Activist Interviews Archives | Page 12 of 26

USA: Interview with Burlesque Dancer Fancy Feast (Part 2)

August 24, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Maggie Freleng, NYC, USA, SSH Correspondent

I met Fancy Feast, a two and a half year burlesque dancer and sex educator, at Murray Hill’s annual Miss Lez Pageant, , an alternative beauty pageant for queer womyn. In part one of my interview with the fearless, fierce Feast, she explained how burlesque is a way for her to dictate how she feels about herself and her body in a positive way to combat the powerlessness she feels being harassed on the street.

In continuation, she explained how herself and many other burlesque dancers are frustrated they are not able to perform their sexuality in non burlesque settings. For example, not having to be concerned with covering up on the street and feeling comfortable and safe no matter what they are wearing.

“Burlesque is always going to be safe and comfortable for me, it offers an outlet to experience joy and pleasure with my body in a public way without fearing violence and reproach.”

Fancy Feast explained a recent incident in the burlesque community where a male fan posted on a burlesque dancers status that she should take unwanted comments as a compliment because she’s beautiful person and should be flattered by the attention.

“Performers analyzed and dismantled the ways this person was thinking…anybody who can’t separate a sexualized performance from the rest of one’s daily experience is really oversimplifying things,” she told me.

“The two experiences are not at all to measure and the two come with their own different set of rules. I am very lucky to work in an industry where there are so many extraordinary people in charge of their own images and own sexuality who are able to call the shots when it deviates from that.”

In Part 1 of the interview, I explained Fancy Feasts nickel idea –setting aside a nickel to be donated to anti-violence shelters every time she is street harassed — as a way for her to mark these constant occasions and make sure something good can come from the bad.

Fancy Feast explained the time she saw NPR was doing a show on street harassment and were asking for individual stories. Fancy Feast thought this was ridiculous.

“It was a way of saying that there was just one experience that stood out when really it is so continual,” she said.

So she wrote to NPR:

“I wish I had “a story” about being harassed on the street, as if it were some kind of discrete experience that stands out as exceptional. It’s not like that. Men say things to me all the time. I’m hot or I’m fat but they’d fuck me anyway, they’d tear me up or hit it from the back. Men touch me too. With their hands, their eyes, erections pressing into my back on crowded subways or clubs. It takes only my most primitive brain to discern what is a compliment and what is not. The men who presume otherwise, saying that women ought to be flattered by these behaviors, assume women to be simpleminded enough not to tell the difference. The difference between “Hey, awesome necklace!” and “You look good enough to get raped.” But the other thing is: don’t compliment me. Interrupting my day to tell me that you like the shape of my dress or the body underneath it asserts that your opinion about me matters. Interrupting a woman to comment on her body or sexuality reinforces that she has no right to public space, to move freely and without comment. The men who assume I will be flattered by sexual remarks from strangers do not understand the reality of living in a woman’s body, the implicit and explicit threats we experience, the keys poised between our knuckles on the way home — just in case.

I wish I had “a story”, but I have thousands, and they get lost or metabolized in the space of a day.These days I set aside a nickel for every time I am harassed on the street. I wanted something to mark the occasion, to not let it simply vanish. I’m donating that money to a women’s anti-violence shelter, so something good can come from something ugly.”

NPR never responded to her story. However, Fancy Feast didn’t write to have her story told, she just wanted to let it be known that for so many people harassment is not just one story, it is a collection of daily, life-long experiences that we just learn and are told to deal with and take as compliments.

We shouldn’t have to deal with street harassment–it needs to end. But in the meantime, while we patiently wait for legislatures and society to finally realize we are suffering, we will find other ways to to reclaim our bodies and sexualities how we want them to be perceived.

For some of us, that is being an over-the-top sex-kitten in a leather harness shaking it on stage.

Maggie is a Brooklyn based freelance writer and photographer focusing on social justice and women’s issues. She currently writes for Vitamin W. Maggie graduated with a B.A in Journalism and English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2011, concentrating on dystopian literature. You can read more of her writing on her blog or follow her on Twitter, @dixiy89.

