Ways Not To Talk To Women
In the same vein as this post on how not to strike up conversations with women, I would like to say:
Dear Creepy Asian-Fetishist Limo Driver,
YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GET A WOMAN INTO YOUR CAR BY SAYING, “I’LL GIVE YOU A RIDE FOR FREE BECAUSE YOU’RE A PRETTY ASIAN, LADY.”
Do you want to know what response your come-on actually produces? This mental chain:
- Ew, what a creep.
- Ew, way to reduce me to my ethnic phenotype and Western fantasies about exotic Asian sex kittens.
- Ew, way to comment on my body and looks and make me feel extremely uncomfortable, whereas previously I had felt confident in my body and gorgeous and happy to be dressed up for my own pleasure.
- Ew, no way am I getting into a car with you, with no guarantee that you’ll keep your hands off and drop me off where I ask, rather than locking the doors and assaulting me, or stalking me around my apartment building once you know where that is.
This limo driver has harassed me twice now, with the result that I no longer try to catch a cab home after the symphony or the opera, because I know that he’s there and that if he sees me without C, he’ll harass me and he won’t take “no” or “leave me alone” for an answer. He’s the reason that I leave out the front door of the opera house and hurry across the street to the bus stand, rather than going out the side exit that passes by the cab queue.
Dear Men,
Street harassment is not acceptable. If it hurts your feelings that you make me feel unsafe, consider that my feelings of fear, anger, and upset are probably way more intense than your temporary feeling of being miffed that you’re not entitled to the smiling attention of every woman in the world.
Sincerely,
PD
Ways Not To Strike Up A Conversation With A Woman
Dear Men-Who-Want-To-Talk-To-Women-But-Don’t-Know-How,
You’re interested in having a conversation with a woman, or at least that’s the impression I get from the way you yell and holler at me. (For the sake of this post, let’s pretend that I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt; let’s pretend that you’re not just catcalling and hollering as an act of aggression intended to establish your dominance over the women you’re harassing.) If you are in fact interested in having a conversation with a heretofore unknown woman without making her feel like a sex object rather than a human being with hopes, dreams, and aspirations, here are some tips on what not to do.
DO NOT:
Come up to a woman and say, “I’ll give you a ride for free, because you’re Asian.” [Man in question is a limo driver] When she says, “No, thanks, I’ll take the bus,” and walks away, follow her down the street and harass her with supposedly flattering comments about her hair, her dress, her ethnicity and repeated requests to get into your vehicle.
WHY NOT: It makes you annoying, because you didn’t leave her alone when she expressed disinterest. It makes you a disgusting, racist fetishist, because you’ve explicitly said that you’re interested on account of her race, and presumably whatever assumptions you’re making about it. It makes you creepy, because you won’t leave her alone and physically followed her. It makes you even creepier and potentially dangerous, because you won’t leave her alone and are intent on getting her into a vehicle that you are in control of.
Open with comments on the woman’s race or appearance, such as, “Hi, are you Chinese?” or, “Hi, gorgeous.”
WHY NOT: It implies that you are a creepy, racist Asian fetishist. It implies that all you see about her is her race. It reduces her down to her race, and there’s a probability of 1 that she’s heard the question before and is tired of complete strangers playing 20 Questions with her race and identity. Furthermore, even flattering comments about her appearance are problematic, because they’re nearly always implicitly sexist and support the assumptions that women are supposed to be decorative and attractive, and that they’re doing it for the observers, not for themselves. Their appearance is not for your evaluation.
Mutter, “Hey, sweetheart!” under your breath as you’re walking past a woman on the sidewalk.
WHY NOT: If you actually want to talk to her, muttering at her while you walk past and away is a bad strategy. It says, “I’m not really interested in talking to you, I just feel entitled to comment on you/your body in passing, as if you were an animal at the 4-H fair.” It also says, “I’m commenting on you–not to you, but on you–with no prior interaction, so the only thing I have to consider is your appearance, and I’m judging it, as if your appearance is for my sake, not yours.”
Call, “Hi,” at a woman in front of you as she’s walking through a subway station. Call, “Hi,” again after she ignores you. Call, “Can you hear me?” after she ignores you again.
WHY NOT: Calling at random people in the crowd is not a winning technique. Would you stop in the middle of your commute for some random person yelling at you, whom you’d never met before, who couldn’t be arsed to say, “Excuse me,” or come up to you or even enter your field of vision? Expecting her to stop, turn around, locate you, and engage in conversation with you after you’ve tried to call her to heel like an off-leash dog is sheer entitlement: a feeling of entitlement to her time and to her attention. It’s flat out rude, as well as stupid.
