Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Coolest Trend on the Streets for Men

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Hey you, yeah you, have you heard about the coolest trend on the streets for men? Well if you haven’t, you better get in the know. For all those in the dark, it’s called street harassment (SH). Yep you got it-street harassment, targeted at women. For this post I am going explore the very nature of street harassment and just how cool it can be for everyone. Why don’t I first begin by explaining my first encounter with street harassment. I came into contact with SH around the age of 15 or so. I was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the time and was quickly walking on my way to the 15 bus stop, when this older man maybe 45 or 50 years old stopped (more like hassled) me kindly and asked “Hey beautiful, why the frown? why don’t you smile, otherwise you’re going to get wrinkles on your face when you get older?” So I smiled back and thought what the heck, why not? I didn’t want to compromise my looks for those awesome old men. My so called beauty had been validated and my self-esteem had risen. Everyone lucked out on those street encounters. Back then street harassment didn’t seem so bad. The usual “Hey baby, what’s your name, can I get your number didn’t seem so harmful. But now as I grow older and have moved to Chicago, I go out in public more and I tend to hear more explicit remarks. For example when I ride by bike, I hear comments such as “Hey baby, can I get a ride with you?” or better yet “Damn baby, I wish I was that bike seat.” As of now, I can’t even ride my bike down my block without hearing a whistle or a smooching noise.

If you have not guessed by now, street harassment is not cool. In fact, it is against the law. It is a violation of personal space, essentially, one’s privacy. Street harassment has many defining behaviors gestures and comments but I believe that Cynthia Grant Bowman’s article “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women” defines it best by stating that it has defining characteristics:

(1) the targets of street harassment are females;
(2) the harassers are male;
(3) the harassers are unacquainted with their targets;
(4) the encounter is face to face;
(5) the forum is a public one such as sidewalk, bus, taxi;
(6) the content of the speech, if any, is not intended as public discourse.

She also notes of this working definition, offered by anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo:

“Street harassment occurs when one or more strange men accost one or more women… in a public place which is not the woman’s/women’s worksite. Through looks, words, or gesture the man asserts his right to intrude on the woman’s attention, defining her as a sexual object, and forcing her to interact with him”

As stated above, it is against the law as defined by Pennsylvania’s statute and comparable in ten other states, a person commits a summary offense when, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person:

(1) he strikes, shoves, kicks, or otherwise subjects him to physical contact, or attempts or threatens to do the same; or
(2) he follows a person in or about a public place or places; or
(3) he engages in a course of conduct or repeatedly commits acts which alarm or seriously annoy such other person and which serve no legitimate purpose

However, Bowman notes that many judiciaries (male) do not prosecute accused defendants on these charges simply because such incidents are too frequent for a justice system to handle them efficiently.

This is the result of society’s general acceptance of street harassment. Many people view or rather argue that when a man approaches a woman and and says sexually suggestive things or talks to her about her attractiveness she should take it as a compliment. But in actuality, it is not about complimenting one on their beauty. It is about power and control. Street Harassment detracts from women’s freedom. According to Bowman, when women are constantly harassed in public they hear the implicit (and sometimes explicit) message that women do not belong in public, where they draw more attention by their mere appearance, but rather in the private sphere, at home. She goes on to further argue that analysts have concluded that the intent of street harassers is to remind women of their gender identity in order to keep them in their private spaces and reinforce gender hierarchy. She concludes that street harassment has serious consequences for women and society. It psychologically disempowers women, which creates distrust between men and women, while reinforcing rigid gender roles, hierarchy, and the confinement of women to the private sphere.

I have become so fed up with my harassers and their intentions to keep me in my ‘place’ that I have begun to spit in their direction if I see one oogling or catcalling at me from a distance. To a certain extent this indirect action empowers me when men turn their heads away. I have also decided to take more direct action by writing up business cards that explain in great detail why it is harmful for them to stare and make sexually suggestive comments towards women and then hand them out when I catch one in the act. Hopefully this will encourage constructive dialogue between me and my harassers and between them and the harasser’s friends.

