A Week In the Life of a Woman on the Street

A Uniform Story: Guest Blogger Karrie Myers

2006-11-20T08:14:00.000-08:00

So, let me preface this post by saying that I stand at 5'10. I'm a black woman. I'm a size 18. And yes, I thought all three of these things would keep me from being harassed on the street. Obviously, I was wrong. It took a lot of de-programming and just being present to realize that men of all ages, heights, races and classes harass me. But I will point out - because I haven't seen this posted yet and I would love to discuss it - that firemen and policemen seem to harass me most of all.

I find being harassed by men in uniform especially confusing and violating. Afterall, we're taught as children that these guys are our "pals", there to protect us when real perverts bother us. What do you do when the authority figure is the antagonist? My first experience with being harassed by a policeman happened around age 12. Up until then, I was sort of used to harassment from regular men. I grew up with one of those statuesque, preternaturally pretty mothers...the kind that people stop their conversations to look at on the street. too young to know better, I linked the street harassment my mother received from men with the attention she received from everybody, and just assumed that was why men were always bothering us. Well, one day my mom and I are riding home from the grocery store, and we hear a speakerphone blaring out of nowhere. Behind us, a police car is ordering my mother to pull over. Frazzled, my mother obides. We're sitting there, scared off our asses, when this cop sidles up to my mother's window and blatantly tells her that nothing is actually wrong...he just noticed her in the grocery store and wanted to know if she had a boyfriend. So, why not ask her in the grocery store? Why make some big spectacle? Why scare the hell out of us? Well, I wouldn't know the answer to that until years later; because normal guys ask you out. Harassers want to assert their power by making a spectacle out of the whole thing.

Back in the car, my mother winced, something she's known to do when she's angry beyond words but can't let out a bloodcurdling scream just then. She told the cop that she was in fact married, and the mother of a 17 year old and a 12 year old. The cop could've cared less. He sad, "your husband...black guy?". Um, no actually, says my mother. She doesn't offer anything else. For the record, my StepDad is white. And so was this cop. But what the hell did that have to do with anything? After his big spectacle, the cop had been rejected by my Mom and he was looking for some way to exercise his power over her...why not ask her a bunch of inappropriate questions while he's got her captive? The cop went on to ask her if her husband "treated her right" and "took care of business". Again, I'm 12, I'm in the passenger seat. My mother asked him if he needed anything else, to which the cop just snorted and just walked back to his car. We proceeded on home, with my mother spewing every expletive on the planet out the window. I wrestled with the confusing feeling of being violated by someone I was told was my "pal".

I wish I could say that was the last time we got pulled over by a cop...for a date with my Mom.

Anybody got any other "uniform stories" stories?

Bus Stop Masturbator

2006-11-15T17:23:00.000-08:00

Well just when I was thinking how lucky I am that I haven't been harassed lately...

I was waiting at the bus stop a little after 4pm, on my way home, there were people around; a woman sitting next to me on the bench at the bus shelter. This man in a forest green van (2 doors, tinted windows on the sides, BF Goodrich tires) pulls up into the bus stop and is just idling there. He's pulled up so that the passenger window is right in my line of vision about 4 feet away from me, and I see he's writing on some clipboards and shit. I think it's strange that he's just idling the van in the bus stop on a busy street while he does paperwork but people pick up and drop off friends there a lot and I figure he’s waiting for someone. After a few minutes of me spacing out I look up and see him stroking his erect penis. I immediately jump up, tapping the woman next to me on the shoulder and pointing at the van which is now pulling away. I tell her the man was exposing himself to us and she says "How do you know?"

How do I know?

I say, "I saw it!" I then chase after the van which is stuck at the light at the next corner hoping to get this predator's license plate number. He drives away before I can and I walk back to the bus stop where everyone is acting as if nothing has happened. Did they not hear me or notice what had happened? It’s surreal.

I’m so shaken and angry as I wait for the bus I’m thinking:

How dare this man think he can get away with that in the middle of the day on a crowded street! But you know what, he can. And he did. What would have happened if a man had seen him masturbating in public like that? "The man would have laughed." My husband said.

And that's the problem. We as a society refuse to see the big picture when it comes to sexual violence. Rather than seeing a continuum of acts which all hurt women and maintain our second-class citizen status, we prefer to see sexual violence as an anomaly and sexual predators as “crazies” operating in a vacuum. I’d love to write the Man in Green Van off as just crazy but if that were the case men exposing themselves to women would be rare. And it’s not. Every woman I know has been flashed or worse by a man at some point in her life-usually several times in her life.