If you do want to have a conversation with a female stranger–I said, “have a conversation,” mind, not, “chat her up and hit on her”–and don’t want to come off as a sexist creep, here are some suggestions:
DO make sure you’re not bothering her. If she’s using her phone; listening to music; reading a book; looking at the bus map; or otherwise engaged, don’t interrupt her. Would you want to be interrupted by a complete stranger? No, not everyone minds it, but it’s better to err on the side of not being an ass. Bear in mind that some of these things are defensive techniques that some women have adopted specifically to keep asses away–”If I look busy/have headphones in/am buried in a book, maybe he’ll leave me the fuck alone.”
DO pay attention to her reactions. If she answers with monosyllabic words, keeps her attention focused on her book, doesn’t try to carry any of the conversation, or pointedly tells you that she’s married and waiting for her spouse (whether or not she’s got a ring on), politely end with something like, “It was nice to meet you,” or, “have a nice day,” and leave off.
DO introduce yourself or say, “Excuse me,” or find something relevant to say. For example, I was once holding a sack of pears at the farmers’ market, and a man asked if I’d tried the apples at his stand, and we had a conversation about stall fees at the various markets in SF. It was an interesting topic, and although I’d initially gotten weird vibes from him, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wanted to have an actual conversation.
Of course, then he ruined it by saying, “Actually, I only wanted to talk to you because you look so pretty.” In other words, he wasn’t actually interested in having a conversation with me about farmers’ markets–he was interested in getting my attention because he thought I had a hot bod, and for some reason, he thought I’d like to know that. Way to make me feel reduced to a sex object.
Actually, that’s been my experience multiple times in the past. For the guys who whine that they can’t have an innocent conversation with women because women will assume that they have ulterior motives, all I have to say is this: stop having ulterior motives. No guy who’s actually been interested in having an innocuous conversation with me has given me the creep vibes. We’ve had innocuous conversations that passed the time on the bus or in a coffee line. The only guys I get the annoying creep vibes from are the ones who inevitably indicate, whether by verbal or physical gesture, that it’s not a friendly conversation they’re after.
Sincerely,
PD
Harassment Log #1
Trigger warning: street harassment.
Following the advice of Atul Gawande, I am going to count something. Specifically, the number of times someone harasses me. Why? Because it interests me. After a while, the hollering, the objectification, and the slurs blend into a cloud of background noise, and I don’t like that. I want to know exactly how many times it happens, so I can know exactly what the price is for wanting to go about my life while female.
May 2009: (1 Mission) Too long ago to remember; the one that stands out most vividly for the creepiness and the fear I felt is one incident on a Saturday night, when I was walking to meet some friends at a club and a man walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction passed me, turned around, and followed me for half the block until I reached a busier street.
May 24, 2009: 2 Homophobic & racist slurs. (2 Mission)
July 17, 2009: 4 (2 Mission, 1 Embarcadero, 1 cab)
- 1 “Hey gorgeous” comment yelled at me on the way to BART. (Mission)
- 1 “Hey young lady” comment yelled at me on the way to BART. (Mission)
- 1 “You look nice” comment muttered in my face as the man brushed past me on the way to BART. (Embarcadero)
- Hit on by creepy taxi driver at 1 A.M., who missed the turns for my street, which freaked me out (see here for why. Trigger warning for the link.). After that, I had him drop me off at a bar rather than my apartment building.
I am not going to get into why “Hey, gorgeous!” is not a flattering compliment and is still, in fact, harassment. I am not going to argue with you about how the men yelling, “Hey, young ladies!” at my friends and me are innocently saying hi. Honestly, I don’t have the patience to put up with that bullshit, so if you need those 101 lessons:
(1) Read this.
(2) Read this.
(3) Ask yourself how many times those comments are yelled at women and girls vs. how many times they’re yelled at men and boys. The disparity suggests that there are certain bodies that are considered available for public consumption, judging, and commenting, and certain bodies that are not.
For more on my experiences with street harassment: tag.
Stop Street Harassment’s blog.
Street Harassment
Some good links lately: Walking As Rebellion, by Kate (via Shakesville)
Catcalling is for Creepers, by blogofchampions.
Any discussion of street harassment usually derails into one of these threads:
- What About Teh Menz!: Some man will pipe up and say, “But I like giving women compliments, and it’s totally innocent! I just want to tell her she looks nice! Does that make me a bad guy?”
