this is for the person who has to smile
or shake their head
or walk faster
because of a follower who wants
to be
that person
who meets people
who women love
who doesn’t answer texts right away and
repeats lines from that actor and succeeds
in front of friends
in front of the street
and is recognized, validated
I’m a success,
people like me
Search Results for: 2014
Today at Noon EDT: #YouOkSIS? Tweet Chat
“If you’re a woman, there’s a good chance you may have been harassed on the street. Have you ever wanted to someone to help you when you were in that most uncomfortable situation? Or if you’re a man, have you seen a woman being harassment on the street but wasn’t sure how to help her? Well, NewsOne interviewed some women in New York City and asked them to give their suggestions of ways someone could intervene in the event they are being harassed.
Also, NewsOne, along with special guest @FeministaJones, will host a town hall on Twitter TODAY, July 10 at 12 p.m. on the issue of street harassment and we’ll discuss practical ways we can all help stop it. Use the hashtag #YouOKSis?
For now, check out our video to see what women have to say about street harassment.”
“No wonder women don’t want to ride bikes.”
In many car-centric cities around the U.S., riding a bike on a city street is equivalent to sticking a target on your back. Being a woman on a bike makes that target 10 times bigger and 10 times brighter.
As much as I love riding my bike, there are times when I feel unsafe and violated, such as when I pull up alongside a bus shelter and a man yells out, “Damn girl. Where you going? You must be riding a lot with an ass like that!” I can’t wait for the light to change so I can get the hell away from this situation.
I never know quite how to respond. A motorist rolls down his window to tell me how lucky my bike is to be ridden by me. I just smile and try to shrug it off, knowing who holds the power in this situation, Often I try to avoid potential situations altogether, changing routes where I know I often get yelled at or not riding at certain times. I once spent a summer as a pedicabber (one of my favorite jobs I ever had), but never took the night shifts after my boss warned me I’d probably be harassed by drunk male college students. Try as I might, street harassment cannot be avoided. A pedestrian once yelled, “I want to cum all over you” on a Sunday afternoon on one of Kansas City’s busiest streets. I didn’t know how to respond other than to break down in tears as I started to climb a hill.
I endure the catcalls on a daily basis and for the most part learn to live with it. But when a few weeks ago, one of my best friends got to work and started crying because a man yelled, “I want to suck your pussy,” on the ride in, I became furious. Words like that are violating and unjust. Too many women are getting hurt.
“No wonder women don’t want to ride bikes,” she said.
It is a well-known fact that women ride bikes at much lower rates than men. In 2009, women accounted for only 24% of all bicycle trips in the U.S. In addition, 24% of women refrain from exercising outdoors in general in order to avoid public sexual harassment and assault, according to the most recent report by Stop Street Harassment. A few bike advocacy groups nationwide have begun to recognize the importance of getting more women on bikes, by hosting forums and summits. For example, the Washington Area Bicycle Association recently hosted a workshop for female cyclists about fighting street harassment.
I do not have a choice when it comes to exercising outdoors as I do not own a car that I can use as a shield from harassment. My bike cannot camouflage the fact that I wear a skirt or a dress every single day–a fact many of my female friends sometimes have a hard time believing. “I try not to wear a skirt when I bike. I seem to attract more negative attention from men,” a friend once told me. I’m not going to let fear stop me from wearing what I want to wear. A woman on a bike is not eye candy for motorists, she is not riding for the attention or the praise. She is riding because she simply loves to ride her bike. She is a cyclist and the road is as much hers as it is yours.
Sexual harassment is not merely a “women’s issue.” It is a mobility issue. If women do not feel safe biking to work or to run simple errands to the grocery store, how can we expect them to pursue alternative modes of transportation? Just as cyclists have the same rights to the roads as motorists, women must have the same rights as cyclists as men.
Heavy traffic, debris in the road, and a lack of bicycle facilities would be enough to deter any woman from riding a bicycle. It is great that cities are beginning to invest more in building bike facilities, such as bike lanes to encourage individuals to use bicycles as a mode of transportation, but the issue of getting more women on bikes extends beyond infrastructure improvements. A bike lane is not going to make a woman feel much safer when she is going to be harassed every day. Without a dramatic change in culture, female cyclists will remain a minority on the landscapes of our streets, their targets still strapped firmly to their backs.
