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USA: Can Teaching Women They Have to Be “Ladylike” Place Them in Danger?

June 15, 2016 By Correspondent

By Shahida Arabi, New York, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Photo Credit: Opposite Strides by John St. John via Flickr. License. — *Photo Credit: Opposite Strides by John St. John via Flickr.*

Rose McGowan’s short film “Dawn” takes the viewer on a journey that encapsulates the female experience under the male gaze – a male gaze that can sometimes lead to dire outcomes. The protagonist in the movie falls for a dangerous male lead and is lured into a deadly situation because her need to be polite overrides her nagging gut instinct that senses danger. McGowan’s film makes it clear that women are socialized to be “ladylike” even at the expense of their own self-preservation. As she notes in her Vice interview, “The fear of being impolite is deeply ingrained and can have tragic consequences.”

Although the film is set in the 1960’s, the societal demand for women to be “nice” in all contexts still remains entrenched in our everyday behavior. Over the years, I’ve witnessed a few female friends of mine be overly friendly to street harassers, allowing them to invade their personal space and take up their time while they excessively catered to the street harasser’s whims in an attempt to be “nice.” Despite their seeming responsiveness, none of my friends were actually interested in their harassers, nor were they at all comfortable with the harasser’s tactics; they told me they felt they had to maintain a friendly demeanor because of social norms that compelled them to be ladylike and polite. One even told me it was because of the fear of what the harasser might say or do if they were not nice to them and did not respond.

Such a fear is, unfortunately, valid and warranted given that there have been harassers that have retaliated against their victims. In addition, the amount of backlash that victims experience when they try to report harassment, abuse or rape can be staggering. Newsflash: we actually live in a world where women can have acid thrown on their faces for refusing marriage proposals, shot when they refuse the advances of their harassers, and on a larger scale, bullied to death for being raped or bullied for speaking out about their own assault.

In the case of major YouTube star Sam Pepper who made “prank” videos of sexually harassing women on the street, retaliation for any victims who spoke out about being assaulted or even raped by him was major. The claims that he had harassed women outside of these pranks were often dismissed and minimized while the women who spoke out received a tremendous amount of bullying and hatred online.

Dottie Martin, a victim of Sam’s inappropriate harassment during a date, noted, “Unfortunately I felt like that was to be expected. I felt I was doing something I wasn’t meant to be doing, which was refusing.” Some women who were groped at a YouTube gathering in London were also afraid to complain about the way Sam had groped them because they felt that because it was done in a “playful” way, they “couldn’t complain.”

When we live in a society where refusal to inappropriate behavior is seen as rude, we teach women that their rights don’t matter, that their bodies are not their own and that the desires of men surpass the needs of women. How many of us walk the streets every day thinking that we can’t complain because we’ve been desensitized to so much harassment that it feels like a normal part of life? That when a man tells us to “smile,” we should simply smile to keep the peace because it’s really not a “big deal”? Or that when a man gazes at us up and down and says, “Bless you,” we should ignore the true intention behind their comment because it’s playfully packaged? How many of us avoid complaining about a rude remark, predatory gaze, or inappropriate touching because we feel it would be “impolite” to do so and that we should see it as a “compliment” rather than a potential trigger?

What about in situations where being assertive and honoring your instincts can save your life? How often do we, as women, feel compelled by the social norm of being polite and ladylike – even when we feel that we may potentially be in danger? How often do we stifle our “no” when a man offers to walk us back to our apartment despite that “bad feeling,” smile through a bad date with a man who’s overly handsy or say nothing as a man gets too close to us when we ride the subway, only to later wish we had said something? How often do we engage in conversations with strangers because we feel we “have to” rather than because we want to? How often do we keep silent when we wished we had used our voices? How often do we use our voices, only to regret it because the retaliation far outstripped the reward of standing up for ourselves?

In contrast to my friends, I was often on the opposite end of the spectrum when it came to street harassers. I usually ignored the harasser with a dirty look, avoided their gaze altogether, spoke back with a sassy remark or was forced to assert myself more aggressively when they continued to stalk and harass me. I even snapped a photograph of a man who harassed me on the train. Neither assertive nor more passive reactions were necessarily “wrong.”