No, it doesn’t make you a bad guy, but it does make you fucking obnoxious. It is indeed obnoxious to barge into a discussion where women talk about being cursed at, objectified, and harassed, and change the topic to your precious feelings and your right to engage in behaviors that, regardless of their intention, are perceived as harassment. If you ever have the urge to ask this question in a discussion of street harassment, I suggest you shut your mouth, listen to actual victims of street harassment, and let them say their piece about the real anger, intimidation, and threats they’ve been subjected to before trying to change the focus of the conversation to yourself and what you want. I also suggest that you listen to the message that these women do not like being sexually objectified or having their bodies commented on, and shut up. You will not suffer agonizing pain because you didn’t tell that hot Chinese-looking chick that she looks soooo pretty. She, on the other hand, will appreciate not being subjected to, “So, I only wanted to talk to you because you’re really pretty,” “Hey, gorgeous, are you Chinese?” “I like your hair, it looks really…exotic,” for the nth time.
Also, nine times out of ten, the comment that you perceive as innocent and flattering? It probably isn’t. If you really think that you just have an aesthetic appreciating for my skirt, it’ll be a lot more believable if you say something about the cut or color or construction or something about the skirt. That’ll make me inclined to believe that you’re actually interested in the skirt qua skirt and not trying to chat me up. It’ll be a lot less convincing if you say a generic, “I like your skirt,” while staring at my legs, ass, or chest.
- Women Are Soooo Fickle, Oh, And, They Lie: Someone, usually claiming to be a woman (and hey, there are enough sexist women out there that I’m inclined to believe them) will say that women are fickle, shrill, whining, shrewish bitches who just can’t be satisfied. Either they get yelled at on the street and they complain about that, or they don’t get yelled at and they complain about that.
The “logic” behind this “argument” is that deep down, women secretly enjoy street harassment. They all feel that their self-esteem and body image depend on how many times a man follows them down the street at night; how many times a man leers and says, “Suck my cock, bitch”; or how many times a man stares at them while they walk down the street and says, “Mmm, gorgeous,” like he’s commenting on a steer at auction. Do I need to explicate why this “argument” is ridiculous, particularly when it’s made in response to a post about how street harassment is damaging, infuriating, and not in the least bit enjoyable?
Usually, these commenters reveal themselves to be (a) projecting like mad. They start with high-faluting comments about how they never get street harassed, but if they did, they wouldn’t mind, they’d appreciate a good, old-fashioned “suck my cock, bitch!” like the honest, unthreatening compliment that it is. See, they’re not like those other women who complain about not being catcalled enough, they … just aren’t catcalled but would totally enjoy it if they were! Right, then. They also reveal themselves to be (b) sexists who think that while they are Special Snowflakes, every other woman in the world is a bitch. These folks usually think that if only they cooperate with the patriarchy enough, they’ll come out on top. This whole line of thought that women actually like street harassment is dangerous in that it relies on the notion that women need, depend on, and should be grateful for any form of male attention that they can get. It’s reminiscent of the idea that ugly rape victims should be grateful that someone raped them, because hey, at least they got to “have sex,” and god only knows no one would touch them otherwise. In other words, it tries to legitimate street harassment after the fact by saying that the victims must have secretly wanted it.
- If You Just Ignore It, They’ll Stop, Or, Don’t Respond, You’re Just Giving Them The Attention They Want: Someone will always chime in saying that the best response to street harassment is to do nothing. That way, you’re not feeding into their desire to provoke a reaction. That way, they’ll see that you’re not bothered by them and so they’ll leave you alone.
Anyone else having flashbacks to elementary school playgrounds? Yeah, when was the last time that you ignored a playground bully and it made them leave you alone? If I recall correctly, ignoring them made them escalate their tactics, because they knew that they could do so without facing any consequences. Their victims weren’t going to stand up to them and so the teachers probably weren’t going to do anything, either, since the victim hadn’t called on them to intervene.
Street harassment works similarly. Sure, the harasser might be aiming to provoke a reaction, but giving them the cold shoulder isn’t going to work, either. Cat callers revel in what they perceive as their power to publicly harass women without suffering any consequences, and the only solution that I can see to that is to disabuse them of the notion that they can get away with it scot-free. Sure, they might want a reaction, particularly if they’re trying to look masculine in front of their male peers, but being called on their bullshit is not the reaction they want or expect. Bullies like power. They like taunting their victims. They thrive off humiliating people they perceive to be weaker than they are, and rejection or confrontation will often stop them in their tracks.
A few years ago, I was walking out of a store, and noticed a man about half a block away. I was headed in the opposite direction, and from behind me, I heard, “Hey, gorgeous.” I ignored it. He then yelled, “Hey, gorgeous,” again. He then yelled, “Hey, bitch, I gave you a compliment.” I ignored that, too. Getting louder and louder, he then yelled, “Bitch, you think you’re too good for me? Ain’t you gonna thank me?” I ignored that, too. Finally, he screamed, “Fuck you, bitch!”