Rachel Krause is a cyclist who is active in the Kansas City bike community. She publishes a feminist bicycling zine called Velo Vixen.
USA: #NotJustHello: What’s so bad about starting a conversation?
Lorna M. Hartman, Spokane, WA, SSH Blog Correspondent
Twitter has provided women worldwide with an avenue for mass sharing of harassment and assault experiences.
It seems easy for some men to hear a story from a woman and simply dismiss it, as many women can testify. When hashtags go viral with dozens or even hundreds of women sharing these experiences, though, it’s much harder for people to simply dismiss them.
It’s harder to say, “You must have overreacted. It doesn’t sound like that big a deal,” when you’re saying it to several hundred or several thousand women from all over the world citing similar experiences.
Writer Aja Romano of The Daily Dot published “#NotJustHello identifies a troubling trend in street harassment” on June 22. She reported, “We’re sure Twitter user UJohnsmeyer probably meant well. But his defense of men who talk to women on the street may have sparked the weekend’s most engaging social commentary hashtag.”
Here’s a piece of the Twitter conversation that led to #NotJustHello:
@UJohnsmeyer @Feminist_Inti @Karnythia ever think that maybe a guy sees a chick he thinks is hot and just wants to try to start up a convo?
@Karnythia @UJohnsmeyer @Feminist_Inti Ever think women don’t want to strike up convos with strange men?
More women joined the conversation, telling about their experiences. Finally, @Karnythia said:
@Karnythia We do understand that it’s #NotJustHello right? That street harassment is never that calm or polite?
The new hashtag took off. Here are some samples of both women’s experiences, and of men’s reactions to the hashtag:
@dale_in_denver @KaeAltoBella @AJStream If there is an expectation of a response, then it’s #notjusthello. Ignoring isn’t working or this wouldn’t be a #.
@notallmikaylas Your desire to hit on me does not trump my right to be left alone. #NotJustHello
@hannaheff When I refused to acknowledge a stranger’s compliment, he invaded my personal space and said, “I’m stronger than you.” #NotJustHello
@UJohnsmeyer How do you get women if you can’t say hello to them? #notjusthello
@theamandabatty ‘Hello’ is a smile or a respectful nod, not a catcall, a jeer, a crude gesture or name calling when I don’t respond. #NotJustHello
@BettorOffSingle [this individual posted several dozen times, attempting to monopolize the hashtag—his post below is representative]
Hey stupid women: #yesallwomen #notjusthello #feminism all lesbian constructs for seducing gullible str8 women by turning them against men.
@cameralinds_ It’s #notjusthello, it’s fear of retaliation for both responding and not responding.
@RynJ21 It’s #NotJustHello when I have a smile I created specifically to deal with street harassment. I call it, “Please don’t kill me.”
Male allies posted as well:
@HolzmanTweed When I was a teen, a guy tried to “teach” me how to catcall, explaining “the rules:” (1/x) #NotJustHello
@HolzmanTweed He told me look for a ring, an ankle chain, something that flagged her as taken so that I wouldn’t disrespect her man. (2/x) #NotJustHello
@HolzmanTweed There’s no pretense on the guy side that it’s about anything but establishing & confirming power, a compliance check. #NotJustHello
@wisemath Brothers, go read the #NotJustHello tag. If that doesn’t move something in you, I’ll pray for you.
@RobScowen For the male “not allowed to flirt” whiners, please read #NotJustHello *carefully* without feeling like the [f******] victim and educate self
As some women tweeted, if men understood the humiliation and the fear women feel when they are harassed on the street, fewer men would do it. Women’s personal risk in possibly being verbally or physically assaulted by a displeased harasser is real.
Last September, blogger UnWinona told of one terrifying experience while commuting on the Metro in California.
On this occasion a bicyclist brought his bike in with him. Despite an empty car, he sat across from her. When he started talking to her, she calmly told him to leave her alone as she was reading.
