For quite a while, I was constrained to accept that my view of what a woman had to endure in her daily life was limited to that of an outsider, and an outsider who wasn’t really around young women very much. While it was necessarily integrated into my commentary, it was from a distance, and perhaps I was missing too much to offer a meaningful view.
When Lawprof Nancy Leong wrote a post about an interesting experience, to show the “cumulative effect of street harassment,” I eagerly followed. Contrary to popular belief, I want to know more, not just confirm my bias.
One of my former classmates at Stanford Law School has started a new Tumblr — Not Your Fucking Sweetheart — that documents the ongoing problem of street harassment. Her immediate goal is to document a month of street harassment in her life in a major metropolitan area (in this case, Washington DC, which is notorious for street harassment).
The experiment went on for the month of August, which struck me as a good month for such an experiment as people would be out on the street, thus eliminating the possibility that harassment was reduced by bad weather. And I was prepared to accept Nancy’s assessment that Washington, D.C. was notorious.
The project is important for a number of reasons. First, it highlights that the harm of street harassment is not just an occasional one-off encounter, although that can be disturbing in and of itself. For many women, street harassment is a near-everyday occurrence. And it’s this cumulative effect that’s the greatest problem.
Granted, Nancy assumes the outcome, but then, she’s a woman and has experienced it, so I supposed she was allowed.
Second, the project highlights the impact of street harassment on women. Street harassment is a constant reminder to a woman that men are not only judging her body, but also that they feel completely entitled to force her to hear their assessment.
People are judged all the time by all people, so that’s hardly novel. But the “completely entitled to for her to hear” piece struck me as the sort of peculiar irrationality of feminist ideology. I was put off by this complaint as entirely facile and self-serving. No one gets to demand a world where others remain silent so they aren’t constrained to “hear” their unwanted utterances. That’s just goofy.
Third, the project highlights that the incidence of street harassment is not distributed evenly among all people. It’s well-documented that women experience harassment more than men.
It’s unclear how the project would do so, as it only notes the experience from the woman’s perspective.
Fourth, the project . . . directly and indirectly address [sic] the issue of why many men are not more aware that of the frequency and severity of street harassment.
It’s also unclear how this would be shown, but I was game to learn.
Finally, I wanted to say a few words about a common responses [sic] to street harassment: namely, that some women like it. I don’t doubt that some women are sufficiently insecure that a random stranger yelling a sexualized comment provides welcome validation.
It’s unfortunate that Nancy felt compelled to use an ad hominem attack to describe women (“suffiently insecure”) who don’t share her views. Tolerance appears to not only be a one-way street, but a very narrow one at that.
Still, perhaps my view was colored by my lack of understanding, and so I followed the tumblr, Not Your Fucking Sweetheart, for the month. And I learned a few things.
Sunday, August 3
Had a lovely walk home from yoga. I was talking to my mom when a man on a bike looked me up and down and said, “camel toe.” I screamed at him like an unhinged lunatic for a bit. And when I got home, I looked in the mirror to ensure he wasn’t merely being friendly and notifying me of a wardrobe malfunction. My top covers my crotch.
This was the first entry, and I am embarrassed to say that I had to ask someone what “camel toe” meant. It was, obviously, a sexualized observation and comment, though whether it constituted “harassment” isn’t clear. On the other hand, “I screamed at him like an unhinged lunatic for a bit” struck me as, well, a disturbing reaction, particularly given that she subsequently checked for a wardrobe malfunction, the cyclist perhaps being friendly and helpful. Scream first, check later? And if her top covered her crotch, why would he have said it anyway?
At mid-month:
Friday, August 15
I was harassed three times on my way to and from my therapist’s office.
1. A guy on the street implored me to smile. I don’t smile before coffee. Too bad for him.
2. A guy walking behind me felt the need to tell me that I looked, “gorgeous,” as I was going into my therapist’s building.