That is typical of my experiences with ignoring cat callers. They don’t stop if you ignore them. They just up the ante and barrage you with more and more harassment.
It’s one thing for victims to not want to confront street harassers: women are taught to avoid confrontation and to endure abuse, and oftentimes it feels unsafe to confront the person harassing you. It’s another thing, however, for people to tell victims that street harassment will stop if they just ignore it. It has the curious quality of (a) being wrong; (b) perpetuating a system where men can continue to harass women to their hearts’ content. Convenient, isn’t it?
“Gay!”
I accidentally tapped a girl in the head with my book today while I was on the bus. As is typical of the 14, the bus was jam packed, standing room was at a premium, and people were falling over in the aisle and grabbing at hand rails while the bus lurched down Mission and the driver yelled, “Move to the back! Move to the back!” In the midst of it all, a querulous voice said, “You hit me in the head.”
I looked over and saw a black pre-teen, saw that my paperback was slipping ever so slightly from the hand that I was using to clutch a hand rail, and said, “I’m sorry.” And that’s the end of it. One of your run of the mill encounters on public transit, where the seething masses of humanity bump into each other, apologize, and move on.
As it turned out, the girl, another girl, her father, and I were all getting off at the same stop. As Girl #1 and her father stepped out, Girl #2 paused in the step well, looked at me, said, “Gay,” and stepped out.
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly in the midst of all the noise–”Move to the back! Move to the back!”–and got off the bus and started walking to a coffee shop, in the opposite direction from Girl #1, Girl #2, and their adult. Not more than two steps away, I heard it again.
“GAY!”
Oh, hell no. I turned around, saw Girl #2 staring at me, walked up to her, and said, “Excuse me, what did you say?”
Girl #2 looked at me, looked away, and said, “I didn’t say nothing.”
PD: No, I heard you call me “gay.” Using that as a homophobic insult is unacceptable.
Girl #2: I told you, I didn’t say nothing!
At this point, Girl #1’s father, who is a good half a foot taller than me and probably 75 lbs. heavier than me, comes over, plants himself right in my face, and says, “Get out of her face! She’s my niece! You don’t talk to my niece like that!”
I figure he’s obviously hoping to intimidate me with his size and masculinity, and react accordingly.
PD: Excuse me, your niece called me gay. It’s completely inappropriate for her to throw around homophobic insults.
Father: DON’T YOU GET IN MY NIECE’S FACE! SHE’S MY NIECE! WHAT’D SHE DO TO YOU?
PD: I understand that she’s your niece, and her behavior is unacceptable.
Father: I DON’T CARE, YOU DON’T TALK TO HER LIKE THAT, YOU DON’T GET IN HER FACE!
PD: I wasn’t in her face, I asked her what she said, and I would appreciate it if–
Father: SHE’S JUST A LITTLE GIRL, GET OUT OF HER FACE!
PD: –you would get out of my face.
Girl #1 dances around her father and shouts, “She wasn’t talking about you!” Girl #2 smirks, making Girl #1’s claim dubious.
PD: I want your niece to apologize.
Father: GET OUT OF MY DAUGHTER’S FACE!
PD: I wasn’t talking to your daughter, I was talking to you.
Father: GET OUT OF MY DAUGHTER’S FACE, I DON’T CARE, SHE’S JUST A LITTLE GIRL.
PD: I don’t care how old your niece is, it’s completely inappropriate for her to go around calling people gay as if it’s an insult.
Father: HOW OLD ARE YOU? HOW OLD ARE YOU? SHE’S JUST A GIRL, YOU DON’T GO NEAR HER!
PD: I wasn’t near your daughter–
Father: YOU WERE IN HER FACE!
PD: How can I get in her face if she dodges around you to yell in my face while I’m talking with you?
Father: I DON’T CARE, YOU WERE IN HER FACE, I DON’T CARE I DON’T CARE.
At this point, I’m almost losing it because the scene is so surreal: two preteens who are by no means little girls, dancing around their father/uncle and smirking; a man visibly trying to intimidate me with his size and volume and utterly failing, even as he leans in closer and closer, trying to loom; the repeated cries of “DON’T YOU GET IN HER FACE!” while he’s most definitely in my face. All I can think is, “Do as I say, not as I do!” while trying not to break out in laughter.
Father: HOW OLD ARE YOU? HOW OLD ARE YOU? MY NIECE IS JUST A LITTLE GIRL.