He walked to his seat in a huff, muttering about it not being his fault she was pretty. But he didn’t stop there; he continued to mutter and complain, and after a few minutes he got back up and started pacing. Then he started screaming at her, and then punching the train.
She was terrified. She froze in her seat, ready with her feet up in case he attacked her, certain that if she got up and walked away she’d be attacked when she turned her back to leave.
For two stops he kept this up. No one came to her aid; no one even came to see what was happening. The second she reached her station, she ran out the door.
She concluded [emphasis hers], “So when people (men) want to talk about ‘legitimate’ forms of assault, tell girls they should be nice to strangers and give men the benefit of a doubt, tell them to consider it a compliment, tell them to ignore the bad behavior of men, I want them to be forced to feel, for even one minute, what it feels like to have so much verbal hatred and physical intimidation thrown at them for nothing more than being female and not wanting to share.”
Lorna is raising three young, kindhearted male allies and has worked on rape and interpersonal violence since the 1990s, including serving on the local rape hotline, answering calls, and driving to emergency rooms to advocate for victims and connect them with resources they needed.
Street Harassment in Boston
Sarah Chang, Guest Contributor
![Sarah RF Osullivans](https://stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Sarah-RF-Osullivans.jpg)
I returned home from work on a late afternoon, parked my car on the street, and as I was getting out of my car, a man walking by and said, “Will you suck my dick? as he passed. The words didn’t even register until a few seconds later. He kept walking, and after I realized what he said, I looked in his direction to see who he was. I suddenly realized this man had actually made “suck my dick” comments to me previously, both times on the street by my residence. I felt angry that I was unsafe in my own neighborhood, and paranoid that perhaps this man was targeting me and knew where I lived.
I emailed the residents in my building to inform my neighbors about this person. With my description of the man and incident, another woman in my building said he had also said inappropriate things to her and her sister, and that they had filed a police report. This made me feel better, knowing he wasn’t targeting just me, but obviously it was equally unfortunate that this man felt entitled to indiscriminately harass women all the time. I followed suit and went to the police station to file a report.
At the station, the police took my report but said they could do nothing because I didn’t know the man’s name and could only provide a general physical description. I asked them what I should do the next time it happened. The officer said to call 911, and if possible, follow the man from a safe distance and wait for the police to arrive.
A few months later, I was walking by this same police station and the man that harassed me actually walked out of the police station. I waited for him to leave before walking into the station, letting the officer there know that he was the man I filed the police report on. The officer said that he knew who the man was, said that he was harmless, and said that he’d talk to his parole officer. The officer didn’t seem to take me very seriously.
I then contacted my neighbor to tell her that I had identified the man and asked if she would come down to the police station with me to corroborate and press the issue. My neighbor didn’t want to do much more other than to leave it be and just avoid the man whenever she ran into him.
I am an Asian American woman, and I experience street harassment all the time. Sometimes it’s just the leering, or just the “hey baby”s or the explicit sexual requests like the example above. But more often than not, it turns race-related: “Love me longtime?”, “Sucky sucky, five dollar”, and the “ni-haos” in my face that sound like meowing. The race-related street harassment is a one-two punch because it thinly veils hatred behind sexual subjugation. It’s common and it happens frequently enough that I’m habitually on edge when I walk outside by myself.
My natural defense mechanism against street harassment and unwanted attention is to have a scowl on my face. This scowling defense mechanism affects my day-to-day public interactions. A recent example of this is that my husband, an Asian American man, will often recount all the people he encounters when he is out taking the dog for a walk. These encounters however, consist of friendly hellos to him (and the dog) and remarks about how cute our dog is. Hardly anyone ever greets or tells me how cute my dog is when I take her for a walk. I attribute this difference to my scowl and general “don’t bother me” attitude, which I’m not even aware of. Walking the dog while male and walking the dog while female shows how street harassment makes a deep impact on seemingly trivial activities.
Speak up about and against street harassment. It’s not ok and I’m still going to report it to the police. I’d really like to enjoy a walk my dog sans scowl, the way that it’s supposed to be.
Sarah Chang is a middle and high school math teacher in the Boston Public Schools. She resides in Boston’s South End and is passionate about education and social justice.