Which is why it’s even scarier that men, and even some women, prefer to laugh it off when a man exposes himself to a woman; rolling their eyes at the “perv.” Or that they choose to deny the reality of the situation and instead doubt the victim when she states the truth - like the woman at the bus stop did by asking me: “How do you know?” As if I might just be hallucinating.

Studies have shown that sexual predators; rapists and child molesters, start out with small acts, like flashing, groping, or public masturbation, and then the longer they go with out facing any repercussions for these actions, they gain confidence, until one day they rape or even kill. And yet, when I call the police precinct closest to the bus stop they tell me I have to come in and file a report. Even though I live an hour away from the precinct closest to the bus stop. When I call the sex crimes hotline listed on the NYPD website they put me on hold for 5 minutes and then hang up on me. Clearly women’s safety is not a high priority. Stacks of unutilized DNA evidence from rape victims currently sitting in NYPD storage is a testament to that fact. http://www.innocenceproject.org/docs/NYPD_Evidence.pdf
And people wonder why rape is the only crime in NYC that has increased even as ALL other crimes have decreased.

I wonder what the Man in Green Van is doing right now.

Dicta?

2006-10-31T11:50:00.000-08:00

In evidence class today my professor was explaining the difference between dicta (when the court is just giving its opinion or answering a hypothetical question) and the holding (when the court is explaining its decision pertaining to the facts of the case) and she keeps saying "dicta is this...dicta is that.. no, that's not an example of dicta..." when from the way back of the room this guy says in a stage whisper "Suck my dicta!"

Slightly funny? Maybe
Unnecessary? Probably
An example of sexualized male aggression? Yup

Overheard ...

2006-10-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

So I was walking up the subway steps out of the station the other day behind a group of three teenage boys, probably about 15 or 16 years old. The only part of their conversation I was fortunate enough to overhear was:

"You bitch slapped him!"- says the first

"No..."- says the second

"Yeah, you bitch slapped him." -says the first, laughing

"No, you pimp slapped him! - says the third, laughing

"I've got an ego but not that much." - concludes the second

I seriously considered stopping these boys and asking them why they thought violence against women was so funny. So casual. I know they probably weren't thinking of their joke in those terms and I can't blame them. "Bitch" "Pimp" "Bitchslap"- The language they used is thrown around constantly and the meaning has been lost-or morphed into something less scary. Something quite removed from the very real and painful image of a man slapping a woman in the face.

The Age of Dissonance?

2006-03-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else read "The Rudeness of Strangers" in the Sunday Times?

On a recent holiday I was dining with my partner, Ira, at a romantic restaurant on the rugged east coast of Barbados. At one table, a stunning older woman — tan and with fine blond hair catching the Atlantic breeze — was eating alone. Was she an actress? An aristocrat? Lonely? In the name of international cordiality, I wanted to relieve her of her solitude and invite her to our table to share the evening. But how to do it?
Ira, who is socially adept, walked over to ask if she'd join us for dessert.
"Try the apple pie," she said, slowly, twice and in a Scandinavian accent. "It is better than the coconut." Befuddled, he retreated.

Clearly her English wasn't good. But as we sat, flummoxed, I wondered if we'd broken protocol. Had I been presumptuous thinking she'd appreciate our invitation?

Yes, presumptuous is indeed what you had been, Mr. Morris. Actually, while we're being presumptuous, why don't I just call you Bob, Bob?

Why is it that I've often seen men eat alone, peacefully, without bother, but we have to devote so much time and discussion to the woman who eats alone? The whole of this essay is: I spy a woman eating alone in a restaurant: what should I do? How about NOTHING?

From McSweeney's

2006-03-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

YOUR STREET-HARASSMENT QUESTIONS ANSWERED. By Wendy Molneux.

Hey, baby! Do fries come with that shake?

Actually, with this shake, you get a choice of sides. You can have regular or curly fries, jalapeño poppers, or a side salad.

What kinds of dressing do you have?

You can get ranch, honey-mustard, or lite Italian.

What about onion rings?

They're a dollar extra.

Can I get this to go?

Yes! And you can also shove it up your ass, you fucking idiot.

- - - -

Pardon me, miss. I seem to have lost my phone number. Could I borrow yours?

Do you mean that you forgot it, or that you actually misplaced it?