PD: How old are you? I don’t care how old she is, trying to insult someone by calling them gay is homophobic and inappropriate at any age and your niece needs to learn that.
Father: I DON’T CARE. I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE.
PD: I think your niece should apologize and I think you should get out of my face.
The father leans in closer so that I’m practically looking straight up at him, and leans and leans and leans. It’s ridiculous. There’s a pregnant silence, where he looms, I refuse to step back or back down, and he tries to loom some more. The moment drags on and on because there’s nowhere for this tension to go: he and his niece aren’t going to apologize and I’m not going to run away crying. As we stare at each other, we both fail at our prescribed gender roles: he’s failed to intimidate me and I’ve failed to be intimidated. The father says, “Whatever,” and walks away, Girl #1 and Girl #2 in tow. As I turn and walk away, he calls out over his shoulder, “Go back to China!”
Oh, dear. At that point, my temper explodes and I turn around and yell at him, “RACIST BASTARD!” Then I rifle through my mental file of insults, thinking that using bastard as an insult is inappropriate, because there’s nothing wrong with bastardy. A couple minutes later, the ridiculousness of the whole scene strikes me:
- It’s bizarre to call someone gay as an insult, because, well, so what? It has never made any sense to me as an insult because sexual orientation has no moral value or lack thereof. I’m queer and if pointing it out is supposed to make me feel ashamed of it, that is illogical and stupid. When used as an insult, gay is a catch all phrase for everything from “doesn’t adhere to stereotypical gender roles” to “gross” and the conflation just doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand the homophobic mindset.
- In a heterosexist society, everyone is assumed to be straight, except when it comes to insults. So does this mean that Girl #2 and other homophobes think that the people they yell at are actually gay, in which case the insult is even more nonsensical (“Yeah, I’m gay. And the sky is blue. Is that an insult to the sky?”), or do they think that the people they yell at are straight and will feel insulted at being called gay? The latter also relies on the assumption that being gay is bad and so a straight person would feel bad at being called gay, which takes us straight back to point #1.
- There is something distinctly ludicrous about being called gay while feeling too sore to walk due to some acrobatic sex with my boyfriend last night. I’m queer but currently in a relationship with a straight man–how does this fit into a homophobic paradigm? Am I supposed to feel insulted at being called gay? I DON’T KNOW!!!!!!!
- The spectacle of the father standing with his face not half a foot away from mine, screaming at the top of his lungs not to get in his niece’s or daughter’s face while his daughter dodges around him to yell at me: oh, the irony. As I texted to a friend, “Easy to see where the kids got their manners.”
“Go back to China.” It’s not a new insult to me, but it’s frustrating nonetheless. It’s racist because it assumes that I don’t belong here by virtue of my ethnicity; it incorrectly assumes what ethnicity I am; and it tries to reduce me to that erroneous assumption. Couldn’t he think of a less tired insult?
-sigh- I texted my sibling afterward, saying, “while on the way to coffee, was called gay&told to go back to china. As far as insult accuracy goes i guess 1 out of 2’s not bad? Its a failing grade@school Lol” That about sums it all up.
Street Harassment Link
From the comments file, a link to Stop Street Harassment, an anti-street harassment website with “a lot of resources, interviews with anti-street harassment activists, some “soundbytes” from [Kearl's] research, and a companion blog where people can share their stories.” Check it out!
Street Harassment Project
Following up on my last post, a few links:
Street Harassment Project – an NYC-based campaign against street harassment. Their mission statement begins
BECAUSE women are terrorized daily in public spaces, our personal space violated by men who block our paths, stand too close, use a too intimate and insulting language toward us…BECAUSE this behavior is implicitly menacing and threatening and often becomes overtly threatening when a woman expresses her anger at these affronts…
BECAUSE the line between verbal harassment and physical menacing is often crossed…
BECAUSE they create offensive adult sites on the internet like ass parade…
BECAUSE on June 11, 2000, hundreds of men assaulted, stripped and fondled over 56 women in the public space of Central Park and the rage of women in the city exploded…
The Street Harassment Project was (re)initiated on June 15, 2000 and has been meeting weekly ever since.
For more information on street harassment and explanations of why catcalls, so-called “compliments,” insults, gropes, leers, whistles, and other forms of unwanted attention are in reality sexual harassment that implicitly threaten me and demean me for daring to participate in public life as a woman, see the rest of their mission statement.
Holla Back NYC: Street Harassment: The Failure of the Law to Protect Women has information on the legal intricacies of street harassment and how street harassment is often a fun three for one deal: racism, sexism, and classism in one neat package.
