment to the proper authorities. This is probably one of the most damaging effects of street harassment – the guilt, shame and helplessness it can make us feel.

For example, once a teenage boy threw a full bottle of water at my back because I refused to stop and give him my phone number. It did not matter that I am an adult who wouldn’t have been interested even if he were of age, or that I was on the phone with my mother when he decided to loudly describe what he thought of my breasts in my top. I’d rejected him in front of his friends, so he threw the bottle at me. I doubled over from the force of the hit, and he and his friends ran from the corner, laughing.

I almost called the police, but stopped short because I hadn’t seen the boy’s face, and I knew that if the police helped at all, they would most likely round up every black boy within a five-block radius and frisk them. Of course, he got away with assault, and my back ached for days, but I wasn’t complicit in having innocent boys treated like criminals. I could live with that…after a while.

But I still cannot fully forgive myself for how I responded to being groped while leaving the train station in June. I was headed to the grocery store to pick up a few things for my then-boyfriend’s birthday. It was boiling out, so I was wearing a thin, cotton dress. I’m not describing what I was wearing because of internalized acceptance of rape culture, or anything like that. It’s important to understand how little actual clothing I was wearing to understand how violated I felt.

As I’m scrolling through the shopping list on my phone, I suddenly feel something press against my backside. It takes me about seven, sickening seconds before I fully realize what it is: an erect penis. I whip around, and come to face-to-face with a stranger: a middle-aged man wearing a white button down and khakis and carrying a leather briefcase.

For a millisecond, I consider that he may have been standing so close to me because the escalator was crowded, but that hope quickly crumbles when I realize that not only is the escalator nowhere near full, but that he had to lean forward in order to press against my behind.

I’m shocked and disgusted and furious, and I start cursing and shouting at him to get away from me – to never touch me. And that is when he did something that infuriated me even more than the groping: he shook his head and walked away, trying to signal to anyone within earshot that I was mentally unstable, and not worth listening to. The other people on the escalator began looking uncomfortable, and moved quickly aside as I stormed up the remaining steps, shaking, afraid that he would follow me.

No matter how many times I tell myself that I did respond, albeit not as effectively as I would have liked (that I was alone and things could have easily escalated if I’d continued to press the issue, that I reacted in the moment and cannot blame myself for being startled) I still wish I’d reported it to the transit police, at least, if not to teach him a lesson, then to prevent him from doing it to someone else.

By the time I made it to the grocery store, I could barely focus on getting my shopping done, taking an hour longer than necessary to gather everything I needed. Eventually, I called my boyfriend to pick me up, and he spent the car ride home feeling guilty for not driving me in the first place.

But I shouldn’t need a male escort to shepherd me around in order to avoid being groped by strangers. Not only is it demeaning, but it’s also impractical, and that kind of thinking places the weight of preventing street harassment back on its victims.

I write all of this to say, no matter how long you have been speaking up about street harassment, how many other people you have helped fight back against it, how many articles you’ve shared or retweeted – none of us are immune to that feeling of helplessness. None of us react the “right” way…at least, not each and every time.

And even though I am still trying to force myself to believe this, I’m saying it now…those moments do not make you weak. They do not make you coward. They make you a person who was too shocked or hurt or disgusted by another human being’s behavior to follow whatever anti-street harassment protocol you had planned. I just hope there isn’t a next time, and if there is, I want to place the shame back on my harasser, not carry it with me for months afterward.

Lauren is a recent graduate of Howard University where she majored in print journalism with a minor in photography. You can check out more of her work at laurenmcewen.weebly.com and follow her on Twitter at @angrywritergirl.

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Kyrgyzstan: Street harassment of transgender people in Bishkek

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By: Aikanysh Jeenbaeva, in collaboration with others from the BFCSQ, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, SSH Correspondents

“T-World, Transgender Advocacy Comic, Kyrgyzstan” Via www.Active-Art.org

Transgender people remain one of the most vulnerable groups of the population in Bishkek. Up to 90% of all transgender people experience constant pressure, violence and discrimination at the hands of relatives, acquaintances, law enforcement officials, medical professionals, complete strangers on the streets, etc.