They were right for us, how safe we felt, and what we felt would be empowering to us personally in those specific situations. For me, assertive responses were my go-to, but that didn’t mean they were always effective or that the polite responses of my friends were any less valid. There are many different ways you can respond to street harassment and any one of them can be safe and empowering for you in that given moment.

Sometimes we won’t act like we normally do when it comes to harassers because each situation may call for something different. We may not feel safe talking back in one context, whereas in another context, we may feel comfortable putting the harassers in their place.

Sometimes being polite can save your life, whereas in other times it can endanger it. There are also many cases where it doesn’t matter what you do, because the predator seeks to attack you regardless. Remember that the actions and reactions of a street harasser are never your fault, much like the responsibility of rape always belongs to the rapist.

This is certainly not a black or white issue and each set of circumstances calls for something different. We can never be truly certain whether going the nice route or the assertive route will work for us until we’ve experienced the outcome, but as the film Dawn teaches us, listening to our own intuition can be essential to our self-preservation.

The danger comes in when we demand that women be polite, nice and respectful in all circumstances where they may otherwise benefit from being assertive in a specific situation. If you call an assertive reaction “rude,” then you are teaching women that they have to respect men who do not respect them. Essentially, you teach them that their emotions, their triggers, their boundaries when trespassed, their values when violated, do not matter. Rather than teaching them to coddle the feelings of men who see them as objects, why not teach them to validate their own emotions and their right to assert themselves if needed? It is this same intuition and assertiveness that, if honored, could save their lives.

While practicing courtesy, etiquette and respect is an ideal way of life for everyone regardless of your gender, street harassment is not a context where “ladylike” behavior is always appropriate or even applicable. In some cases, it can be dangerous. We need to stop teaching women that they always have to be “nice” in contexts where it’s more effective and safe for them to be discerning and assertive.

Shahida is a summa cum laude graduate of Columbia University graduate school and is the author of four books, including The Smart Girl’s Guide to Self-Care and Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare, a #1 Amazon Best Seller. As a passionate advocate for survivors of abuse, sexual assault and trauma, her writing has been featured on many sites. You can follow Shahida on Twitter, her blog Self-Care Haven and join her Facebook community.

USA: CTA Ad Campaign is a Step in the Right Direction

June 10, 2016 By Correspondent

Hope Herten, IL, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Frequently, like the rest of society, I have to leave my bedroom, stop browsing through social media and watching old episodes of Sex in the City, and go outside, whether or not I am going to class, work, or anywhere else. Going places is a general requirement for being a person and when you live in a city without a car, any mode of transportation you choose is a part of the public sphere. Whether I am riding my bike, taking a cab or ride share, or on public transportation (the “L”), I enter an environment where I am surrounded by other people and in doing so, I unwillingly become the target of stares and comments by strangers.

Normally, it is a relatively uneventful experience, aside from near-death experiences on my bike, erratic cab drivers, and less than pleasant smells on the train or bus. All in all, the majority of my commute is devoid of unwanted encounters. Despite not being the majority of my experience, harassment as I am “making my way downtown” occurs frequently enough for it to stick in the back of my mind no matter where I go. As one of my friends said, “I’m a human that needs to get places and I won’t let a male stop me. (Assuming the street harasser is a male). That doesn’t mean I’m not cautious. I’m especially cautious at night or when I see a group of males around, even if it’s in the middle of the day”.

I am not one to let fear keep me from doing what I want, I am not about to let an experience or stories from friends keep me from venturing to different parts of the city, but that doesn’t mean I am not aware.

I have had more than my share of harassment experiences while on my way to work, which for me is one of the most troubling types of harassment. Not that I welcome harassment on my days off, but there is something about being yelled at or cornered on my way to work that makes the rest of the day horrible. On my bike men have yelled at me from the street and, to my horror, from their cars, pulling up beside me to say something. Less so cab drivers, but there are a handful of times that while I am using ride shares like Uber and Lyft that my driver has repeatedly hit on me and refused to give up when I denied to give them my number.

By far though, my experiences of harassment on the “L” are the most frequent and frustrating. On the train, I have been approached by men who are alone and by groups of men, telling me what they think of how I look or asking for my number. These situations are often frightening and never feel good. On one occasion when I was traveling to work a group of men, the only other people in the train car, were yelling at me, as I continued to ignore them they approached me, threatening me by asking, “Who do you think you are to ignore me?” Luckily, my stop came and they did not follow me, but it was difficult to go through an eight hour workday doing customer service after I was so shaken. It was actually this experience in particular that motivated me to seek out organizations like Stop Street Harassment and Hollaback! to see what people were doing to stop street harassment.