USA: Interview with Burlesque Dancer Fancy Feast (Part 1)

August 23, 2013 By Correspondent

By: Maggie Freleng, NYC, USA, SSH Correspondent

Sunday night at Murray Hill’s annual Miss Lez Pageant, an alternative beauty pageant for queer womyn, something caught my attention. It wasn’t the contestant with a vintage vagina puppet or the plethora of boob tassels or even the contestant in the Winnie the Pooh outfit doing a strip tease pouring honey on her body. No, it was the one contestant in a bondage harness whose pageant platform was on a serious topic — street harassment.

“In my personal life it is something that I am very deeply and seriously passionate about. I am very concerned about it,” Fancy Feast, a burlesque dancer, told me.

Fancy Feast caught my attention when she took the stage with her extravagant beehive wig, kitten heels and form-fitting mini dress and told the audience that in her daily life every time she is street harassed she puts a nickel aside to be donated to shelters and abuse programs for women and LGBTQ folk.

“My performance is sexual and big and public,” Fancy Feast told me, who explained that people tell her she should expect to be harassed because she has such a sexualized performance. “But there are a different set of expectations when I’m in control of my image when I’m performing and presenting sexuality than when I am trying to get to work and get a smoothie.”

“Some people feel like every contact should be a level playing field and I should expect the same attention doing burlesque and taking the subway. To me its one of those ludicrous things…there is a separation.”

She said the differentiation comes when she is wearing no makeup and going home sick from work and minding her own business to when she is wearing makeup and a wig on stage where she is intending to be in control and powerful.

“When people are harassed on the street they have a lack of control. Someone is dictating how you should feel about your body walking down the street.”

“I tend to get harassed a lot when I have my stage makeup on when I am coming home after my gigs. It doesn’t matter if the makeup is really over the top or grotesque, or if I have fake bruises (I have a fake black eye for one of my acts) — I get harassed way, way more, especially if I look disheveled. It sometimes feels like I’m getting attention more for the performance of femininity, the artifice, as well as a perceived weakness,” she told me in a follow up email.

“It’s in those moments when people take advantage of perceived weakness that does not show up in my performances.”

Burlesque allows her to dictate how she feels about herself and her body, and she says the reaction is always positive.

Fancy Feast, who is also a sex educator in her day job, says she has never gotten harassed during one of her performances. She has found the burlesque scene to be very body positive and accepting.

While she does not always make her performances about her personal politics, Fancy Feast was excited she had the space to do at Miss Lez.

“My job to make sure people are having a good time and being entertained and taken care of,” she told me. “I don’t always intend to use that space to talk about personal politics. Often times it is not the right atmosphere.”

However, if she does have a moment with the mic she will try to make jokes and add satire to the serious issue, to aware people and get the message out while also keeping the audience entertained. For example, at a performance she told the audience her leather harness was made from the last guy who told her to smile on the subway.

When I asked Fancy Feast about her nickel idea that initially caught my attention she told me, “The nickel thing came from being in SoHo a few months ago and this guy started making comments about my body, his son was 8 or 9 and he encouraged his son to yell things too. I got so upset thinking about how many times I get harassed a year. These experiences happen so quickly and then they just pass.”

The nickel idea was a way for her to mark these fleeting occasions and make sure something good can come from these horrible moments that happen far too frequently and make a difference in something so many of us feel powerless against.

This piece is a part one of two on Fancy Feast. Burlesque dancers reactions to sexual harassment and the rest of the nickel story (which made its way into a letter for NPR) to come in part two.

20th Anniversary of Anti-Harassment Book!

August 21, 2013 By HKearl

This is an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Marty Langelan for Fem2pt0. Read the full interview on their website.

I spent years feeling annoyed, angry, and scared by gender-based street harassment. In 2007, when I began research for a master’s thesis on the topic, I was very grateful to find the book Back Off: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers. This ground-breaking book was authored by Marty Langelan, the former president of the DC Rape Crisis Center, an economist, activist, and martial artist. I read every page of it, relieved that there was both an explanation for my experiences and a toolkit of tactics for what to do about it.