The story below is told from the perspective of my fellow trans*activist, for whom harassment in public places is just one of the many facets of violence in his everyday reality.

“We get harassed by the police most often”, he says. “They come up to me or to my friends and start demanding to show identification. After seeing what they consider a discrepancy in the documents between indicated and real gender identity, they take us to the police station, where we are subject to more severe harassment in the form of humiliating interrogations and threats. One of the officers once said that people like me “are perverts and should be killed”.

This kind of attitude by the police officers is not only seen as normal, but also encouraged. Even if you call the MIA (the Ministry of Internal Affairs) hotline to report police misconduct and brutality, they hang up on you upon hearing that this was done on the basis of gender identity.

You never feel safe and you are never protected. Home is not a place where you feel loved and secure for a large part of my friends and myself and the streets are like a battlefield, where you never know when and who will accost you.

When I or my friends walk down the street, people usually stare at us trying to guess gender identity. Women (mainly) stare at the genital area trying to make out whether the transgender person has male or female genitals. People loudly comment my appearance, stop and start giggling or discussing between themselves whether I am a boy or a girl. And this is even worse for people who do not look masculine/feminine enough and thus do not fit into the cis-normative patriarchal gender binary.

Harassment is so normalized that people simply do not consider it as such. It is normal for them to come up to an unknown person and laughing, start asking whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. It is also normal for them to start contradicting you, if you choose to reveal your gender identity. They ask incredulously: “Do you really consider yourself a man?! But… just look at yourself!” I get called a hermaphrodite, a faggot, an “it”… there are so many insulting names that it won’t be possible to list them all here.

However, street harassment is not limited to staring or verbal abuse. Many of my friends have been harassed physically by strangers on the streets who have grabbed their chest to “check whether it is real or not”, have hit and beaten them.

Part of the harassment comes when people confuse transgender people with lesbians and gays, and in such a highly homophobic society as the Kyrgyzstani one is, you have to expect threats, loud insults, hateful and disgusted looks. And just imagine what happens to those who are non-heterosexual or queer transgender people…

When we gather as a group to go somewhere to eat or just hang out, we almost always get harassed. When it happens, some of the guys try to start a fight or curse back. Strange thing, if we react in an aggressive manner and yell or shout back at the people, that shuts most of the harassers up. This has led us to believe that the only language people understand is the language of violence and that it is the only efficient way to react. However, acting violently and aggressively in response to harassment makes you feel disgusted and angry that you have allowed yourself to get provoked once again.

Of course, not everyone can or wants to use the tactic. Some of my friends just gave up and stopped leaving home without any urgent need. The streets are a too scary and hostile place for them.

In the past, I used to react in a very angry manner. I was very upset after every such encounter and brooded over it for a long time. But after a while, I just stopped reacting to it. Now when someone makes a comment on the street, I simply pretend not to hear it. Still every time I experience it, it completely kills my mood and leaves me empty on the inside.

This is the society we live in — a discriminatory transphobic, homophobic, biphobic (add your description here) society. I know that tremendous efforts and time are needed to change it. But one thing that any person can do next time he/she has an urge to harass others on the street, is to think how it would feel, if you were in the place of that person.”

Aikanysh graduated from the University of Freiburg with a degree in European Literatures and Cultures and recently from the Diplomatic Academy of the KR with a degree in International Relations. Aikanysh is a co-founding member and coordinator of the Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ. Salidat is an undergraduate student at Kyrgyz National University and a dedicated volunteer at the Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ.

Bishkek Feminist Collective SQ was founded in 2012 by activists from various communities of Bishkek city. Follow BFC SQ on Twitter, @bish_feminists and on Facebook.

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