3. A guy smiled and honked his horn at me while I was walking home. I gave him the finger. He kept smiling.
One of the things I hoped to gain from this experiment was a better understanding of what women deemed “harassment.” To the extent there is a takeaway, it’s that any interaction, verbal or not, kind or not, pleasant or not, is harassment if it’s not invited. A guy implored her to smile? Those are some mean streets in notorious Washington, D.C.
The final entry:
Friday, August 22
I was buying myself some croissants and coffee at Heller’s Bakery in Mt. Pleasant. A man standing at the counter looked me up and down, not meeting my eyes, several times. When he finally made eye contact, I said, “Can I help you with something?” He said, “No.” And turned away from me. I was wearing shorts and a tank top.
Was this creepy? I suppose, if one is hypersensitive to the fact that someone looks at you when you’re out in public.
The tumblr is brief and important to read. Even with the effort to find a harasser under every rock, it appears that the author couldn’t come up with much, and failed to come up with a single instance of conduct that was threatening. Given how often I’ve been “informed” that street harassment, the sexual objectification of women is tantamount to sexual assault and rape, and given the purposes Nancy offered, all with an overwhelming bias that it would prove the cumulative impact of street harassment, and given that if it was going to happen anywhere, it would be Washington, D.C. in August, I was underwhelmed.
Smile? If that’s the “sexualized harassment” you’re complaining about, then you’re shooting blanks. And you might want to consider asking your therapist to work on your anger management.
Update: Via Gideon, there is another tumblr dedicated to the cause of “stop telling women to smile.” From what I can gather, telling women to smile is harassment because it objectifies them, as if they’re are nothing more than a female body inviting male direction when in public.
As Gideon notes, it’s a matter of perspective. Like most things
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I’m reasonably certain her therapist is located near McPherson Square. Why? Her description of a guy on the street imploring her to smile sounds exactly like what one of the panhandlers outside my office does every day.
His shtick is, when people ignore his requests for money, to beg them, “at least give me a smile”. It gets people’s attention and seems to result in people acknowledging him (which, it would seem, is the first step to separating them from some lucre). He spends part of the day outside the CVS/Cosi/Starbucks corner, and the rest making laps around the block and implores everyone – man, woman, black, white, short, tall, skinny, fat, republican or democrat – to give him a smile. When they do, he then asks if you’ve got some loose change.
He’s quite relentless about getting people to smile. He also has a laser-like focus on people he recognizes as they come down the block. Once you’ve chatted with him a bit, you’ll never be able to avoid him – he’ll see you coming his way and had over to meet you and ask for a smile.
But when you want to find misogyny and harassment, that’s what you find. I have no clue whether your guy is her guy, but regardless, this just doesn’t make the cut of harassment.
Here are some more great YouTube videos of a lady in Minneapolis talking to the people who cat call her on a daily basis. I know hyperlinks are not permitted, not sure how else to submit this to you and not sure if you even care 😉
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVTnOjyu7gxMCbh00aLS3gQ
Rules notwithstanding, I think it’s worthwhile to include the videos. I’m not sure how you come to say “daily basis,” but even so, it happens and so it’s worth recognizing. So are these criminals? Is this tantamount to rape? How many years in prison should they get for being annoying?
One aside on the videos: I only watched a couple, but I think she may be misconstruing panhandlers for sexual harassment.
When annoying becomes criminal, the streets will be deserted.
For what it’s worth, I suffer from “Resting Bitch Face” syndrome, which is to say that when I’m alone and minding my own business, I don’t necessary look friendly and cheerful. I have lost track of the number of people who have implored me, encouraged me, ordered me, or yelled at me to smile.
It’s not the one single guy encouraging me to smile; it’s the relentless need of strangers to inform me that I need to change my face/expression to better suit them.
Do you attribute it to sexual harassment and misogyny, or just too many annoying people who think it’s their job to that frown upside down?
That’s a good question, for which I don’t have a definite answer. I wish I did.
