marilyn french Archives | Stop Street Harassment

Connections between street harassment and sex work

July 26, 2010 By HKearl

“How much?”

“I’ll give you $200”

These are comments that women from my 2008 street harassment survey have heard from men while walking down the street, waiting for the bus, or riding the subway. Because they were just trying to go about their day in peace, they were upset by the intrusion and also insulted by the presumption that complete access to their body could be bought on the spot.

My former college roommate, who is from Salt Lake City, sent me an interesting article from the Salt Lake Tribune that made me think about these stories and the connections between street harassment and street walking. The article looks at how women who are not sex workers, but who live in an area where there are many are constantly solicited when they’re walking places. Because of a crackdown on the sex industry, sex workers wear clothes that help them blend in with everyone else, making it hard for customers to distinguish them from other women. Thus any woman is fair game.

As the article suggests, there are several similarities and connections between street harassment and the sex industry, particularly female prostitution, and because it’s quite complex, I’ll only touch on two of them.

The first connection is that there’s a presumption that men should have access to women’s bodies. Just like some customers may feel that because they’ve paid money, they have the right to a sex workers’ body (rape and other violence is not that uncommon in the sex industry), there are men in public places who feel the same way about any woman they see. It’s their right as a man to stare, say, and do what they want: women are there to be consumed. And so they openly talk about women’s body parts, demand sexual favors, describe sex acts they want to engage in, leer, follow, and grab. Women’s desire to be left alone or to have autonomy over how their body is used or viewed is inconsequential.

Sadly, men’s access to women’s bodies is ancient history. From Marilyn French’s book From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, I learned that the first record of prostitution dates back to when Sumarian priests forced slave women to be sexually used by men who paid the priests. (Today many prostitutes continue to be used as an object in a financial transaction between two men: a customer and the pimp.) For other women, fathers or other male members of authority historically—and in some cultures still do—sold off their daughters to men through a dowry system. A daughter’s opinion usually was not sought and was not considered. Marriage was a financial transaction and her body was a commodity for men.

While of course women have always been resilient and have found ways to rebel and to empower themselves in these contexts, the framework and systems are still bleak and they continue to impact today’s societal view of women’s bodies.

The second connection is a blatant culture of disrespect for women. Street harassment is a manifestation of this disrespect because it shows that the harassing men don’t care about a woman’s right to public space, to her own thoughts, and to her desire to feel safe. They don’t care if she’s having a bad day, puzzling through a problem, or late for work. They interrupt, scare, annoy, and anger women anyway. But that disrespect is even more intense when it comes to female sex workers.

There’s a societal attitude that it’s okay to treat sex workers badly, assault them, and even murder them (like serial killers who only murder sex workers). Some people see the life of a sex worker as worth less than the life of a “respectable” woman (which is an outrage). To treat someone “like a slut” means to treat them without respect. In the GGE documentary “Hey…Shorty,” for example, when the documentarian asks an older man why he harasses women, he says something along the lines of how if he sees girls dressed “like sluts,” he’s going to treat them like sluts. As his comment reflects, an attitude of disrespect for sex workers means it’s okay to harass women who “look” or “act” like one. This attitude also contributes to the persistent victim-blaming of harassment and sexual assault victims based on their appearance.

And as a related side note, what always gets me about the disrespectful treatment of sex workers is the fact that so many are not there by choice (but power to those who are and who enjoy their work). Meaning, growing up that was not the job they wanted to have. Two years ago at my training to become an online hotline volunteer for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network I learned that an overwhelming percentage of sex workers are survivors of incest, sexual abuse, child abuse, and are runaways who need to find a way to survive and, in a society where sex is a commodity, they know one way they can make some money. Even those who enter it to feed a drug addiction may be addicted to drugs as a way of self medicating from trauma. And of course the work of organizations like the Polaris Project reminds us how many women, even in the US, are not in the industry by any semblance of choice. But yet, the cultural consensus is that they are people we can disrespect, make fun of, and vilify? How messed up is that?! (And I know the illegalization of their work does not help matters.)

There is much more to this issue that I’m just not going to attempt in a blog post, though, as always, I welcome comments from those who want to tackle other aspects or delve deeper into these.

So I’ll conclude by saying we need to do everything we can to help build a society where there is respect for ALL women and where women have control over their sexuality. We can refuse to put down sex workers and not call women we don’t like “sluts” or “whores.” We can stop victim blaming women for the violence they experience. And we can trust women to have ownership over their bodies and work to ensure they have control over who has access to their bodies and when.

An underlying fear of rape

November 25, 2009 By HKearl

“A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent.” – Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

Today is day one of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence. In commemoration, I want to briefly touch on the direct connection between gender violence and street harassment (I explore it in depth in my forthcoming book on street harassment).

Most women worry about rape, particularly when they are alone. For example, in their book The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape, Margaret T. Gordon and Stephanie Riger found that one-third of the women they studied reported worrying at least once a month about being raped. A third of the women said that their fear of rape is ‘part of the background’ of their lives and ‘one of those things that’s always there.’ Another third claimed they never worried about rape but still reported taking precautions, unconsciously or consciously, to try to avoid being raped.

Women fear stranger rape the most. While women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by people they know than by strangers, 27 percent of reported rapes are perpetrated by strangers (see RAINN stats). Add to this reality the fact that male stranger-perpetrated rapes are the type we hear about the most in the news and see on tv shows or movies (see The Female Fear) and they are the type that tend to be random, and it is no wonder women fear them more.

