Street Harrassment

~ Laura

I wasn’t going to tackle the street harrassment documentary, because everyone else was talking about it. Also, “women are harrassed on the street” seemed like a “no duh” topic to me. But I’ve been driving around thinking about it. So, if you missed the video, check it out…

In the early 1980’s, I started taking the bus to Manhattan with my friends to shop in the Village or visit museums. I was sixteen. Until we moved back to the suburbs in my late 30s, I spent a lot of time walking around the city. And harrassment was a way of life.

The women in the video said she was harrassed 1oo times in 10 hours. I was harrassed more. Because I have red hair and often walking around with my best friend who also has red hair, this led to a lot of attention. I got all the cat calls in the video. I was followed by a guy who accused me of being a witch. Random people took pictures of me. Old dudes on the subway dropped their trousers. In bars, guys would grab my ass and then pretend it was someone else. Occasionally, guys on the street would try to kiss me.

I learned how to completely tune it out, so it didn’t really bother me unless they touched or followed me.  I only really became aware of my numbness when the street calls stopped. Nobody bothers you if you’re over 35 and carrying a diaper bag. Made me wonder if I was numb to other problems.

Published by Laura

14 thoughts on “Street Harrassment”

  1. Have you been following the Jian Ghomeshi scandal in Canada of the past few days? That and this video made me feel sad remembering all of the street harassment and work harassment that I and many many other women have experienced over our lives. And the pressure to keep silent about it for fear of bringing on even more.

    You live with it til you realize one day how crazy it is to accept that this is the way it is.

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  2. I got the definite feeling from the video that young attractive women must feel very uncomfortable indeed when they walk through neighborhoods with unemployed black guys loitering on the sidewalk. (This description doesn’t fit all of the cases, but it was clearly a dominant theme.)

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  3. I’ve had almost no experience with street harrassment in my life (despite once being young and reasonably attractive) and I wonder if street harrassment is a) a big city thing (though I did not notice it in Chicago, for either me or others – so maybe it’s a NYC thing) or b) a thing that happens where there are unemployed people hanging out on the street – or anyone hanging out on the street. The race/ethnicity thing would be good to look at; I wonder if women are harrassed more or less in neighborhoods where they are the same background as the majority.

    It does make me think New York is just an awful place, despite its advantages.

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    1. Well, I grew up in Portland, Oregon (and suburbs) and as a teen in the 1970s and early 1980s I got a lot of catcalls, guys following me with their cars, even pulling across the sidewalk to stop me and insist I accept a ride from them. I kept saying no, shouting no sometimes. It’s clearly not just an NYC thing, and it was mostly white guys who catcalled me.

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    2. Yeah.

      I’m suspecting:

      1. density (one guy saying something is nothing, 100 of them is intolerable, even if it’s just, “hey, beautiful”)

      2. pedestrian culture (if she were in a car, she’d just sail past in total security)

      3. the anonymity and total impunity of a really big city

      4. cultural differences

      5. that some of the guys are doing it as cheap group fun, so it’s more about cementing relationships between the guys rather than an actual effort to meet women (i.e. homobonding). It’s like going out bowling, except it’s free.

      To expand on #4, I notice living in a city with a majority minority population that there is a substantial difference in cultural attitudes toward greeting greeting strangers between non-blacks and blacks. As a rule, African-Americans routinely greet strangers, non-African-Americans do not. Just that alone makes for some huge cultural clashes–one side may feel rudely accosted, while the other feels rudely ignored. A lot of the more minor interactions may fall into that category.

      Another cultural issue is the Mediterranean tradition of street harassment, which is proudly carried on by many Latin American men. Here’s the 1951 photo “American Girl in Italy” which famously illustrates the practice:

      http://www.today.com/id/44182286/ns/today-today_news/t/subject-american-girl-italy-photo-speaks-out/#.VFPQZkpX-uY

      My personal experience of spending a lot of time zipping around Los Angeles on foot and on public transportation as a college student (I was constantly doing various journalism projects) suggests to me that street harassment is not a universal experience and may affect some women far more than it affects others. Being of at best average personal appearance, I’ve had very few encounters of this kind. I can count almost on one hand the times I had strange men in the US accost me at any sort of length. When I was younger, it was so rare that it was mostly amusing (I found being followed by a 5’3″ Latin American guy in downtown LA in broad daylight funny and flattering), but I understand that if it were a daily or hourly occurrence, it would be horrifying. In the US, I think it was almost always Latin American men, but it is a small sample and it might just be that I happened to be their type.