On several occasions, it was obviously the first step in a pick up routine; the demand was followed up by other comments common to the pick up artists’ genre. (They make repeated negative comments so that you will try harder to achieve positive comments, and it’s easy to lose sight – in the heat of the moment – that you don’t actually care one white about these strangers because, hey, momma’s always taught you to be a good girl and somehow you’re failing that, and … )
On other occasions it was people trying to make a sale, and if they can make you change one behaviour, they can better make you change others. (Like the decision to buy something, or donate to a panhandler.)
But the weird thing is that I work in a male dominated field and *none* of my male coworkers ever recall these comments. Its possible, I suppose, that they are confident enough that the comments just don’t register. It’s also possible that the comments are only ever phrased as a polite suggestion or as a way to start a sale. I don’t know.
I don’t mind the ones who encourage politely so much, but the others are *creepy*, and I find myself routinely checking for a safe exit just in case because based on prior experience I clearly cannot accurately predict what a creepy man (and why is it almost always men, anyways?) will do.
(Similarly, why is it okay to bother me when I’m reading a book out in public, whether on the bus or at a bus stop? Especially since the response to “I’m sorry, I’m reading.” is often a long confusing harangue?)
I’m not a lawyer, by the way, just a regular reader, so I am not at all certain about the legal aspects. But you seemed curious about the female perspective.
I am sincerely curious about the female perspective. Some see misogyny in everything, which I dismiss. I think you’ve hit on a couple of key points:
1. Yes, males do it far more than women, which I think is attributable to their more aggressive nature and socialization.
2. Yes, it’s annoying. I’m annoyed when panhandlers hit me up, not so much because they do as because it happens with such frequency in the City. They rarely tell me I have a cute butt, however.
3. I can understand why, due to innate physical characteristics, a woman would feel more threatened by it than a man. To me, it’s a nonevent. I do not, however, acknowledge that the sense of vulnerability is something the other person causes, so much as one’s perception about their own vulnerability.
4. I still don’t see it as more than ordinary human annoyance. We’re all annoyed at unwanted intrusions into our private worlds. We get annoyed at a great many things. Nobody promised us a life without petty annoyances.
5. Just because street interactions happen more frequently to women, and are initiated more frequently by men, doesn’t make it “sexual harassment,” but fairly pedestrian behavior.
If this tumblr is an example, it’s remarkably trivial. And contrary to the demands of feminists that what I characterize as “pedestrian behavior” that men must change to accommodate how women feel, my reaction is “meh.” I don’t want to be more feminine. I don’t like shoes or Kardashians, and I do like bacon and football. And most importantly, I like being a guy and doing guy stuff.
I actually agree that the events described on that tumblr are mostly fairly trivial sounding – although I will qualify that agreement by mentioning that context is everything, and we don’t know the veracity of the people posting.
I was struck by the persons who pointed out that they stayed home to avoid harassment. And the one comment that really struck home was by a poster who commented that it didn’t really happen *every* day, but when it did, it stayed with her for days.
Personally, I think the people doing the commenting – usually but not always – are jerks. Having been forced to pay more attention to social cues, I no longer trust people blithely, and so when a person starts invading my personal space or making personal comments – especially when this person is a stranger or I am clearly busy doing something I wish to do, and there is no present emergency – I immediately switch to evaluating my safety, my escape routes, etc. Very often, I will respond politely *while desperately looking for a way out* because politeness may result in him not going batshit crazy until *after* I’ve escaped. (I note that responing “rudely” or “curtly” very often results in him raising his voice and becoming verbally aggressive. Or more aggressive, as the case may be. I also note that the flight response was trained in to me by prior social interactions, rather than being a result of my nature, based on my childhood. I know the plurel of anecdote is not data, but I’m offering my perspective because it strikes me as vaguely relevant.)