This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Back Off, and Langelan is still tackling all kinds of harassment. She’s working with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to design sexual harassment trainings this fall for more than 3,000 frontline bus and subway employees.

Because her work – and her book – is so essential to the on-going efforts to address sexual harassment in workplaces, schools, and public spaces worldwide, I was thrilled when she agreed to an interview.

Q. Holly Kearl (HK): Why did you write your book?

Marty Langelan (ML): Harassment was “normal” back then. It was happening everywhere. If you managed to sidestep the sleazy professors, bosses, and coaches, you ran into slimy landlords, creeps in the park, gropers on the bus, and gangs of sexual bullies on the corner.

They did it anytime they felt like it. They did it for a sexual turn-on, or an ego-boosting sense of power, or just because they liked humiliating women. They did it because they could.

I was teaching self-defense for women and kids at the DC Rape Crisis Center, and doing research on how to stop sexual assault. My friends at Women against Rape in Columbus, Ohio, were doing the same.

We learned that harassment is more than just creepy. Some harassers were “rape-testing” women, using sexual harassment to select victims for assault, looking for women who seemed unlikely to fight back. It might start as a simple verbal intrusion, but any harasser, any time, could decide to escalate: Follow you, grab you, and shove you up against a wall. It made me so angry.

Being silent did nothing to stop the aggressors. Cussing-crazy-lady tirades just turned into violence.

We needed to change the predator-prey dynamics. We needed tactics that would make women safer (stop the harasser fast, without escalation) and create social change (make him think twice about ever trying it again). We needed verbal self-defense.

So we began to challenge harassers with nonviolent confrontation. Instead of scurrying away like scared rabbits, we began to walk up to the harassers, try some carefully structured verbal judo, and analyze the results. We tested and fine-tuned tactics to find out what worked. (We had plenty of opportunities for testing – we were all getting harassed, all the time.)

By 1986 we declared Washington DC a “Hassle-Free Zone,” with public speak-outs, leaflets and posters, and training sessions all over town. We took back neighborhood parks and street corners with ethical, direct, nonviolent action.

When Anita Hill testified at the Clarence Thomas hearing, I got furious all over again. Women everywhere talked about it — people were shocked to find out that almost every single woman they knew had been harassed. But most women still felt defeated. They still just quit the job, dropped out of school, stopped using that park or bus stop, and crossed the street to avoid harassers. I hate it when people feel helpless.

So I sent out a nationwide survey, asking, “Have you ever successfully stopped a harasser? Tell us what you did, what worked.” That survey flew across the country. Responses flooded in, first from the U.S., then from around the world.

And when I analyzed the results, all the successful tactics had the same core structure. They were all versions of the same verbal judo we were using in DC – fast, clear, principled nonviolent action that changed the power dynamics and stopped harassers cold. We had an entire toolkit of tactics that worked.

It was a turning point. I don’t know whether we can stop rape in our lifetime, but we sure can stop harassers. I wrote Back Off so that no harasser could ever make us feel helpless again.

High School Student’s Year-Long Project on Street Harassment

August 8, 2013 By Contributor

Cross-posted with permission from Surayya’s blog.

My name is Surayya I. Diggs, I am a recent graduate of Elizabeth Irwin High School, and I will be attending Cornell University in the fall at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. I have an interest in science and agriculture, but since I can remember I have also had a tremendous interest in race, feminism, and social justice. In the more recent future I have become very interested in fighting street harassment.

In early August 2012, I found an opportunity to do something about the issue of street harassment. The ELLA Fellowship Program, a part of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project was an opportunity to carry out a 9-month community development project.