Fun and Joy of Being a Korean-American Woman
Yesterday, I went to the Ferry Building to run some errands. I was walking through the plaza reading Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead when I heard a call behind me.
“Hey, beautiful!”
It wasn’t coming from someone right behind me, so I ignored it. It sounded like he was ten feet away or so, and whatever–it’s not worth my time to face off with some jackass catcaller. It was just one comment, and maybe that would be it.
“Do you love me?”
The passive response of ignoring him clearly isn’t working. I was irritated at the first comment and I’m growing angry, but I tell myself that maybe he’s not yelling at me. Maybe he’s yelling at someone else, not that it would make the situation any better–by not facing him and not calling him out on his verbal harassment, whether it’s me or someone else he’s catcalling, I implicitly condone him harassing a woman because she’s a woman and she dares to walk outside in the city. Dares to exist and live in public spaces.
“You don’t love me.”
Okay, I’m angry now. Goddamned right I don’t love you, you jackass fuckwit asshole. I don’t like sexist jackasses who yell indiscriminately at women and feel entitled to sexually harass women and think of women as sex objects for their viewing pleasure rather than as people and make women feel unsafe, unwelcome, and afraid in public spaces. I’m thinking about facing him and calling him on his shit.
“Fine. Go back to China!”
Ok, that’s it. That is absolutely it and I’m not taking racist shit from anyone. Sexual harassment is bad enough, but the combination of racism and sexism makes me see red. I stop, whip around, and see that I’m the only stereotypically “Chinese” woman in the vicinity, so there’s no question that he’s been yelling at me the whole time. I see one man in the area, an African-American man lugging a suitcase.* I yell, “Excuse me, are you talking to me?”
He looks at me. “Yeah.”
I’m furious. Livid. Sexual harassment simply for being a woman is run of the mill for me–I don’t like it and I’m increasingly likely to not tolerate it, but the racist comment just broke my restraint. I yell at him, “What the hell makes you think it’s okay to yell at random women and harass them, you asshole?”
He sulkily replies, “You harass us all the time.”
I see red. I yell at him, “I’ve never harassed you in my life, and it is not acceptable to harass random women. Fuck you!”
I’ve never seen this man in my life. I’ve never harassed an African-American person in my life. I’ve never harassed anyone for racist or sexist reasons in my life. His bullshit attempt to use anti-African-American racism as a justification for anti-Asian racism and anti-woman sexism is complete bullshit and it doesn’t even work as a justification. If anything, having experienced racism himself should have taught him that racism is wrong, period, and it’s poisonous to everyone. Using it himself is hypocritical and it makes him petty, vindictive, and immature. I learned in kindergarten that two wrongs don’t make a right, and his attempt to use racism to justify racism and sexism is simply nothing more than perpetuating the system.
He walks away and I storm off, mind awhirl with anger, loathing, fear, and adrenaline. Facing a harasser always results in the volatile emotional cocktail of the flight or fight response. While I’m fighting, the anger burns away almost all of the fear, but as soon as it’s over, I’m left shaking and the fear lurches back. Women are told not to respond to harassers because as soon as they know you’re paying attention, they’ll ramp it up. They might grow violent. And so we have to endure the verbal and physical attacks on our persons and let them go on, because if we don’t, something worse might happen. Dum dum dum. Fuck that shit, I’m not listening anymore to that passive endorsement of harassment and a patriarchal society where women are advised to endure harassment because they can’t expect anything better. Fuck that shit, I’m not putting up with harassment from sexist individuals anymore.
Behind every “Hey, beautiful!” is the notion that I, a woman, exist for the harasser’s viewing pleasure. I’m walking along the sidewalk so harassers can stare at me and remind me that because I’m a woman, I don’t deserve respect. Because I’m a woman, I don’t deserve to feel safe outside. Because I’m a woman, I’m a sex object and I shouldn’t be outside running errands, jogging, working, or living. Because I’m a woman, I deserve to be catcalled and intimidated.
Insults and catcalls aren’t just words. First of all, words have power. They’re the predominant form of communication between humans and they’re used to cajole, placate, threaten, thrill, and more. Words matter. Second, behind every catcall, every reminder that in the harasser’s sexist worldview, women exist for men and women are inferior to men and he’s entitled to treat me as lesser, is the reality that one in every six women is raped at least once and far more women are sexually assaulted. I turned around and yelled at my harasser, but the entire time, I was thinking about how he was larger than I was and quite capable of assaulting me. If someone thinks it’s okay to act sexist and racist, that person might not have qualms about attacking someone perceived as inferior for sexist and racist reasons. The entire time I was in the Ferry Building, I was scanning the crowd, looking for him so that I’d be prepared if he tried to grab, grope, shove, bump, or hit me. This alertness and fear is part of being a woman, even in liberal, progressive San Francisco.