But yours is a lawyerly blog, and a lawyerly space, so as I understand it the question is not one of comfort, but of legal behaviour. The comments are legal; yay for the First amendment. But they also serve to make us uncomfortable, and sadly, far too often the whole purpose of the comments seems to be to make us uncomfortable. And so we search for a label, something we can call this behaviour. And we’re back to whether this behaviour is misogynistic or harassing in basis. And there’s the rub; the sociopaths hide amongst the herd of jerks, and we have no way of telling them apart.
(Am I typing too much? I keep wanting to expand on this; it’s so rare that a man actually seems to want to understand and be willing to listen.)
I think one of the key reasons that this problem is so often “invisible” is the default female reaction of politeness, of attempting to assuage the other person that they will do no harm (or no further harm, if we start adding in PTSD etc …).
And for the record, I enjoy football, although not the North American version of bacon. Women can enjoy those too. 🙂
The sociopaths are everywhere. It’s one of their magic powers. Thanks for helping me to understand better.
I read this post this early morning and was composing a reply in my head all day. But when I got back to the computer, Eowyn had said almost everything I wanted to say, and much better perhaps than I could have. My lifetime’s experiences are so close to those outlined by Eowyn that it’s almost uncanny. And I too have worked most of my professional life in male-dominated fields. I only comment now to add weight to Eowyn’s words since you seem sincerely interested.
Thank you. I appreciate your throwing your weight behind Eowyn.
~~~And when I got home, I looked in the mirror to ensure he wasn’t merely being friendly and notifying me of a wardrobe malfunction. ~~~
Just checking in here but curious minds need to know. Nancy is being covertly sarcastic with the above sentence correct?
If not…I don’t even think Fubar will be able to bring clarity to my troubled mind.
P.S. Is it just me or does the thought of the esteemed one pondering who he should consult for the slang definition
of the phrase “camel toe” strike anyone else as endearing and cute? I can just see him now, looking like a fifty something year old toddler in his pajamas awkwardly approaching a trusted source for clarity. And just as he tries to pat down an untamed holiday cowlick for the third time on the back of his skull he gets the the information he was seeking and at long last he is at peace and in awe of the universe simultaneously for the first time in his life.
That wasn’t Nancy, but her classmate from Stanford. That’s the law school on the left coast.
Interesting…
If my memory serves me correctly Stanford is also where the [T = (800 x mJT) / 4] formula originated from.
Some have said the above formula which aired on national television is the most awkwardly high-brow dick joke to ever to be televised.
However, I have heard that ever since they started working on the Sentencing-o-Matic 100 algorithm Stanford has become a very serious place.
There have been a few set backs though. Just last week a few brave Stanford students crossed the bridge to do some research in Oakland and they were nearly beaten to death by some Berkeley students that weren’t even wearing shoes.
It is indeed a very perplexing and troubling world we live in but it seems to me more speech from individual women alone is not going to fix this whole unwanted and unsolicited catcall and gazing mess.
Even if the students of Stanford could create a catcall and unwanted gaze retort generator to divert or at least shame the millions of creepers out there, more is needed to silence the creepers once and for all and banish them to their bedrooms to masturbate to celebrity sex tapes before they even consider setting foot in public again.
Yes, I think things are definitely going to need to be notched up a few levels, a few twit feeds and blogs are not going to get the job done.
Some serious guerrilla street theater in conjunction with close broadcast air and sword wielding infantry support from the comedic sitcom writers guild is needed. Perhaps then and only then will society once and for all be able to stomp out not only the speech and gazes of mean people but to reprogram the very nature of their thoughts.
In the meantime I think I will get to work on figuring out a way to imbed the catcall and unwanted gaze retort generator app into a rechargeable canister of mace while pondering a children’s book to address the delicate subject matter of why it is mean people talk too much in public but don’t have the courage to become nudists.
