V-Day, the Non-Harassing Way

Valentine's Day is all about love and, for singles, finding your special someone. However, our culture is rife with books and movies that teach us more about how to become a stalker than they do about how to approach someone new with respect to their personal boundaries. Comment is Free has some great tips for how to approach women without being harassing.

Perhaps you think there is no way you could be considered as harassing. Maybe you're just giving someone a compliment or trying to be friendly. Well, consider this:

In one of the first street harassment studies ever conducted, Carol Brooks Gardner, associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, interviewed 293 women in Indianapolis, Indiana, over several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The women were from every race, age, class, and sexual orientation category of the general population in Indiana and the United States. She oversampled women of color to better represent their experiences. Gardner found that every single woman (100 percent) could cite several examples of being harassed by unknown men in public and all but nine of the women classified those experiences as “troublesome.”

In her Comment is Free article, Holly mentions that talking with young men about appropriate stranger interactions in public is especially important.

Society often suggests that in heterosexual relationships, it is men who should approach women. Men's peers, family members and the media may tell them that it is OK, and even flattering, to be aggressive or to sexually objectify women whom they encounter (no matter the men's or women's sexual orientation). I doubt most men want to be harassers, but if they take these messages to heart, they may become harassers.

The most important thing a cisgender man can do to be an ally to women and to the movement to end violence against them is to realize that intent doesn't always matter, and that the way you view a situation through a male lens is often not the same as a woman will view it. If a woman sends you clear signals that she feels harassed, or threatened, don't mock her for overreacting. You will never understand what it feels like to live under the constant threat of violence just because of your gender, so don't presume that you can tell her how she should feel. Instead, learn from her reactions to you and listen to her if she is willing to explain her feelings. After all, the quickest way to a woman's heart is to be part of the solution, not the problem.

Street Harassment Update

From Salon:

Sure, snapping a cellphone picture of a street harasser is good for humiliating the lech -- and alerting other women to his modus perverandi -- on the Web site Holler Back NYC. But, as a story in the New York Times shows, it can serve him with far more than embarrassment.

Last month, a 28-year-old woman was walking up a set of stairs -- wearing a skirt -- at the Dyckman Street station when she noticed a man suspiciously close to her. He just so happened to be fiddling with his cellphone and someone nearby told her that the man had snapped an up-the-skirt shot. The woman told the Times: "I said I had to do something. Since he is taking pictures of me, I am going to take pictures of him." So, she followed him onto a train and readied her cellphone. "And I told him 'smile' because I am going to the police," she said. She took a photo of his mug, e-mailed it to police and filed a criminal report. Bravo!

It's the kind of admirable act hardened city dwellers expect to lead nowhere -- except, thanks to the snapshot, a police officer recognized the suspect in a subway station earlier this week and he was charged Wednesday with attempted sexual abuse, harassment and unlawful surveillance. How's that for bursting your bubble of cosmopolitan cynicism!

See our original post on the topic here.

Take it to the Streets

Jennifer Kesler, who writes for the Hathor Legacy and Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, has written posts directed at both men and women regarding catcalling, and why street harassment should not be considered a form of flattery.

In her post to women she writes:

Strange men do not hoot at, yell at, or leer at you because they think you’re hot. They do those things because they think you’re vulnerable and needy. If you think they want you sexually, you need some serious education on power psychology. They want to feel like they’re on top of you, but not in the way you imagine.

When you see someone attractive, it’s natural to look. But not to stare - there are rules against staring throughout the animal kingdom. And you don’t talk unless the person you’re looking at says something to you first, because when you get caught looking, it would be aggressive to follow that up with verbalization. This is something your cat understands, for pete’s sake. Stop reading Cosmopolitan and get in touch with your animal instincts. Discrete looks are flattering because they reflect only a natural aesthetic reaction. Leering - staring overtly at someone who’s watching you stare - signals aggression. Uninvited verbalizations are also aggressive - that’s why when the salesman at the kiosk leaps out to ask you if you ever get split ends, you feel pressured and cornered (until you realize you’re entitled to tell them to back off and leave you alone because they started the hostility and you’re only responding in kind).

To men, she says:

If you’re honest with yourself, you know it’s not really about how attractive she is. It’s about one of two things:

* The men. Most often, catcalling at a woman is a way men socialize with each other. You’re trying to impress each other with who can say the most outrageous things, or who can get a smile or glance from the most passing women. The woman is just part of the scenery, so it’s no surprise you’re oblivious to her feelings. Her responses don’t represent a person with sensitivities to you; they represent a finish line, and tell you whether or not your verbal volleys are scoring.

* Intimidating women. For every bunch of guys who thinks catcalling is harmless because they know their own motives aren’t hateful, there’s one guy who really hates women and revels in feeling that a woman is afraid of him. He thinks his buddies feel the same way, and when they engage in the same behavior, they are (perhaps unwittingly) encouraging him.

Whether you’re merely insensitive to what strange women feel or actually hate them doesn’t really matter. The behavior was invented by men who hate women, and by participating in it - in fact, by not calling on other men to stop doing it - you’re encouraging misogynistic attitudes whether you mean to or not, whether you share them or not.

Kesler's posts come in response to a May CNN article entitled Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?, in which some women report feeling threatened by men yelling at them on the street while other women express insecurity with their appearance if they are not catcalled.

But Kimberly Fairchild, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Manhattan College in New York, says catcalling can take a larger emotional toll than many women realize.

"There seems to be some evidence that it increases self-objectification," said Fairchild, who surveyed 550 women both online and at Rutgers University in 2006 and 2007. The women -- who ranged in age from 15 to 64 in the international online component and from 18 to 24 in the Rutgers survey of women from central New Jersey -- were asked about their experiences with street harassment.

Catcalling "encourages women to look at themselves as body parts instead of as full, whole, intelligent human beings" and can cause women to fear for their safety, Fairchild says.

"When a man catcalls you, you don't know if it will end at that point or if it could escalate to assault," she added.

The CNN article also discusses HollaBackNYC, a site which encourages New Yorkers to snap pictures of street harassers and then post them to the blog as a way of fighting back.

Emily May, 27, and six of her friends were inspired to create the site in 2005 after a young New York woman used her camera phone to take a photo of a man who was looking at her while touching himself on the subway. The picture led to his arrest. (Such behavior is, according to New York state law, a misdemeanor offense). The blog has spawned similar sites in other major cities such as Chicago and San Francisco.

The site is a way to encourage dialogue, May says. "I think sites like ours can help women see that they're not alone, that it happens to women in all walks of life by men in all walks of life, and that it's not okay."

We encourage you to visit the links included in this post, especially those to Kesler’s posts and HollaBackNYA, to learn more.