When asking my friends about their experiences on the “L”, they shared similar experiences: men coming up to them, sitting next to them, relentlessly pursuing them until they are forced to leave the car. My group of friends and I must not have been the only women who have experienced serious harassment while on public transportation, because recently the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) began an ad campaign to bring awareness to the issue.

Ads on the trains and buses encourage passengers to not just sit by and watch fellow riders be harassed or threatened during their commute. A CTA official told the Chicago Tribune in an interview that they are aware that the vast majority of harassment cases are not reported, “One of the main reasons for this campaign is that we want customers to report incidents they experience or witness.”

As the campaign is relatively new, many of the people with whom I spoke had not noticed the advertisements, but upon viewing images of them, they agreed that they would be helpful. Many people agreed that bringing any sort of attention to the issue is good and could encourage bystanders to intervene and victims to report cases, but a few people whom I interviewed expressed concern that since they hadn’t noticed the ads, the efforts should be expanded and that the ads should be more eye catching. I carry the same sentiment as many of my peers, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Maybe one day I won’t have to practice my resting bitch face in the mirror before heading to work.

Hope is a full-time undergraduate student studying public health and Spanish in Chicago, IL. During her time in Chicago, Hope has participated in many protests and events trying to call awareness to women’s issues on campus and in the broader Chicago community. Follow her on Twitter @hope_lucille or check out her public health blog.

USA: Popularizing Safe Spaces through Corporate Responsibility

June 7, 2016 By Correspondent

Turquoise A. Thomas (Morales), Kansas, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

Trigger Warning: Rape and other sexualized violence

It should be very clear to those involved with or interested in the prevention of street harassment and sexualized violence that there is a clear intersection between sex trafficking and street harassment. The U.N. and other global forces are even developing task forces and support groups specifically to combat sex trafficking and sexualized violence.

It’s an abhorrently common habit of those in the U.S. to say that certain women are targeted for street harassment because they “look like a hooker”; furthermore when women are dressed this “certain way” in lower income neighbors they are told to expect street harassment and solicitation because it’s the “norm”. Regardless of a woman’s style of dress or the neighborhood she’s in, no one deserves or should expect to be harassed. The idea that women or children should expect sexual advances from strangers in public (or private) based on their dress and location reeks of victim blaming and further allows those who walk among us everyday with a predatory eye to have the ability to move through society unchecked.

It’s widely accepted that traveling and stopping at a gas station can be a very dangerous act in and of itself. Gas stations are a hot spot for street harassment, particularly those adjacent to interstate highways. Highways are widely known in the U.S. as a lucrative tool of sex traffickers. In 2014, Sacramento and Oakland were named two of the largest sex trafficking hubs in the world by National Public Radio. Both cities are located directly along the heavily traveled Interstate 80 which spans from San Francisco, CA, into New York City, NY, allowing predators who harass, stalk, and traffic women to move almost effortlessly across the states.

Violent incidents involving street harassment, trafficking and domestic violence occur at gas stations. Women and children have commonly been kidnapped, molested, raped or even at gas stations, rest stops and truck stops. With this information in mind, some gas station companies have developed on site “safe spaces.”

In the Midwest, Quiktrip (QT) is one of those companies. As summer approaches, festivals and other events occur, schools are out and families are traveling in higher frequency than during any other season creating more opportunities for people who seek to harass or traffic others.

Arguably, companies like Quiktrip are leading social responsibility in their industry by providing a bonafide safe space. Simply knowing that QT has this space available means more individuals or families can plan safe trips with QT safe spaces on their route. We need other companies to follow suit and join the fight against street harassment; safe spaces should be widely available in commercial spaces like gas stations, grocery stores and other places where people are street harassed. Non-profit organizations like United Way can easily assist corporations in building these spaces, but it’s up to us to demand they do so, after all…the customer’s always right!

Turquoise is a 26-year-old freelance journalist, a program manager at the Wichita Women’s Initiative Network, and a junior at Wichita State University. She is the founder of SHERO Coalition (SHERO Co) and you can follow her on twitter @anthroisms.