It's weird, but I actually misplaced it.

But that's impossible. A number is abstract. How could you misplace it?

I'm not supposed to say this, but I work for the government, and time and space are collapsing. Abstract concepts have acquired actual mass, and can now be misplaced.

So, do you think you might lose your chauvinism? And your lack of respect for other people?

I hope not. That's kind of what I'm about.

- - - -

Hey, can I get in your pants?

I think they might be too small for you.

All right, then. Can I get in your shirt?

But I'm wearing a floral blouse. Aren't you worried that these guys you're hanging out on the porch with will laugh at you or call you names if you wear a blouse?

Well, if they do that, I guess they're not really my friends.

Wow, you're a lot more secure than I would have expected. And deeper.

Yeah, it's weird. I woke up this morning and my low self-esteem had vanished.

That's probably because time and space are collapsing, and abstract concepts have acquired physical form, meaning that we can lose them.

So, do you think you'll lose that chip on your shoulder?

God, I hope not. It's kind of what I'm about.

Looking Pretty

2006-03-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

Walking down the street with my Mets cap on (Yankee-fans, don't hate, it was a gift) and a man says, "A pretty girl shouldn't cover herself up with a hat! Why don't you want to look pretty?"

"None of your beeswax," I say, because saying something like that back sometimes make me feel better. I make myself smile a little bit.

Other things like this I get regularly are comments on how pretty girls should "smile" and also how, as a pretty girl, I shouldn't have short hair, and I've even been told that, as a pretty girl with tiny feet, I ought to "show them off" with sandals.

I am asked "Why don't you want to look pretty?" I have said, on several occasions: "Because being pretty means I get harassed by people like you." But I want to locate myself outside of the cause- meaning, I am not harassed because I'm pretty.

We say a lot, when talking about street harassment, that it doesn't matter what you wear or how you look. While I have been, a few times, harassed while almost completely invisible (hat, coat, scarf, only my eyes uncovered), it has been my experience that I, personally, get harassed more when I wear makeup or am "dressed up". I also found that having short hair drastically decreased the amount of harassment I got on a daily basis. When I had long hair, I could hardly go more than a block or two without being harassed. When I first cut my hair, I walked back from the salon to my apartment and didn't get one comment: I thought I was free! (If only.) When I was blonde, on the other hand, I was harassed more than I ever thought possible.

I loved the way I looked blonde, but the "attention from men", as my mother put it, was more than I could deal with. I am growing my hair out, but sometimes I get little panicky feelings about returning to that level of harassment, even though I'd much prefer to be able to put my hair back again. I don't want to make decisions about the way I look based on the amount of harassment I might get, but I also get very tired of standing up to it and making my decisions in defiance of it, then dealing with the irritating, degrading, and sometimes scary, consequences.

When I have tried to de-pretty myself to the fullest extent (sports bra, no makeup, sweats), I am sure to get the kind of harassment with which this post began: "be pretty for me" comments.

Waiting For Someone To Come Out of Somewhere?

2006-03-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

I had a particularly strange bit of harassment today. I was standing at a stoplight, waiting to cross. A man tapped me on the shoulder. I said, "Can I help you?" And he said, "Yes, you are a beautiful woman and I need to talk to you." I made a sound of disgust. He said, "Just wait here one second, I need to buy a pack of Newports. Then we'll talk." And he ran into a deli.

Reader, I left.

Manhattan afternoon

2006-03-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday when I left work, I walked all the way from my Murray Hill office to meet my friend at Film Forum in SoHo. As any woman can tell you, the more time you are on the street, the more harassment you are likely to experience, so, when I made the choice to walk, I also recognized Id have lots to tell you all about later.

I heard a couple of "Hey shorty," "Hello beautiful," to which I responded with well-rehearsed scowls. I reserve these scowls for such comments that I don't want to hold up my day to respond to. I am perfectly willing to turn my head behind me to continue the scowl, if warranted, but sometimes I am exhausted by the idea of confronting each and every man who says a lame line.

By the time I got to the West Village, I was feeling rather good about things and was pleased by the low-intensity of the harassment I'd gotten over what was such a long walk. I felt so comfortable in fact that, having broken a bit of a sweat with my usual gait through the city, I stopped to remove my heavy winter coat.

