Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming
Walking to work in a busy city. A young woman walks past, then a couple of guys. The guys push others out of the way and obstruct the way whilst they ogle the young woman. Not a care about what they are doing. If you tut or walk around them they say, “You’re just jealous.”
Not really.
– Anonymous
Location: Whenever there are humans around
Share your street harassment story for the blog.
By: Taylor Kuether, Minnesota, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
My experience with street harassment has happened almost exclusively during my college years. I go to a mid-size state school in northwestern Wisconsin, and the harassment seems to follow a pattern: The number of catcalls rises and falls with the temperatures. Every spring, the first day I deem it warm enough to wear shorts, I can count on someone making a loud comment about it, usually from across the campus mall. If I decide to go on my first bike ride of the season, I know I’m going to hear men shouting at me from passing cars. And once the height of summer hits, if a friend and I want to go floating (tubing down the Chippewa River, which runs right through our campus), we should expect to hear lewd comments aimed at us as we carry our inner tubes to the riverfront.
Being yelled at as I try to live my life doesn’t make me feel comfortable or safe. It isn’t something anyone should leave the house expecting or calculate into their day. But in my experience, at least before this summer, the comments were just that – comments.
This summer, I’m living in Minneapolis – a much larger city than my college town – for an internship. Minneapolis is home to the University of Minnesota, a Big 10 school with an enrollment of about 50,000. And on any given weekend night, you can find many of those students in “Dinkytown,” the city’s college bar district.
A few weeks ago, a friend and I went out for a drink in Dinkytown. Just 20 minutes into our outing, a college-aged man came up to us on the sidewalk and tried to put his arm around me, asking us where we were headed. I was surprised, but I shrugged it off as my friend and I kept walking, wordlessly, heading to the next bar.
Once inside, we tried to go upstairs, only to find a second college-aged male who took it upon himself to drunkenly block us from doing so. He stood squarely in front of me, slurring pickup lines at me and making it impossible to ascend the stairs. Annoyed, I grabbed his shoulder and moved him out of our way.
At our last stop of the night, a burrito place where we were hoping to grab some food before heading home, a third college-aged man came up behind my friend, pressed himself against her, and asked her what she was up to. It was the third time in a span of maybe two hours that someone had come up to us and physically entered our space. This wasn’t the street harassment I was used to – words thrown from afar with the space between my harasser and me acting as a buffer, a safety net. This was much more aggressive, much more invasive.
I’ve speculated as to why there is such a difference: Is it the size of the school? Is it the presence of Greek life (my school doesn’t have it; at U of M it’s huge)? Is it the size of the city the school is in?
I’ve always assumed college-aged men think they can get away with harassment for three reasons: one, their new found freedom and lack of supervision, two, their age and lack of maturity, and three, the anonymity afforded by the sheer size of a college campus.
At a big school, your own stupid actions can disappear into the much larger sea of stupid actions. At a big school, you can “get away” with more – after all, if you’re not the only one doing it, it must not be wrong, right?
What have your own experiences been with street harassment on college campuses? Did the size or location of the school impact the harassment you experienced or witnessed? Leave a response on the blog or tweet at me at @taylorkuether.
Taylor Kuether is a senior journalism student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconsin. She has previously written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, worked as a reporter at her city’s daily newspaper, The Leader-Telegram, and its arts and culture publication, VolumeOne, hosted a local-music centered radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio, and worked as Editor-in-Chief at her student newspaper, where she enjoyed writing biting, slightly rant-y columns about feminist issues.
A group of 6-12 men sit on the sidewalk at this location every single day from morning till night. They drink beer, stare and catcall at women all the time. Walking past them on the sidewalk is out of the question. We have to walk on the road and risk being hit buy a car.
– Anonymous
Location: 4215 N 2nd Rd, Arlington VA 22203
Share your street harassment story for the blog.
Dear Men,
As a straight, single woman, I love you guys. I love your hairiness. I love when you do rugged and manly things outdoors like setting stuff on fire. I love how stoic you are, yet still get choked up when you watch the episode of Futurama about Fry’s dog. Unfortunately, sometimes I get the feeling that you don’t love me—and other women, for that matter—back. I’m talking about street harassment: whistles, catcalls, horn honks, etc. Pretty much all those little things guys tend to do that you think are complimentary but are actually demeaning and frightening.
I can almost hear your arguments of rebuttal from here. Believe me, I’ve heard many of them before: Women secretly like it… It’s showing appreciation… I’m just being nice… Women are just too stuck up… I don’t mind when women objectify me…
Gentlemen, as I said before, I like you. A lot. I’m sure there is one of you out there I’ll meet someday that I will love even. So I’m going to let you in on a secret—a secret, insider, girls-only secret. When you do those things, they do not make me feel attractive. They do not make me feel like I would be safe in your muscular embrace. They do not make me swoon in awe of your sexual prowess.
They do make me feel that you might be the type of person who would attack me and rape me, that you are a predator and I am your prey. They make me feel like I should cross the street with my head turned away, eyes cast down in shame for daring to wear a skirt or dress or running shorts. They make me see you as the type of goon Batman pulverizes without breaking a sweat. They make me feel sick inside. I’m pretty sure most women feel the same way (though truthfully I can speak only for myself). If you care that much about us, then you should respect us enough to stop. If you continue to harass women on the street, then you don’t really care about us; you care about your own selfish personal gratification.