I faced the harasser and stood up for myself. It’s my way of challenging every sexist harasser who thinks it’s okay to objectify me–to break out of the box they put me in and say, fuck you. Fuck you and your attempts to make me a passive object who’ll succumb to your oh so charming insults and swoon before you, or a victim who’ll stoically endure your fucking insults. I am a person, an individual, a woman, and I am active. I deserve respect, civility, and safety by virtue of being a human being, but if you think you can take those away from me because I’m a woman, I’ll take them for myself.
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* I only note his race because it’s relevant to his pathetic justification for his racist sexual harassment. As pocochina says, I don’t give a flying fuck if a man harassing me is white, black, yellow, brown, or any other color. He’s harassing me and that’s what matters to me; his ethnicity is irrelevant.
Questions relating to Feminism and I: Part II
In response to a recent post, Feminism and I, part II, A Year In Japan commented asking a bunch of interesting questions. I started writing a response and it got out of hand, both due to my usual logorrhea and because they’re complex questions that aren’t easily answered. So I’m taking it out of the comments and responding to it in a post. For the sake of coherency, I’m splitting my answers up rather than putting them in essay form. Also, I can’t think of a way to smoothly transition from one answer to the next, or an overarching theme to integrate them with. Numbered lists: the lazy person’s answer to sophisticated writing!
1. AYIJ asks,
You don’t like being a “pretty girl” ? You would rather be an “ugly girl” or simply, “anonymous average girl”? Just a natural question, based on your description of being made to feel like a “pretty girl” in Istanbul. Read the rest of this entry »
Feminism and I: Part II
Feminism and I: Part II. My experiences with sexism and other forms of systemic discrimination since graduating from college.
In the five months since I finished college and moved out of the rarefied environment of thoughtful, intelligent, analytical academic types, most of whom are liberal, I have encountered more instances of sexism than I did in the four years at university. I was appalled at first and wondered if the world outside academia was genuinely that bad or if I was just having a set of bad experiences because I was living in the wrong part of town, oversensitive to sexism in the New York Times, and generally reading too much into things.
After five months, I’ve decided that the world outside academia genuinely is that bad and that I was extremely lucky when I was in academia, because my fellow students and professors were thoughtful, intelligent, socially conscious individuals. Not all Classicists are like that; I have definitely encountered sexist jerks in the field. But my department had many female professors and some female professors were tenured, and the grad students were evenly split (unusual for the field). Toss in the tendency of much of the department to focus on social history and late antiquity, which often focuses on groups usually left out of scholarly inquiry (women, slaves, foreigners, prisoners of war), and the fact that most of us are routinely insulted for being Classicists, and you have some understanding of minority status from both an intellectual and a lived perspective. I think it inclines us to be whatever the opposite of prejudiced is. Open-minded? Pro-equality? Anti-discrimination? What’s a good term to use? Liberal is too vague and too tied up with political connotations that in today’s America, often have little to do with equality for all people.
But I digress. Since finishing school, I’ve decided that I’m not overreacting and that the U.S. is genuinely full of sexism and other systemic prejudices. I knew it before, but for the most part, it wasn’t something that I had lived. Here are some of the things that have happened in the last five months:
After returning from Istanbul, I cringed every time I had to walk past a boy or a man on the street because I thought he would yell come ons, make me an object for his gaze, invade my peace of mind and identity (I am a human being, a person, not a doll walking by for your pleasure: for you to get off on, objectify, and yell at), and make me worry about my safety. The catcalls happened constantly in Istanbul and for some reason, they got to me more there than they did when I was living in Rome, although sexual assailant aside, all of the men were friendly, not rude, and the yelling was aimed at all the foreigners. The words aimed at me, however, centered on my sex and my looks and made it clear that I wasn’t just a foreign tourist passing by, I was a “pretty girl” with something I could give them (the pleasure of my company, a response to their overtures, a gift of the orange I was eating, the list goes on). There were plenty of boys and men who came up and wanted to go for dinner, go on a date, ask me about my boyfriend, take a picture with me, etc., and I got very twitchy. The most peaceful afternoons I spent were in non-mosque tourist attractions, because no one chatted me up there (aside from the boys in the Hagia Sophia who wanted me to take a photo with them and the security guard who started talking to me). I’ve finally gotten over that reflexive fear, that feeling of being unsafe and uncomfortable in my own skin and wanting to hide, thank god. Now that it occurs to me, I’ve been over it since moving to SF, since, for whatever reason, no