Until society’s general view of women as sexual objects for men’s pleasure is changed women, will always be seen as the lesser sex, always getting the short end of the stick in society. In order for that view to change though, a serious shift in the legal system will have to take place and that will only happen if more people are aware of street harassment and it’s psychological consequences and when more women become apart of the judicial system. Start talking and campaigning people.

– j

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Afraid and Unsafe

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I have had the good fortune of being able to travel in many urban, rural and suburban places and for the most part have felt safe, that is until recently when I was verbally attacked in a series of vulgar harassments and racial slurs in a neighborhood in Brooklyn.  And the worst part about the situation, is that I’ll never feel safe walking in that neighborhood again. Some people try and downplay this kind of occurrence by calling it “cat-calling” or “hitting on” or even “compliments from a stranger,” but street harassment can create real mental and physical boundaries, just by making a person feel afraid and unsafe. — Anonymous

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Understanding Each Other

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I want to say this carefully, because I don’t want to be misunderstood.

Most important, it is my opinion that in a civilized society, no one should harass anyone else. This is particularly important when we’re talking about a group that is more powerful, both physically and in other ways (in this discussion, that would be men), harassing a group that is less powerful (in this discussion, women). There is no excuse.

I would like to suggest, however, that if we limit our discussion to those individuals (women and men) who are willing to invest some thought and some empathy, perhaps we could eliminate at least some of the street harassment—and other harassment as well—perpetrated by men on women. There’s a big difference between males who whistle and cat-call at females in public settings and males who prey on vulnerability and commit violence.

A few years ago, a television series that had an extremely short run chronicled the lives of about four teenaged boys (I think they were sixteen years old), and it based its plot on the fact that normally-developing boys of this age think about sex every few seconds. I watched one or two episodes and confess I got bored with the repetition of the theme and the absence of anything I considered substantive. Shortly afterward I read a female reviewer’s take on the show, and (paraphrasing) she said that it should be taken off the air because no teenaged girl should be subjected to this subject matter.

I beg to differ with her. It seems to me that at least one episode of this show should be compulsory for teenaged girls, right along with the shorts I was shown in junior high about menstruation. And it should be shown in the absence of boys and followed with a discussion led by a female counselor. What do the girls need to know? It’s very possible for a teenaged boy to be so in thrall to his sexual development that even if he says “I love you,” and even if he thinks he means it, he might really be screaming, “I WANT SEX, NOW!” This does not mean these boys are necessarily bad. It means they have a lot to learn about their own bodies. And girls have a lot to learn about boys.

Similarly, the boys should be treated to something that helps them understand that when a girl agrees to make out with them in their car, it’s possible that she’s doing that because she doesn’t want him to think she’s prissy, because she wants the affection, because she wants him to be her boyfriend, because all kinds of possible reasons that have nothing to do with sex. Which is not the same as saying girls don’t want sex. They just seldom want it the same way boys do.

It’s said that women generally approach sex (exceptions always present) from the head down. They want romance, or at least mood lighting, and then they’ll progress down to the pleasure center if all things seem to work out. The complement to that is that men, while they are also capable of romance and spiritual connection, can and often do experience sex that begins and ends below the belt and doesn’t need to travel much further than however many inches he can lay claim to. Women need to understand this. So that when their boyfriend or husband is unfaithful and says, “But honey, it meant nothing to me!”, while she still has every right to be furious and to expect contrition or whatever she needs to feel better, she won’t think it means nothing when he has sex with her, but that he wasn’t lying about that unfaithful situation. This protest seems reasonable to him, and he might have said it to make her feel better. It probably doesn’t make sense to her.

If both sexes had a deeper understanding of each other’s approach to this intimate part of our nature, perhaps there would be less harassment. Women might have a better understanding of just what affect they have when they wear revealing or suggestive clothing; it might make them feel sexy or feminine, and it makes lots of men feel SEX. Big difference. A better understanding might also help women feel less threatened if the harassment is limited to whistles and/or comments that come from a safe distance—which is sometimes the case.