Beneath my winter coat, I wore a tweed blazer and black long-sleeved sweater. However, as I began my removal, I heard behind me muted whistles. Turning around, I saw that, standing as I was before the window of a restaurant, a table of four guys were acting as though I were performing a striptease for their enjoyment. As I turned, one guy began rapping on the window near me. The others were smirking, laughing, and one was even waving. I did what I always do when someone harasses me from behind glass. I hit it really, really hard with my hand a few times and left.

As I was walking away, I considered putting my coat back on, but didn't want to draw any more attention to myself, so I kept it under my arm. I passed by two guys standing in front of a brownstone-type building. One was leaning on one of those half-fences and, as I passed, he looked me up and down and said, "Hello, hello, young lady." And I said, "Do you ever think it scares some women when you do that?" He said, "Did it scare you?" I said, "A little bit, yes." And he said, "Well then why are you talking to us?" His friend laughed. "I just wanted you to know," I said, feeling stupid. As I walked away I heard the friend saying, "You dumbshit." I think he was talking to harasser and not to me.

Reflecting

2006-03-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

When I first joined the group, I had a difficult few months. Whereas before I had been able to brush off, to some extent, all but the very worst of the harassment I experienced on the streets, becoming a part of a group devoted to the issue made each and every encounter on the street burn hotter. It made me dread it more in some ways, it made me more angry and frustrated, even as sharing my experiences and organizing soothed and validated me.

Obviously, I joined the group because I was so angry to begin with, which is part of what made my new frustration so, kind of, scary.

I have only been at this blog for a little over 24 hours and I am noticing a similar sensation. I know that every episode of harassment I will be considering more deeply because I will relive it if I choose to blog it. So, when I didn't have to be on the street alone at all this morning, I was relieved more than usual.

But, what does this mean? I've often heard people argue against, for example, teaching Women's Studies in college because young women end up seeing their whole lives with anger for awhile. In other words, knowing about the problem is seen as exacerbating the problem, an over-reaction, rather than an appropriate reaction, to one's personal experiences.

But the problem is not itself exacerbated. In fact, the examination of street harassment, over the course of years in the group and now as a blogger on the subject, has led me to a more nuanced perspective, overall, making me slightly less viscerally GRRR and more thoughtful about it. In a way though, despite my fears and discomfort, there is something amazing about being this angry about it again. It has been making me remember a lot of the first experiences I had with street harassment that made me so humiliated and angry ... now, I am jaded usually and I just live with it. I just shed most of it, the stuff that doesn't scare me too badly, that isn't physical or particularly vulgar, by the time I am home at the end of the day. When it was new, any experience of it stuck.

I remember when I was eleven and first developed breasts and boys at the swimming pool would call me "snowcones" because of the size and shape of them. I wanted both to die and to kill. And I almost vomited when I first heard it. Though, as I said yesterday, I was (often rather brutally) teased a lot as a child, when the teasing became so sexualized and so related to my gender, it brought about whole new feelings of injustice and rage. By the time I was fourteen, it had become part of the overall landscape of my life, something I totally hated, but hardly saw anymore.

It's International Women's Day today, in case you don't know. It's a day of the year that we pay special attention to what's happening to women globally and locally. And we do so even if, maybe even because, it makes it feel worse for awhile.

16 Blocks

2006-03-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

I always wear my iPod when I am walking around, or am on my cell phone. These two methods seem to deter harassers, as it's harder for them to get my attention. I think the other part is that it makes me less aware of my environment, which is probably dangerous at night or in an uncrowded area, but is something which, during the day in Manhattan, I prefer. I'd rather listen to music or a podcast and feel as though I'm disappearing from the space around me, rather than feeling so overly visible.

As I was walking, two men unloaded a large slab of wood from the back of a truck. One man gestured with his head that I could walk ahead of them. When I tried to, they played the game of deliberately getting in my way. Every direction I tried to walk around, they placed themselves and the wood in front of me. This kind of thing happens to me all the time and I am enraged by it a lot more than by "cat-calling" because I feel like I am being somehow "tricked" and that my size (I am only 5'1") is being taken advantage of. I was teased a lot as a kid and there is something about this particular "joking" on the street, where I feel physically boxed-in, that really gives me the same feeling. I feel like I am being cornered on the playground. Maybe because of that memory, this kind of harassment makes me most want to lash out. Today, I just stopped moving and said, "Get out of the way." After I stood there, hands on hips for a moment, they moved the wood into the building and I walked after them, once I was sure they were far enough in the right direction.