The fear of strange rape impacts how women feel in public. A study by Canadian sociologists Ross MacMillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh of over 12,000 Canadian women showed that stranger harassment and assault has a more consistent and significant impact on women’s fears in public than non-stranger harassment and assault. This fear significantly reduces women’s perceptions of safety while walking alone at night, using public transportation, walking alone in a parking garage, and while home alone at night (p 315, 319).

Women’s fear of stranger harassment and assault came up many times in stories written by women who took my 2008 informal online survey, which I conducted for my book on street harassment. For example, one woman wrote:

“I always feel uncomfortable when I am out alone at night in my neighborhood. As every man walks past me, I silently evaluate how likely he is to rape me and what I would do if that happened. I always notice how many people are around, what their gender is, etc.”

Also contributing to women’s fears of stranger assault is the fact that rapists don’t wear signs. Marilyn French wrote in The War Against Women, “Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor – age, dress, or color – distinguishes a man who will harm a woman for one who will not” (197).

Consequently, women do not know which man who approaches her in public is a threat. Cynthia Grant Bowman, author of “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women,” found that when women discussed their feelings about street harassment, they usually cited their fear of rape. In her book Back Off! how to confront and stop sexual harassment and harassers, Martha Langelan wrote that for women, an underlying tension is always wondering how far the harasser will go, will he become violent? (p 41) In the conclusion to Gardner’s book Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment she wrote that “it is impossible to state too strongly how constant the theme of fear was” among the nearly 300 women she interviewed in Indianapolis regarding male harassment (p 240).

This underlying fear of rape is particularly acute in several circumstances:

if the woman is alone
if the man approaches the woman in an isolated area
if it is dark out
if the man is larger than the woman is or is otherwise in a position of power (for example in a car while she is on foot)
if there are several men versus one woman
if the woman has been assaulted or seriously harassed in the past
if the woman knows that another woman has been raped or assaulted in the area

Even if the man has innocent intentions, a woman does not know that and may be wary, particularly in the circumstances outlined above. (Incidentally, most men harass women when women are alone and may do so in packs, so already they are creating a circumstance where women are more fearful.)

Men, this is the reality that many women live in. As it relates to how you interact with women in public, try not to approach or talk to a woman who is alone (or in the other circumstances listed above). Also, be respectful of her as a person. She may be occupied or in a hurry and have no desire to talk to strangers so make sure approaching her is absolutely necessary before you do so (such as to ask directions). If you are trying to “pick her up,” note that not all women are interested in men, many women are already in a relationship, and many of the remaining women are wary about giving out information to complete strangers they see on the street. So please consider not doing so (and I’m not talking about bars or clubs but places like streets, bus stops, subway cars, grocery stores, and malls). And if you do try to pick her up and she ignores you or does not agree to go out with you etc, do not call her a bitch or a ho or stuck up.

Please see “How to Talk to Women in Public” (which includes a link to the most excellent blog post on Shapely Prose, “Schrodinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced”) for more.

On other days during the 16 Days, I will write on this year’s theme, Commit, Act, Demand: We CAN End Violence Against Women!, about the ways we can work to end male harassment and assault of women strangers in public spaces.

Neighborhood Protectors

August 28, 2009 By HKearl

The Philadelphia Daily News reported that last week in Philadelphia, PA, a young woman had been waiting at a bus stop to go to work when a man approached her, demanded her purse and cell phone at gun point, then forced her into a nearby alley and sexually assaulted her. When he showed up in her neighborhood again, the young woman spotted him and started yelling, “He raped me! He raped me!” as she chased him down. Her neighbors joined in the chase and helped detain the man until the police arrived. Neighbors interviewed for the article said:

“I got a daughter myself – I hope someone would do the same for my kid,” and another one said that sexual assaults aren’t a crime anybody takes lightly in the neighborhood. “Everybody is like family around here and that’s one thing we don’t play,” he said. “That’s the crazy stuff out here.”

The article notes that something similar happened in Philadelphia earlier this summer when neighbors detained a man who raped an 11-year old girl (when she was on her way to school) until the police arrived.

Too often survivors of sexual assault (both female and male) are not believed so I am glad these neighbors took the complaints seriously and made sure the men could not escape until police arrived.

These stories remind me of something I read a few days ago in Marilyn French’s book From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World (volume 1). In the Intro, she wrote about how 1000s of years ago, most people lived in matricentries, meaning families were centered around the mothers (in part because they didn’t completely understand men’s roles in procreation). Women used land and passed it on to their daughters while men migrated from other clans to mate with them. Children were named for their mothers and stayed with their mothers until they were grown and then usually stayed nearby much of the time.

She writes, “Nor, in such societies, could men abuse their wives, who were surrounded by family members who would protect them” (French, 8). A woman’s family and community helped keep her safe in general. But then, in time, men better realized their role in procreation and started taking women away from their families in an effort to control their reproduction and ensure paternity, and that’s when acts of violence against women seemed to start.

I like this idea of neighbors/community/family as protectors, though it’s not always possible, especially when, in our society today, there is so much abuse within those relationships. I think the Philadelphia stories and French’s book also speak to the importance of bystander intervention by men and women – both to intercede and prevent harassment and assault from occurring in the first place and to hold harassers/assaulters accountable for their actions. Being better about intervening and becoming protectors for those in our neighborhood is something we can all try to do.