I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that we are, for the most part, all adults here. What separates men and women from boys and girls isn’t the number of years they have been alive or their ability to grow body hair, it’s their capacity to understand and respect each other. Children are selfish because that is the only way they know how to be. Their scope of life is limited. Adults, however, have history. We have baggage we carry with us whether we realize it or not. All this baggage—the good and the bad—helps us to be unselfish and to see things from others’ perspectives. A lack of mutual respect results in grown-up children: adults who still think only of their own immediate wants and desires. When men fail to see things from women’s perspective, fail to listen to us, you are not behaving like men. You are behaving like boys.
This brings me to my final point: how can men possibly understand women? How can you possibly understand that we are not being too stuck up or overly sensitive when we object to street harassment? Frankly, there is a very simple answer. Allow me to share this story as an explanation:
It has become something of a tradition among my high school friends and me to gather periodically for movie marathons. One of our most recent marathons was the Alien franchise. I was particularly excited about this, as I had never seen any of these films before. (As a side note, my final verdict: Alien and Aliens are perfectly awesome, three and four are negligible, Prometheus had its flaws but is overall pretty good.) During the course of watching the first movie, my friends and I (three men, three women including me) got to talking about its underlying themes of rape and male violation. Paul, one of the friends who hosts these get-togethers and who writes a movie review blog (Man of Constant Hatred), pointed out that the whole concept of the face-huggers—especially in the original when they first attack John Hurt’s character—illustrates sexual violation of men. Think about it: the face-hugger surprises Hurt and latches itself over his face, specifically over his mouth. It refuses to release him until after it has had its way with him, laying its eggs inside him—in other words, raping him. This rape ultimately results in Hurt’s death.
Gentlemen, how do you feel when you watch this movie? Uncomfortable? Squicky? What does make you feel that way? I don’t know; I’m a woman. I’m just trying to help you all put yourselves in our place.
I am not going to tell you that you need to get in touch with your feminine side or express your feelings more or anything like that. All I can do is present my feelings and opinions on the matter. It’s up to you to respect them, hopefully after taking a while to consider what real respect looks like.
Sincerely,
Emily C. Williams
Emily C. Williams is a middle-school English teacher and a writer of novels. She holds degrees from the University of Mary Washington and the College of William and Mary. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Alexandra Moran is a 20-year-old English Literature student from Birmingham, UK, with a passion for music and writing and a hope to become an English teacher and a writer one day. She wrote the poem “Bacon” about street harassment (see below for the transcript).
Her inspiration for writing it?
She said, “After experiencing street harassment almost every day where I live and realising how commonplace it was becoming, with friends constantly tweeting about or discussing the fact people had been “creepy” to them whilst walking someone, it was starting to feel like we had all resigned ourselves to the fact this was just, unfortunately, becoming an everyday part of life as a female in a relatively urban area. However, when, one night, I was followed the whole way home by a car of guys slowing down and shouting things I realised that something had to change, it was something about the context of this – how dark it was and how empty the streets were, that made me more scared than usual and I found myself, as I sat at home shaking, wishing that the guys in the car could somehow realise how shaken up their “meaningless fun” had made me.
Two other key moments stuck with me when writing this poem, when, on discussion feminism and street harassment by mum actually told me she would be flattered to get beeped at by a car of males and also, whilst working a bar job, when a male co worker told me that a female customers who kept staring at them was making them feel uncomfortable. To my mum I say this is the furthest thing from flattery, and to my co worker -welcome to what life is like for the 21st century female.”
And yes I quicken the pace
but A to B shouldn’t always be a race
and should it really be a breathless, achy sprint
and only then will you, sir, get the hint?
And if you think that you flatter me
you don’t know the last thing about flattery!
A compliment isn’t commenting on a nameless strangers behind
It’s not very gentlemanly I think you’ll find.
What would you do, if one night, I followed you?
Rolled down windows, testosterone seeps through
beeping the horn. you ignore me. I begin to shout
” Oi love, get your pecs out”
Oh sorry is this making you uncomfortable?
By the dim lit do you feel vulnerable?
I’ll signal you lewd sex acts,
get my girls to pitch in at the back
mob attack.
Oh .. you don’t respond to our hollers and shouts
Is there a closet you wanna step out?
Oh … you’re not gonna step over to our car tonight?
You must be really, really, really frigid , right?
Why quicken your pacer?
This isn’t a race.
We will follow you until our fun is through
because that is just what us girls in cars do.
It’s not just after dark, it’s daytime too
a “nice ass” in the morning should see you through
really i’m doing wonders for you
boosting your self esteem, it’s true
what do you mean i’m demeaning you?
You’re dressed for it, you must be aware?
With clothes like that i’m gonna stare.
Onesie, jeans, suit, underwear.
You wouldn’t dress like that if you had a care.
See how ridiculous this is.
Cat call, curb crawl
cuz afterall it doesnt mean nothing to you at all.
And yes this is quite a stir i’m making
but all I wanted was to go to the shops for some bacon.