      A think a lot of the work is done by the frequency and the persistence. I had a much worse time of it when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Russia with the tweens and teens in my little hamlet. I had no idea who these kids were (I worked in the next town over but lived in their tiny city), but they knew that I was the American, and they’d follow me around yelling badly pronounced obscenities in English. (“Suck my peh-nees, American girl! Fak you, American girl!”) I think I was in no physical danger at all from these pint-sized harassers, but it was AWFUL and it made me not want to leave my apartment and walk around the little town (all three or four streets of it) unless in the most dire need. In bigger towns in Russia, I was able to walk around unmolested. And I know from talking to fellow volunteers that other people had exactly the same things yelled at them, so it wasn’t just me.

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      1. This is funny – when I was thinking about whether I’d ever experienced anything like this, I remembered being in Moscow as a college student and being followed by a teenage boy. Very annoying, but not scary (and actually not common even there).

        I do think the point about looking average is interesting. Some commenters on another site have talked about how horrible it is to be singled out for looking “wrong” due to weight or whatever. My averageness may have protected me more than I realized.

        The cultural difference issue is also very important. I grew up in a suburb where no one ever yelled across the street to anyone (not a lot of yelling there in general, either!) Someone yelling from a car at you would have been really shocking.

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      2. I just had a college student yell “hello kitty!” at me the other night, after which he and his friends giggled and ran away. I was walking with some Chinese girls who were totally disgusted and called him a pervert, but I just found it funny. Other common things men shout at me are, “hello welcome to China,” and “good afternoon how are you?” It’s more cute than threatening, but it also gets tiresome very quickly.

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  4. It was mostly white guys too for me. The most egregious was being physically assaulted by a man in a suit on a busy high street during the work week at lunch. I was so shocked that he was about 15′ past before I had the presence to even THINK of doing/saying anything. He was walking with his business suited friends. I was also in the corporate world at the time.

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    1. This is a really weird thing to pick on Joyce Carol Oates for. She is a 70-something lady. Of course she isn’t going to have the same experience out on the street as a busty 20-something in skinny jeans.

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      1. They are not picking on Oates for “that” (your interpretation)… I´m a 30-something man (and white and heterosexual); am not going to have the same experience out on the street as a busty 20-something in skinny jeans… That doesn´t mean that I can´t KNOW… I can observe and think… I have information, and I can understand experiences that aren´t exactly mine… I know about such women´s experiences. I´m not blind. I´m not deaf. I´m not living in a cave or a lost island. I have sisters and female friends. Men don´t have girlfriends? So, Joyce Carol Oates is saying… what??

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      2. I’d read it as Joyce Carol Oates as saying that none or few men are street harassing 70-something Joyce Carol Oates and say yeah, I expect you’re right about that.

        Remember what Laura said about turning 35 in NYC–it’s been 40+ years since JCO has been in the target demographic for harassment and that was a completely different NYC.

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      3. No. Sorry, Amy, but no… This is (some of) what Oates said: “Would be very surprised if women [WOMEN] walking alone were harassed in affluent [AFFLUENT] midtown NYC (Fifth Ave., Park Ave.), Washington Square Park etc”. She is saying this: rich men don´t harass (at least where they live and/or work); women (rich or not) don´t get harassed where the rich men work or live. Why?? “Mistery”…

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  6. Laura said: “Nobody bothers you if you’re over 35 and carrying a diaper bag.”

    I think there’s probably a pervert for everybody, if you just wait long enough.

    One of my friends was right around that age and probably about 6 months pregnant when she found herself being followed around our local ghetto HEB by some guy. She had to talk to the store staff and get an escort out to her car.

    She was puzzled by the experience. I explained that there actually are perverts who REALLY like pregnant women, which was news to her.

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