USA: My Literary Introduction to Street Harassment

May 31, 2016 By Correspondent

Deborah D’Orazi, NY, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

The first time I remember reading about street harassment and recognizing it for what it was was in Virginia Woolf’s iconic essay, A Room of One’s Own, when I turned 17. In the essay, Woolf sets out on a momentous task to speak on women and literature and ends up writing about her journey searching for women in literature, women who write literature, and why women are not more prudently featured within the realm of literature since they are so often portrayed as the inspiration for what are deemed some of the greatest and most romantic written words in the English language. To her dismay, Woolf finds little evidence of women in literature (outside of the occasional female ruler or writer and the consistent muse or romantic interest—typically always written by men). She is then determined to journey and figure out why. Ultimately, she comes to a remarkably economic conclusion stating that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. What is even more profound is that Woolf demonstrates that this economic necessity for a woman’s career and independence within the private sphere is not at all possible without uncompromised, safe access to the public sphere, or public spaces without harassment or the threat of it.

This subject is explored early on in Woolf’s essay when she is beginning to contemplate and research her ideas. While Woolf encounters the beginning of an idea on a walk and starts to chase it she is promptly interrupted when “instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me”. Woolf is instantly aware of the power dynamics. She is a woman visiting a man’s college, thus despite the space being open for her and others to walk in, she must remain on the gravel while male college members walk on the turf. She notes that this territorial power play did not actually physically harm her, but she did lose her thoughts and ideas that were so precious to her.

I am sure many would argue that this incident was not street harassment because it took place in a seemingly private space or that this incident was just a mere a sign of the times Virginia Woolf lived in. However, this indicates the importance of understanding the very definition of street harassment.

At Stop Street Harassment we use the following definition: “unwanted comments, gestures, and actions forced on a stranger in a public place without their consent and is directed at them because of their actual or perceived sex, gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation.”

Virginia Woolf, who undoubtedly came from a very privileged background and lived a very privileged life, was still looked down up, criticized, and harassed because she was a woman taking up space within the public realm, where typically men dominated and still dominate today. As Woolf notes in her essay, “The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in the protection of their turf” which sent her ideas into oblivion.

Yet, how many ideas, leisure and social activities, or mere existences of women, racial and ethnic groups, religious minorities, LGBTQIA individuals, differently abled people, etc. have been disrupted because the public sphere is, in fact, not so public. It is important to note this intersectionality because women inhabit all of them and as women and other disenfranchised groups gain rights and visibility within the public sphere, harassment remains a constant. This constant serves as a reminder that people must remain within a social constructed role, no matter how much it inhibits or oppresses them. And it is often quite effective in limiting and changing where people travel geographically, whom they socialize with, and where a person may go for services. For example, if a girl is harassed on her way to school, depending on her individual situation, she may have to change her route, endure the harassment, or stop going to school all together. All of these situations create a legacy of trauma and undue economic burdens that disenfranchise an individual, community, and population. It is not at all uncommon for women to consider changing their routine or way they lived to avoid street harassment. As documented by a Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates survey from 2000 it was discovered that 84 percent of women would “consider changing their behavior to avoid street harassment.” How much economic opportunity have women and other communities lost because of harassment? How much safety? Too much for my liking.

So, what should we do? Educate, advocate, organize, speak out, protest, create policy, listen, and support each other. Many people have experiences, some similar and some different, but recognizing the reasons for street harassment and the many forms it takes for different people and communities is important for an inclusive movement. It is a hard journey, but combating street harassment in its many forms as misogyny, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia xenophobia, abelism, etc. is just as important as speaking out. So many have been harassed into silence, trauma, injury, hurt, and death in public spaces throughout countless years that it is important to note the many reasons why. Without this understanding and cooperation more people will be oppressed and more people will continue to be left out of public spaces and, consequently, public life.

Street harassment is a push back towards oppression and objectifying. Let us strive to make a world where people’s private and public lives can thrive and where people can have safe access to safe places and safe public and private lives. As Virginia Woolf wrote in another essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, “mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it” and we must continue fighting against the current in order to achieve justice and equality for everyone to use public spaces freely.

Deborah is a recent MSW graduate who also received certification from American University’s Women and Politics Institute and Rutgers’ Center on Violence Against Women and Children. In addition to social work, Deborah is looking to pursue an MPP/MPA and she is also extremely passionate about the arts (theater, writing, film, television, fine art, poetry, performance art), history, and Hamilton.