At the beginning of my fellowship I knew I wanted to make a documentary. I thought that a video would be a great way to reach people because the Internet is becoming such a relevant part of today’s society, but I had never made a film in my life. I began searching on YouTube for videos about street harassment to find some inspiration and figure out what I wanted to do differently with my film. One of the videos I came across was, Totally Biased: NYC Women Talk About Cat Calling. This was a very comedic, and almost offensive, approach to the issue of street harassment, and it only gave examples of street harassment. After watching this video, I watched a few more, and they each seemed to do the same thing, simply talk about cat calling and give alternate ways of approaching women, when the real issue is men feeling like they have the right to talk to women on the street in the first place. After watching those videos I knew that I wanted my video to strike a different cord, I wanted to paint the picture of street harassment for people living in NYC, then show why it is dangerous, and finally give solutions to combat and end street harassment.

In November 2012, I conducted the first interview for my film on street harassment. I was able to set up and conduct an interview with Nefertiti Martin at her office at Girls for Gender Equity. I then spent the next 6 months interviewing and editing my film, converting over 6 hours of footage into a 10-minute documentary. During the process, I was able to interview and observe the work of many significant players in the fight against street harassment including Chair of the Women’s Issues Committee and Council Member, Julissa Ferreras, Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, Founder of Stop Street Harassment, Holly Kearl, Co-Founder of Hollaback! Emily May, and many educated people that I interviewed on the street.

Here is my documentary:

Here is a shorter film that I made in December that shares the street harassment testimonies of students from my school:

In addition to these films, I led several workshops in order to reach people on the ground.

On March 25, 2013, I guided a fishbowl at a Youth Summit for Street Harassment. A fishbowl in simple words is a conversation; I called out different identities like gender, sexual orientation, and religion. There was a small circle of 10 people in the center and over 100 people surrounding them that were listening to what was being said inside the smaller circle. The fishbowl was a chance for people to share their personal experiences of street harassment and have people really listen to what is being said, this is something that can’t be accomplished with a simple discussion. For most participants, their favorite part of the entire summit was the fishbowl.

Next, I conducted a workshop on May 18, 2013 at the International Youth Leadership Institute where I talked to high schoolers from around NYC about the root issues and effects of street harassment, this was called the roots and branches activity, and then I had them think of an axe, a solution to the problem, which was meant to cut down the tree. I did an identical workshop on May 20, 2013, for my old middle school, the Little Red School House.

Finally, on June 4, 2013, I directed an all-school assembly at my high school, Elizabeth Irwin High School. During this assembly I screened my film and brought in Holly Kearl, founder of Stop Street Harassment, and community organizer at Girls For Gender Equity, Nefertiti Martin to speak on specific topics within the issue of street harassment.

Overall, it was a very successful fellowship and I learned a lot about filmmaking, planning, and street harassment. I learned that filmmaking is about storytelling, which means not including everything even if you want to; because I had to cut out so much footage, there were some things I, regrettably, could not include, such as police harassment of men of color, sexualization of women in the media, and the power dynamic of women and men in society. I learned that planning a youth summit and high school assembly requires great attention to detail and advanced planning. I also learned that the most common form of street harassment is verbal, but it can escalate to the physical, such as groping and public masturbation. Many people don’t understand the threat of violence that women have to deal with and the psychological effects of being called out at like a sexual object for the pleasure of heterosexual men.

The purpose of my fellowship was to educate participants and inspire them to do something about the issue of street harassment. I created my film in order to make men and women more sensitive to the effects of street harassment. I want men to understand that most women do not appreciate being “complimented” and help women understand that you don’t have to just deal with street harassment, but you can do something about it. Being able to show my video on the Stop Street Harassment website is a great opportunity and I hope there will be more platforms in the future to share my video. In the mean time, please direct your family and friends to this article and YouTube to get my videoes out there and educate people on the issue of street harassment.

Video Interview with Tatyana Fazalizadeh

August 5, 2013 By HKearl

Here’s a great video interview from Quiet Lunch Magazine with artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, the person behind the amazing “Stop Telling Women to Smile” project. Don’t forget, you can now bring her art work to your community!

“The posters are directed toward men…but the posters are really for women. When they walk past it, I want them to feel like they have a voice, they have an advocate for them, they have somebody out there speaking up for them.” – Tatyana

After featuring her work on the Stop Street Harassment blog periodically since Oct. 2012, I’m excited to FINALLY meet her in person on Sunday to discuss possible collaboration!

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