Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

The issue is disrespect for women, not “compliments” about our looks

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I’ve read several important blog post this week that mention street harassment, from Jos’s Feminsiting post, “On violence, hate and gender non-conformity” to Mychal Denzel Smith’s post on Roots, “Growing Pains of a Male Feminist.”

Yesterday on Womanist Musings, JuJuBe wrote, “The Street Harassment Experience in a Fat Body” about how she envies women who experience “complimentary” street harassment because the street harassment she experiences is negative, like being called fat.

Though I have some issues with what she said, I’m glad she wrote it because way too often the harassment we hear about is the “complimentary” crap, the whistling, the “hey baby,” the “nice ass” comments. One of the reasons I get annoyed when I see an article supposedly about street harassment only talk about “catcalls” is because that term encompasses the “complimentary” type of harassment while ignoring all the rest.

Overall, I think there is still a big misconception that street harassment is only “compliments” that attractive women don’t want to hear. Stock photos that accompany street harassment articles reinforce this as do cartoons, commercials, and tv shows.

But street harassment is any harassment that happens because of gender and it’s harassment that 80-100% of women (cis and trans) have experienced at least a few times.

Some forms of street harassment are meant to punish/humiliate women who meet conventional beauty standards and gender performance for doing so and other forms are meant to punish/humiliate women who don’t for not. It’s all similar; it’s all a way for men to exert control over women and force their opinion on women when it’s not solicited.

This is an excerpt from my book when I talk about this issue:

In their article “Beauty Is the Beast: Psychological Effects of the Pursuit of the Perfect Female Body,” Elayne A. Saltzberg and Joan C. Chrisler, wrote that “street harassers put women ‘in their place’ by commenting loudly on their beauty or lack of it. Beauty norms limit the opportunities of women who can’t or won’t meet them.”[i] Street harassment can shock women into remembering that they exist “to be sexually enjoyed by men.”[ii] When men say “mmm-mmm” at women’s butts or tell women they are fat cows, they remind women how some men and how society in general value them, and they are forced to see themselves as men see them.[iii] Thus, a woman who is conventionally beautiful is reminded of her value when men harass her “positively.” One of my 2008 online survey respondents said when answering 2009 follow-up questions, “Sometimes I wish I was fat or ugly so that I would not be sexualized by strangers. But then I remember that they would instead taunt me for being unattractive and not sexually pleasing to them.”

She is right, many women who are not conventionally beautiful are reminded that they are “undesirable” despite their other qualities when men harass them with negative comments or when they see men harass “pretty” women but not them

So while I’m glad that the Womanist Musing post is bringing more attention to all of the types of harassment that happen, I’m also disappointed in it and I’ll discuss two reasons why.

First, the author, just like a lot of people who talk about street harassment, ignores how frequently there is an underlying threat of rape/gender violence behind street harassment, “complimentary” or not. Too many people ignore how often the harassing men turn violent – if they weren’t already violent to begin with – in what they say or do to the woman. The “Hey baby” can turn into “Stupid ugly bitch” in a matter of seconds. Women may find themselves suddenly being chased or being hit with garbage by their harassers. We just don’t know what will happen.

An extremely beautiful woman I know routinely faces “complimentary” street harassment. Do you know what else has happened to her? In public places, men have groped her, hit her, followed her, and at a bar, given her a roofie. She’s been hospitalized twice because of panic attacks from the severe harassment.

And that’s supposed to be enviable?

The second reason I’m disappointed is that her post reinforces the societal notion that women’s value is our looks. Practically from day one we receive messages that our most important achievement in life is to be pretty and desired by men (no matter our sexual orientation). Princesses are beautiful and all girls are supposed to want to be princesses. Boys are smart, girls are pretty. Actresses, singers, models and sex workers often make more money than women in most occupations where looks aren’t one of the job criteria.

This message that women’s looks are our value is reinforced on the streets. We’re supposed to like and wish for strange men to comment on our appearance. Clearly, a lot of women have internalized that. And sadly, whether they mean to or not, when they voice support for that internalization, they contribute to why street harassment is dismissed as a problem: they’re portraying it as a compliment.  That’s not helpful.

