Editor’s Note: Lorna Ciani lives in Rome and studies Illustration. She is the person behind the new Tumblr Princess Walnut and she kindly agreed to tell SSH’s readers about her project and what inspired it!
SSH: How has street harassment touched your life?
LC: I have been experiencing street harassment since I was 14 and the only thing that’s changed over the years is my reaction to it. As a teenager I was extremely intimidated and ashamed by it.
As a 20-year-old I felt oppressed, which resulted in a persistent sense of powerlessness. It made me very uncomfortable to be honked at by drivers or commented on when I went jogging or walking alone, for instance, so what did I do? I stayed home. Catcalls and unwanted sexual attention undermined my sense of self-worth and made me feel vulnerable and self-conscious, not to mention humiliated.
Now, at 22, harassment makes me combative and even more determined to reclaim my right to walk down the street with dignity. It’s only been a few months since I started working on what I’ve now dubbed the “Walnut Project” and examining the experiences of women worldwide through websites like Hollaback! and StopStreetHarassment.org, but this short time has been enough to make me want to stand up and fight back. I go jogging now. I go out whenever and wherever I want.
The harassment hasn’t stopped, what’s different is that I don’t let it stop me.
SSH: Good for you! What inspired your illustrations and project?
LC: The first inspiration for Princess Walnut came to me last autumn after talking to a male acquaintance who seemed genuinely shocked to discover that no, I and women everywhere do not appreciate being yelled, whistled, leered or stared at, commented on or solicited in the middle of the street, just as we don’t appreciate being followed, groped, stalked or assaulted. It seemed obvious to me, but there was this man assuring me wide-eyed that he’d never stopped to think how women might feel about it, and that he wouldn’t stand for it anymore now that he knew how upsetting it is.
That’s when I realized how much harm can come from ignorance: bystanders aren’t necessarily indifferent, they may not know exactly what it is they’re witnessing. They subscribe to the tired old belief that street harassment is just a guy’s way of paying women a compliment, that is if they even stop to consider the matter at all.
I felt a sudden, unstoppable need to do something: to create something that would draw attention to the topic of harassment, introduce and educate about it in a lighthearted way, and to which those who already know very well what harassment is and what effects it has could relate and be reminded that we’re all in it together, we all go through the same kind of thing over and over again and all of us are tired of it.
I communicate more effectively through images, not words, so there wasn’t much question about my project taking the form of a picture book; coincidentally, I was expected to produce one for my Project Management class and I had intended it to be a modern feminist fairy tale in any case. The trouble was that a picture book discussing a distressing, unpleasant, triggering topic like street harassment ran the risk of being a distressing, unpleasant and triggering read.
What’s more, I wasn’t sure I felt like drawing a cartoonified bunch of perverts. It sounds like an extreme reaction, I know, but the idea really put me off. I get my fair share of them on the street and I don’t want to have to think about them any more than I have to, never mind picture them in detail in my mind and breathe life into them on paper.
So I came up with the idea of allegorically substituting them with archetypal fairy tale bad guys, dragons. Not just one big bad evil dragon hiding in its lair, but lots of them walking the streets and mingling with everyone else. Traditionally a dragon’s bane is a knight, but of course I wasn’t about to let my princess mooch in a tower waiting for someone else to save the kingdom.
I wanted to tell an empowering story, make it entertaining, and use it to ridicule age-old roles and clichès. Even disregarding her fondness for slobbing around in front of the TV in her pyjamas on Sundays, Walnut remains an unlikely candidate for a fairy tale princess simply by not being defined at all by her looks, but solely by her aim: to stamp out street harassment. As many funny comebacks as she might make (almost all of them, as well as the dragons’ sleazy commentary, are episodes drawn from real life experiences shared on the Hollaback website. I have to say, there are some very witty people out there), I feel there is really only one way to overcome street harassment once and for all and this involves all of us, that’s what this book is all about. Standing together, fighting together, making a change together.