Once I got to my destination, I was standing outside making a call. I was making a telephone balance transfer at my bank, meaning the whole thing was very dial-intensive, lots of touch-tone action. A guy comes up and asks me if I have a light for his cigarette. I said "No, I don't smoke," and continued my call. He says, "Why not?" I said, "Huh?" He said, "Why don't you smoke? It's very relaxing." At that moment, I fucked up my dialing and the operator sent me back to main menu. I was annoyed. I moved a bit away from the guy who wanted a light and looked at him like, "What are you saying, you freak?" but I didn't say anything because I wanted to finish the call and go inside. "Who are you calling?" he says as he sidles over, matches in hand. He had pulled them out of his bag. I was furious, but ignoring him so I could finish the call. He sighed loudly when I didn't respond. I did finish the call, but felt distracted and irritated. I started inside and he said, "Come talk to me when you're in a better mood." I said, "Unlikely."

Following the commands of automated bank tellers is annoying enough without having to dodge real-life randoms in the process.

Going to Get Coffee

2006-03-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

Left my office to get a cup of coffee across the street at Anonymous NYC Deli. As I was pulling the crank, a man taps my shoulder:

"How old are you?" he asks.

"Um, how old are you?" I replied.

He laughed. "You're cute."

"I don't know you, by the way." I tried to wrangle my way around him to get my coffee to the counter. I did so, he followed.

"Do you always get your coffee here?" He asked.

"I don't know you, sir. What is this?"

He threw up his hands. "Just trying to be friendly."

At that point, thankfully, he left me alone to put my change on the counter and walk across the street back to work.

My midmorning coffee is one of my greatest joys. I wake up looking forward to it. But I can only enjoy it once I am sitting at my desk with it. I know that many days I will have to deal with something like this just to get there.

By the way, sorry I have no picture of my harasser- my phone is utterly old-school.

His comment on being "friendly" is one that really gets my goat. See, I used to think he knew he wasn't being "friendly". I really used to think that men did this to show their power over women and to scare us and make us feel uncomfortable. I also used to think that every incidence of street harassment was basically a manifestation of the exact same thing. But what makes me uncomfortable now is that, the older I get, the more sure I get that this guy has been trained that "friendliness" from a man to a woman looks like that. And it looks like that partly because women are not only trained to be "polite" as people are often pointing out with regard to street harassment (and rape and assault), but also because women are assumed not to have boundaries or levels of intimacy. You see it all the time in the way men relate to each other with such a distance. If a woman does that to anyone, not just a harasser, she seems and feels cold or superior.

I see myself as rather aloof and cold, tough on the outside. I think maybe I see myself this way because I'm a woman. I think, if I were a man, it's entirely possible that I would see myself as friendly. It's not just the prickles I've grown because of street harassment, but also the interpretation of those prickles.

About This Blog

2006-03-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the Street Harassment Project? Featured in Time Out, the Village Voice, The New York Sun, The Guardian, Alternet, Bitch, Bust and other publications, we took on the rarely-publicly-acknowledged but all-too-common problem of gendered harassment in public spaces. Well ,we're back and better than ever, with a new name to boot: Street Harassment Coalition!

If you visit our old site, you will find stories of harassment from women and girls all over the world and other groups and individuals have taken up the mantle and expanded it: Hollaback NYC takes pictures of harassers with cameraphones and, today, Blank Noise is doing a blog-a-thon on the subject and expects to have TONS of hot bloggers thinking and writing about what women experience everyday. Please visit these awesome gals and support the excellent work they're doing.

We start this blog today because we believe there is one element missing: the everyday-ness of the problem. Sometimes the sharing of stories has made street harassment seem, to those who don't experience it, to be isolated incidents, rather than the cultural and social landscape in which we live our lives, something which impacts our choices, our moods, our participation within and relationship to our communities. That's why the SHC has decided to do a week-blog, focusing on the incidents that take us through our day to day lives, as well as discussion, consideration, analysis, reflection on an issue which, when discussed (rarely) is given short-shrift. Each week will be devoted to one individual's experiences of and thoughts on street harassment. We are really excited to get readers to become bloggers and we welcome experiences from all over the globe. If you are interested in committing a week of harassment to the blogosphere, contact us at aweekinthelife@hotmail.com.

This week we start with me, Erin, a longtime member of the Street Harassment Project, now Street Harassment Coalition. It will be nice to have you with me on the streets, seeing things through my eyes.

Ready?