Khiara Ortiz, NY, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
As a woman living in New York City, it’s a given that I have to put up with street harassment on an almost daily basis. I leave my apartment in the mornings on my way to work and the men at the produce market on the corner of my street will toss out sexually fueled comments like biscuits to a dog, hoping I’ll bite. I don’t, but it’s not always easy to ignore them. Sometimes, I change the route I take to the train just to avoid them, only to be greeted by another slew of catcalls on the other side of the street.
And it doesn’t stop there. I work in the midtown neighborhood of Manhattan where there’s always an endless amount of construction work being done and an endless amount of street harassment from construction workers polluting the streets like the dirt and dust clouds from a drilling site.
All of these instances have made me think about why street harassment happens. Most women in America are aware that street harassment either happens to other women, happens to them, that they will probably experience it at least once a week, and that they’ll just have to put up with it. But I’ve begun to wonder how many of the victims of street harassment think about the why; why is this man calling me out for being female?; why does he think he can talk to me like that?; why can’t he see me as his equal, as another human being going about her day, NOT wanting to draw any type of attention towards herself, much less any sexual attention?
In New York, anonymity is easy. You see hundreds, maybe thousands, of people every day. The chances of remembering a face you saw the day before or even that morning are slim. People go unnoticed all the time. This has led me to consider the reasons men feel comfortable practicing street harassment and entitled in doing so. Perhaps the man feels he will not be punished because the woman he is calling out to won’t remember him. Or maybe the complete opposite is true and the man wants to be remembered by a woman, wants to feel more masculine, and therefore calls out to the woman at her expense and for his own psychological benefit. He has now brought himself to the surface of the woman’s psyche and may not even realize he’s done so in a negative way.
In either situation, I think there’s an underlying factor: the release of aggression. An article published in The New York Times in 1983 cited that while “psychologists and psychiatrists often disagree sharply when they discuss whether behavioral differences between the sexes exist, many agree on one difference – that boys and men are still the more aggressive and violent [sex].”
An article published last month in Psychology Today addressing the same issue, the differences in aggression between men and women, theorized about the reasons behind this seemingly factual statement. The article cites a theory by Leonard Berkowitz, a leading American psychologist, who says that “men and women are educated, traditionally, to carry out different social roles.”
The type of aggression that occurs among women is “verbal aggression in intrasexual competition”, not the more obvious, testosterone-fueled aggression that’s valued in men by societal standards. Men’s aggressive tendencies are rooted in the way they are brought up by their parents, in the positive reinforcements they experience when they play rough or practice aggression, to an extent, in sports. When they grow up to become men and no longer have the outlets they did as little boys – sports, games between friends, etc. – they lose a clear target towards which to direct their aggression, which by this time can manifest itself in sexual forms. I believe that sexual harassment, street harassment, and catcalling are all outlets for men who don’t know how to deal with their cultivated aggression. And the streets are places outside their homes, away from their wives and children, where they don’t have anyone to tell them any better because they know the women they target will most likely walk by, leaving them anonymous and free of punishment.
I think that an effective way to break this cycle is to start calling men out on the wrongness of street harassment. Make them uncomfortable, make them realize that their targets aren’t just objects of sex walking by like sponges ready to absorb insults. In the way that the parents of a kidnapped daughter might use photos of the daughter or stories about her to humanize her to the kidnapper, women must humanize themselves before these men to make them realize they cannot and will not be used as targets for male aggression.
Khiara is a recent graduate of New York University with a BAS in Journalism and Psychology who works as an assistant in the contracts department for Hachette Book Group. She is also the co-social media manager for Stop Street Harassment.