one has catcalled me in this city. 1 point in SF’s favor! But in Boston, it did happen: there were multiple times when I was trying to hail a cab and men in cars would leer out the window and yell at me while they were passing, or even worse, stop and verbally harass me until I told them to fuck off. When I walked home at night through the senior center and lower income community housing developments, there was a table of men playing mah jongg on the sidewalk and every time I passed by, they would mutter, “Ooh, it’s the gorgeous Chinese girl again.” Bonus points for objectifying me, exoticizing me, and getting my race wrong! I was angry about these incidents and my reactions always included, “I’m not even wearing anything sexy!” and, “I could ignore it by walking home a different way–but why the fuck should I have to change my route because some assholes are assholes? Why do I have to give in to their behavior and change myself? Why am I the one who gives, and not them? My behavior isn’t wrong, theirs is!” The second reaction, fine. The first reaction, not fine. I should not have to endure catcalls, leers, and harassment, no matter what I’m wearing, and the thought that what I’m wearing should influenced whether or not I get harassed is the logical antecedent to “she was wearing a miniskirt and a bikini top, so she deserved it.” No. That thinking is wrong on two counts. Firstly, no one deserves to be verbally harassed, no one deserves to be treated as a sex object to insult. It doesn’t matter if I’m buttoned up from head to toe in a suit or running in boxers and a sports bra, I don’t deserve to be harassed and neither does anyone else. In this society, I have to expect it, but I shouldn’t. People need to take responsibility for their own actions. Secondly, focusing on my behavior, in this case my clothing, as the catalyst for sexist behavior takes the responsibility off the harassers and puts it onto the victim. It absolves them for seeing a person on the side of the road and going from there to seeing a woman to harass and then to shouting lewd comments and making rude gestures. It makes me responsible for causing, and thus overseeing, their behavior, and I won’t tolerate that. Each of us is responsible for our own behavior and no one is responsible for the man’s decision to mutter, “Gorgeous Chinese girl,” at me except for that man. This line of thinking–putting the responsibility on the victim–is a prominent part of sexism and shows up over and over again: women are responsible for men’s behavior, men can’t control themselves, the rape victim was asking it by wearing a short skirt/going out to a bar alone/knowing a man.
Sexism in the media: this is so overwhelming I feel tired just thinking about trying to organize my thoughts. Where to start? Well in TV, there’s Cuddy’s oversexed, skimpy outfits and ridiculously high heels in House; there’s the abysmal writing of female characters in Heroes; there’s the relegation of female characters to stereotypical roles in Heroes (self-sacrificing mother, jealous wife, victim). In the news, there are the constant articles in the NYT about wives being subservient homemakers; women being appearance-obsessed, consumerist, superficial; women being less happy than men, so they should go back into the kitchen and give up fulfilling careers. In film, there are the beautiful, perfectly made up girls in Superbad that the ugly, social outcast boys were entitled to; the girls are portrayed as objects to get; the boy who wants a thoughtful, respectful relationship with a girl is ridiculed; the girls are portrayed as the Other who are incomprehensible and who break up the true bonds of boy pals; there is the idea that it’s okay and normal to get a girl so drunk that she can’t say no to when you fuck her, so you can get her to be your girlfriend for the summer so that you can fuck her for three months. That last one really, really, really made me angry. It is incredibly fucked up to present raping a girl so you can trap her into being your girlfriend so you can fuck her more as a normal part of being a teenager, a sympathetic situation, and a humorous situation. That made me incredibly angry. What also made me angry is that I thought that if I said anything about it to the male people who told me that Superbad was awesome, they would say, “Boys are just boys,” as if that’s true, as if that excuses promoting rape, as if that excuses anything, as if that’s okay. They would also say that I’m reading too much into things rather than acknowledging that the rape promoting/normatizing message exists, is fucked up, and never acknowledge that their male privilege allows them to ignore the rape promotion as harmless. I think Superbad deserves its own post because the rape message itself could eat an entire book, it says so much about rape: normatizing rape, acquaintance rape, victim methods for dealing with rape, how all of those are important to consider in the context of recent court decisions about rape. In film, there’s also Warner Brothers executive Jeff Robinov’s declaration that female leads are the reason that WB movies have tanked lately and that the solution to WB movies tanking is to stop making movies with female leads. In advertising, TV, and film, there’s the idea that the 18-25 male demographic is the key demographic for spending power, leaving out that there are just as many 18-25 year old females as males and that they, too, have spending power and interests that they would probably exercise if they weren’t ignored and if so much content wasn’t sexist crap aimed at their male peers.