And men need to understand that just because a woman is dressed in a certain way doesn’t mean that sex means nothing to her, or that she necessarily wants a cat-call. It might also help them understand that it can make a woman feel threatened and afraid instead of complimented.

Have I ever been on the receiving end of unwanted comments from men? Sure. Did I like it? Not at all; it made me feel creepy. Was I dressed in a revealing way? Never; it’s not my style. Why did I think it happened? Maybe the guy(s) were bored. Maybe they were trying to look macho to their buddies. Were they thinking about me as a person? Probably not. Should they? Absolutely.

I say let’s approach this from both sides. If we can identify the people who are willing to understand and get them out of the harassment picture (by getting them to stop), then we can take appropriate action against those who are still behaving like Neanderthals. They’re the ones who are truly dangerous. They’re the ones we should fear.

–  Robin Reardon

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Fear Remains 36 Years Later

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I think my first memory of being harassed was when I was 14 years old and was taking a shortcut to school through the fields in Bountiful, Utah. A guy who was a senior and new to our town saw me and ran up to me. I remember I was wearing a new dress and felt so pretty and I was flattered that this older guy wanted to walk with me. He asked me my name, my age, and then he said, “I think you’ll do,” and he wrapped his arms around me and began to unzip my dress. I was horrified and I shoved him away and started to run and run and run. I remember finally looking back when I was at the bottom of the hill of the local Elementary school. He was at the top of the hill, hands on his knees panting.

After that I was afraid to ever be alone with any male my age or older. I was a friendly outgoing girl but I became tongue tied and fearful around males. I guess that’s when my gay radar came to me. I didn’t consciously know my friends were gay, but I seemed to feel safe around gay men and gay teens who didn’t look at me like a side of beef.

I eventually faced my fears and got married, but I have never really gotten over the fear of what a male can do to me. I still will never go to the woods or any place where I am alone to walk. I am fifty years old now, I moved from a small town in Northern VA to NYC last year. Ironically I could never walk through that town in VA without getting honked or whistled at. Now in NYC I actually suffer less, but I get winked at, looked up and down and given the thumbs up sign or comments like “Mama I want to take those tit-ties home and give them some good loving,” about once a week.

Often the whistles and comments come from males half my age. Inside I’m screaming good grief I could be your mother. But still it happens. And I can never quite shake the feeling of the fields in Utah and that morning so long ago. I have never talked back to my harasser. I want to be brave and confront them, but the fear of what they could do to retaliate is still too strong a fear inside of me.

– Beckie Weinheimer

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Share your story!

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Have you ever been whistled or honked at, commented on in a sexual way (positively or negatively), leered at, groped, masturbated in front of, followed, or assaulted while in public? If so, please share your story via e-mail and it will be added to this blog as a new entry. Visit the blog to learn more about the kinds of harassment women face and how they deal with it.

Note: In public, we are all susceptible to verbal, physical, and sexual attacks from complete strangers. People who are “different” or less “powerful” are particularly vulnerable to attacks by strangers. However, this site focuses primarily on the experiences of women being harassed in public by men.

In a society where politics and business are still male dominated, men make more money than women, and women are depicted in the media and advertisements simply as sexual objects, women as a category are less powerful than men as a category. Women are also vulnerable to physical or sexual assault by men and have a history of being men’s legal and sexual property. Thus, the dynamics of men harassing women on the street has a different underlying meaning than if a man harasses another man, a woman harasses another woman or a woman harasses a man. Also, the street harassment of women by men is further complicated by the different ways in which women perceive the harassment. Factors like how often they are harassed, the severity of the harassment, the race, class and age of the harasser compared to themselves, and issues of fear and safety all play a role in how women feel about and classify the harassment they receive. While surely no one would like an unknown man to grope, stalk or assault her, the circumstances and personal history of the woman will determine if she finds a man’s whistle or comments to be offensive or complimentary. Feel free to share your views on this blog.

– Administrator

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