Another female imput here. My experience is from San Francisco, so may not have much bearing on D.C., but guys saying things in the street never bothered me. I took the comments as either a prelude to being panhandled or a compliment, and I am definitely NOT insecure about my body image. I am quite pretty and I know it. I am also a proud naturist and not at all body shy. I also haven’t felt the need to “check for exits” unless I’m in a secluded, bad place like a dark alley at 2 am.
What I have noticed, is that a large number of my female friends and acquaintances are looking to be offended, to gain some sort of victim cred points I guess–where do you turn those in and what’s the prize?– so it wouldn’t matter what was said or by whom. I do know that modern feminists embarrass me as a female individualist. I thought we were after equality of opportunity, not a return to the perfectly Victorian notion of men guarding their speech and actions so as to shield our “delicate” sensibilities. I know, I probably suffer from false consciousness or some clap-trap like that and should turn in my woman card.
So you’re an “old school” feminist? Me too.
I like my woman card; I’m keeping it. Like you I’m not insecure, but I think I am somewhat more cautious.
That being said, I totally agree that there is a victim cred movement; I just don’t think it covers all cases and all circumstances. Just as there are sociopaths hidden in the crowds, there as also real victims hidden behind all those who want victim cred. One of the things I grieve for in the USA is the general pathology of worshipping victimhood.
As a self-identified feminist, I accept that people have the right to be jerks. I wish they weren’t, and will go out of my way to avoid them. But avoiding them is my choice, not theirs, to make.
This is true for everyone. And if it was a crime to be a jerk, I’m not sure any of us wouldn’t be convicted.
I think she did the survey because she is an inveterate attenton-seeker and this serves as a way to show everyone how much men chase her. She’s just skiting.
I won’t speak to her motives, but what seems to be a pervasive characteristic is the narcissistic view of the world. Her feelings dictate the characterization (and perhaps motive) of everyone she comes into contact with. If other people’s conduct doesn’t meet with her approval, they are evil rather than benign and annoying to her. And this justifies her behaving like a shrieking nutjob toward others.
I doubt many of the SJ readers have graduated high school in the past 10 years, so this is probably a little different insight, but to pretend like this mundane “street harassment” described above only happens to women, or even more frequently than men, is false. Young men simply don’t complain about it as much, and most enjoy the attention. While it happens much less frequently when actually walking down the street and nearly always while driving (unlike men, I guess women normally do their “street harassment” while driving with their girlfriends?), I am “wooooo’d” at, flirted with at lights, kissed at, winked at, have phone numbers held up or balled up and thrown through my window, or called sexy (and I’m not even attractive) on at least a weekly basis during the summer, and have been mooned and even been flashed more times than I can count since I started driving. Does this bother me? Hells no, but to act like men are just pigs and women don’t do that sort of stuff is a big pile of steaming, unadulterated BS – this is something every single person under 30 that I know regularly experiences. I can’t speak for people older than that, but this is universal among young people.
And it’s not even while I am alone or with other guys – just last week when I was laying by the pool reading NatGeo with my fiancee, a group of 3 younger girls were staring at me and blowing kisses and giggling every time my fiancee looked down at her book. Maybe women grow out of it by the time they hit 30 and men don’t, but women do just as much piggish stuff as men do.
Sure, women may feel more threatened by it in general, but that mid-50’s excessively drunk and mentally unstable can/bottle collecting homeless woman who screamed at me, quote: “I’ll bite your dick off and fuck myself with it if you touch my cans” at the beginning of this summer while I was taking out the recycling was pretty threatening too.
Yeah, that doesn’t happen to me that much. And I’m not that attractive either. I must be giving off that unapproachable vibe.
This comic from Dork Tower is about a young lady at a comics convention, and oh my lord, I’ve been her. Having been her, repeatedly, I offer this is an explanation of sorts as to why some women are … perennially aggravated by jerkish comments.
What’s ironic about this is how the “geek guys” are treated by the non-geeks guys.
Jerks! They’re everywhere!
(Also math problems. Sigh. I needed an abacus to post today.)