USA: Clinic-Specific Street Harassment

May 25, 2016 By Correspondent

Mariel DiDato, NJ, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent

*Protestors harass a patient outside of a women’s healthcare clinic. Photo by and courtesy of Wendi Kent.*

Whenever a woman is in a public space, there is always a chance she will be shouted at, followed, or recorded without her permission. However, there is one place where that harassment is almost guaranteed.

Women’s health clinics have seen a rise in harassment and violence since the first murder of an abortion provider in 1993. This rate especially has risen within the past few years. The climate is so bad for these clinics that there are volunteer clinic escort teams simply to help patients walk from the sidewalk or parking lot to the front door. As a clinic escort myself, I have seen the extent of this problem first-hand.

Each clinic’s atmosphere is different, as each state has different political leanings, religious influences, and laws surrounding women’s healthcare. In general though, the themes are the same. Patients must walk through numerous, large posters depicting gory, aborted fetuses. They have their personal space violated by anti-choice protestors who follow them and try to convince them not to go inside the clinic. When they finally get to the door, there are protestors preaching loudly, sometimes through megaphones, chastising these women for going inside. It gets so bad that even some of the more peaceful pro-life demonstrators criticize the protestors who scream at and follow patients. To make matters worse, the sound of the megaphones permeates the clinic walls, so that patients inside have to listen to these protests for the entirety of their appointment. Oftentimes, the loudest of the protestors are men, who think they know what women should do with their bodies and health better than the women trying to receive care.

In addition to clinic escort teams, many clinics have been awarded legal buffer zones. Protestors cannot step foot in these areas, so that patients can feel safer in walking to the clinic. Although political buffer zones have been easily enacted in other scenarios, such as political polls, it is difficult to obtain a buffer zone for women’s healthcare clinics. Even when they are obtained, they may not be enforced, depending on the religious or political beliefs of the on-duty police officers. Anti-choice groups often try to repeal these buffer zones by citing of freedom of speech. Although freedom of speech does not protect harassment and intimidation, these cases often swing in the favor of the anti-choice movement. Just recently, anti-choice protestors were even given permission to violate the city noise ordinance in Portland, Maine.

A clinic in Madison, Wisconsin obtained a “floating buffer zone,” in which people within 160 feet of the facility have an eight-foot boundary that protestors cannot cross. Other buffer zones have spanned as wide as 35 feet. These boundaries allow protestors to practice their freedom of speech without causing any physical or emotional harm to patients trying to access the clinic. However, in most other places, the buffer zone can be as little as just eight square feet in front of the clinic entrance. This gives protestors more freedom to the sidewalk than the patients, who may not even be going to the clinic for an abortion. In many places like Richmond, Virginia, or Louisville, Kentucky, there is still no buffer zone at all.

These protests go beyond freedom of speech. The last time I escorted for a clinic, three different women were crying by the time they got inside. This is not an uncommon occurrence. These women and their companions are slut-shamed, insulted, and even threatened. Protestors sometimes violate the buffer zone, but these infractions are hard to prove. Oftentimes, since our focus is on the safety of the patients and not necessarily on the bad behavior of the protestors, we can only pull our cameras out to record after a threat has been made or the buffer zone has been invaded. For the safety and security of the patients, we also never take any photos or videos that could be used to identify them. On the other hand, this is something that anti-choice protestors are not afraid to do.

This issue is not pro-life verses pro-choice. Regardless of one’s stance on abortion, most people should agree that women deserve the right to feel safe on their way to the doctor. The clinic that I volunteer at received their buffer zone through clinic escorting, documenting harassment from protestors, lobbying, emailing weekly reports to the city council (as well as the city and clinic attorneys and the chief of police), and partnering with the local National Organization of Women chapter to draft buffer zone legislation. Buffer zones create harassment-free environments for patients. I urge you to fight for a buffer zone in your area. It can mean the difference between women being scared away from their doctor’s appointments, and women feeling safe enough to receive the care that they need.

Mariel is a recent college graduate, feminist, and women’s rights activist. Currently, she volunteers for a number of different organizations, including the Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey and the New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault. You can follow her on Twitter at @marieldidato or check out her personal blog, Fully Concentrated Feminism.

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