What I hope is that all women will learn about types of street harassment experiences they don’t have (and of course that men will learn about all types) to better understand the larger issue and how it’s all about gender inequality, gender violence, and patriarchy. Learn how racism, homophobia, classism, transphobia, ableism, and fat-hating can make different women have different experiences. I cover all of these issues in my book (particularly in chapters 2 and 3) and you can read a range of women’s stories illustrating these experiences on my blog.

No form of street harassment is a compliment; otherwise it wouldn’t be called harassment. There is a time and place for genuine compliments between strangers and the street can be one of those places, but the complimenter needs to make sure that it’s consensual first and that it’s not being done in a way that reinforces the disproportionate value society places on women’s looks.

And finally, let’s all remember that most men do not have to deal with unsolicited comments about their appearance as they walk down the street because they are respected enough to be left alone. And when they do hear comments, they rarely fear rape or attack the way many women do. Women completely veiled or very modestly dressed in countries like Yemen or India face some of the highest rates of street harassment because, when it comes down to it, the issue is disrespect for women, not “compliments” about our looks.

[i] Elayne A. Saltzberg and Joan C. Chrisler, “Beauty Is the Beast: Psychological Effects of the Pursuit of the Perfect Female Body,” in Women: A Feminist Perspective, Fifth Edition, ed. Jo Freeman (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995), 312.

[ii] Norma Anne Oshynko, “No Safe Place: The Legal Regulation of Street Harassment,” Thesis for Masters of Law in Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, 2002, 15.

[iii] Margaret T. Gordon and Stephanie Riger, The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 6; see also Oshynko, 15–16.

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I don’t take orders from strangers

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Well, I now have a harassment story from Vancouver. I was walking down Commercial Drive yesterday. I walked past a group of men who looked like bikers. One of them shouted at me to ‘smile!’ I know that isn’t as extreme as many of the other stories on this blog, but it really pissed me off. I mean, what gives this guy the right to order me to change my facial expression for his amusement? Don’t I have the right to walk down the street with a neutral expression on my face without being ordered to appease the menfolk?

I shot him a glare. He responded by telling me my dress was beautiful. I just kept on walking. I wanted to tell him off, but I didn’t want to risk a confrontation with ten big guys. I’m pretty tough, but I just wasn’t interested in putting myself in danger to try and teach this guy how to respect women. Gross.

– Margaret

Location: Vancouver, BC

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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Connections between street harassment and sex work

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“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.

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So, I’m pretty? That doesn’t oblige me to sleep with you.

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This piece by Amelia Wells is cross-posted with permission.

Chatting with my step-dad in the study the other day, I started flicking through his guides to Andalucia, Catalonia and Barcelona. A photo of the Placa De Catalunya popped out of me, the fountain square at the head of La Rambla, Barcelona’s most interesting street, and I remembered sitting down in the shade, checking out the crowd, enjoying resting my legs, when an elderly gentleman came and sat beside me.

The elderly gentleman in Barcelona inquired if I was cold and pointed to my goosebumps. ‘I’m fine, I have a jumper’ I responded/mimed. Then he began to rub me. Now, I am not going to move from my spot because someone decides it’s okay to fucking touch me. I laughingly asked him to stop. He did for a bit, then invited me back to his piso (flat) to get warm. ‘No, I have a jumper, thank you.’ Again with the rubbing. With less laughter this time, I asked him to stop. Bedamned if I was going to move or put my jumper just because this guy wouldn’t stop touching me. I want to sit here, jumperless and goosepimply and NOT BE HARRASSED. Thanks. Eventually, I left. Annoyed and frustrated and giving the evil eye to every man I saw after that.

Now, in Madrid I had been reading in some park or other when an elderly gentleman approached me, asked me if I was a tourist, asked my name, asked how I liked Madrid, and I answered him in halting Spanish. We had the same name! We bonded! He was incredibly polite and I really enjoyed my interaction with him. As he rose to leave, I stood also, we did the cheek kissy thing and both left with a better opinion of the respective age groups involved.

Later in Barcelona, perhaps another day, a man came up to me in the street of an evening and told me I was pretty. ‘I know’ I replied. ‘Come for a drink with me?’ No, I have to meet my friends. (I hate telling this lie. If you rape/murder me, PEOPLE WILL KNOW! I’d rather be able to say “I’m alone. Leave me alone.” and trust that people are good people.) He repeats that I’m pretty, or beautiful, or something about my eyes and takes my hands. Firmly. In his. No, I reply. I have to meet people. I have to be somewhere. I don’t want to go for a drink with you. Please, let go of me. ‘Your friends can wait! This is more important! You’re so pretty!’ DUDE. You haven’t even asked my name. You know nothing about my interests. Sure, we might realise that we’re soulmates over a drink in a dimly lit bar, but since you’re asking me out solely on the basis of my looks, I’m really doubting that we’ll find a lot to talk about. I could chat with you about veganism and respecting everybody regardless of their looks, body size, political leanings or skin colour? I’m not suggesting that I don’t respect you, but I really don’t want to go and have a drink with a stranger, in a strange city who WON’T LET GO OF MY HANDS WHEN I ASK HIM TO. ‘But you’re so pretty!’ I KNOW.

Telling me that I’m pretty, or beautiful doesn’t make me go swoony on the inside. Even when people I actually like and respect tell me so. I appreciate that they want to tell me something nice, but my looks are completely incidental to WHO I AM. I was born this way, I grew up with this face and body and I did not make it in this fashion in order to lure men into my pants. I would far rather be conversed with, had my opinions discussed and generally, have my mind acknowledged.

Dancing in a club in England a couple of months ago with my friend Bex, a young, drunk, guy approached us and began enthusing about my dancing. I dance exactly the way I feel and just completely let myself go, for my pleasure. I love moving my body to dubstep, and the way the beat flows through me…So, I completely dance for myself. I appreciate it when people appreciate that because I hope that it inspires other people to not worry about what other people think of them on the dancefloor. Anyway, this chap seemed to believe that telling me I was sexy and amazing at dancing should have elicited more of a response from me than ‘Thanks.’ Possibly ‘Oh my god, nobody has ever been as nice about me as you have, of course I will accompany to your bedroom this moment’?

These are all fairly minor events but they each illustrate this assumption that men believe it is okay for them to touch a woman, to grip her hands, to pressure her into going with them to wherever they want to go. This sort of mentality, that of control, is the first step, the beginnings of the idea that men should be able to tell women what to do, they should be allowed sex, they should have access to women’s bodies whenever they want. The boy in the club didn’t touch me, but he sure expected me to be a lot more grateful about the fact that he had noticed me to compliment. These assumptions on the part of men that all they have to do is make a nicety and they can take whatever they want PISSES ME THE FUCK OFF.

This shit is reinforced in every woman’s magazine and men’s magazine and advert for make-up and teevee show and film and book and song I’ve ever read. It’s ALL ABOUT HOW BEAUTIFUL THE WOMAN IS and as soon as the man ‘realises’ or ‘acknowledges’ that to the woman ‘Oh, I find your eyes so mesmerising’ then the woman’s belly goes gooey and they fall into bed having realised their true love for each other.

It is SO INGRAINED that complimenting someone on their looks, clothes, hair is important, or matters, that even writing this I’m thinking ‘Well, surely it’s cool when one of your friends says that you look nice today’. But, what the fuck does it matter how you look? On any level. Ever. Really? I would absolutely so much rather be complimented on my style of discussion, on my passion for pointing shit like this out, on the way I use language, anything that I’ve actually WORKED HARD ON or MEANS SOMETHING TO ME. I would rather be known and understood before being complimented. I think my favourite single compliment ever as been ‘I like the way your brain works’ from someone I had ranted at in great detail about the injustices in the world and spent some serious amounts of time with, who knew me. And he didn’t even say it to get into my pants.

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An Ugly Girl's Story*

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I am fat & considered very unattractive. I am often told that I’m a dog/ugly/cow/pig/barked & oinked at by strange men in public.

Two men recently followed behind me on the street for several blocks, loudly discussing what they would have to do in order to make me “f***able” (ie. put a bag over my head, get me to go to a plastic surgeon, etc.)

I try very hard not to take these experiences to heart but this recent one was very disturbing. I realized that I have been avoiding crowded public areas because of this. It also reinforces my feeling that despite my achievements & personality, in this world what really matters is my outward appearance.

– anonymous

Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

*Note, the author of this post wrote the title, too. I think what’s ugly is the behavior of the harassing men!
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