Normalised Street Harassment: Moving Away from ‘Feminism’ as an Ugly World

Brooklyn Street Art project Stop Telling Women To Smile by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh addresses the issue of gender-based street harassment by plastering publicly the portraits of the women whom it has affected continuously whilst out in the street.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where the word "Feminism" is one that is considered bad, negative, or even taboo. Everytime I have to use the word "Feminist" when describing myself, there is always a sense in me that the word - despite it meaning the positive aim for equality - is going to be received badly by those around me. Even worst, I fear that defining myself as feminist is a point that will automatically put me by others skewed perception in a man-hating, negative, or whiney box of women who speak up against gender inequality. In fact, for many, "woman's issues" means nothing else but a series of problems that don't really exist or can't really be changed - it is even enough to inspire hatred, threats, and degredations as many outspoken proponents of contemporary feminism have experienced. Feminism is not an easy word.

But why is that we find it all so difficult to agree on what Feminism means or on what it seeks to achieve? Why is it that both men and women struggle to see what not only seperates them but also what brings them together? Why is it so difficult to reach a united stance on issues that are affecting not only the women of the world but also the men? All of these questions are ones that would require long, complex responses and could command each individually their own elaborate investigations. Rather, in this short piece, I'd like to explore some of the tensions behind how feminism is interpreted in contemporary global society through an issue that I - like many others - can personally relate to. This issue, although many will try to minimise it as not being one, is street harassment. Where lies that boundary between innocently construed compliment to a stranger on the street and unrequited, undesired, and unappreciated gender-based street harassment?

Before I delve deeper into the subject, I'd like to reaffirm that I can only account and express the experiences and opinions I have about street harassment from my personal perspective point. I want to emphasize this as not trying to explain all men or women's views or opinions on this and I invite any alternative opinions and experiences on the subject. In fact, in terms of gender-equality, I've grown up in relatively comfortable circumstances compared to many women's position in the world. Raised comfortably in France, a country that ranks 22nd on the Human Development Index for Gender Equality, I never grew up feeling that I couldn't accomplish anything that my male class-mates could, albeit that they would maybe beat me at a race. I grew up with little restrictions being placed on me due to my gender, being allowed to freely go out, move, interact with other girls or boys, and so forth. At the time, mainly due to a childish naivite, I didn't necessarily understand the more deeply ingrained social realities that differentiated me from my male counterparts , the ways that even from my birth and childhood, society would have a completely different set of expectations for us.

The street - and other public urban spaces - became my first experience of my own womanhood and what this meant for others; it was through the accepted social rituals of big city life that I began to understand that being a girl or a woman implied a different set of behavioural patterns than that of boys and men. The first accepted fact was that as a girl, my presence - especially alone and at nights- on streets constitute a constant risk. That due to this, I had to be careful with what I wore outside, with how I behaved myself, with whom I walked with, with the amount of alcohol I consumed, or with the amount of skin I chose to bare and where it was I was walking to and from. I was taught to be careful when on my own, to cover my body and femininity, to always be accompanied at night, and to always be aware of potential dangers. I was taught that the danger I would be facing was men - not all men of course but some men. Some men, I would come to learn, did not always accept the boundaries and give you the respect you were to deserve as a women. Some men are looking to use you, abuse you, and if given the chance to hurt you. Some men will deceive you, follow you, talk down to you if you let them. Some men will flirt with with you and be unable to read the signs of your disinterest and therefore persist. And in fact, slowly and almost invisbly, the reality of streets being synonymous with sometimes undesired attention started to settle in to my reality - whether this be in the sunny streets of Rio de Janeiro or summertime New York to the chilling winter nights of Paris or London. I tried to outsmart the risk - wearing sneakers and extra leggings in situations I felt it might occur - but I started noticing it didn't really matter, that often as prepared as I would be it would still happen. Like most other women, I began to simply accept this as an everyday experience of womanhood that could not really be changed and that the only thing I could do is modify my behaviour accordingly to situations, to always depend on a fellow friend to get home in the evenings, to accept the over-bearing looks and comments that accompanied any visible demonstration of my femininity. Somewhere, and I'm sure I'm not alone here, the process had become so normalised that I simply accepted it as the 'nature' between men and women. Afterall, men have instincts and if I am as a woman, am to provoke those instincts with my appearance or clothing, how can I blame him right? Somewhere, I'd forgotten to be outraged, to not accept this, to refuse the disrespect.

It's often difficult - for both women and men - to understand the difference between a well-intentioned compliment and undesired attention in public spaces. When a video of a woman walking 10 hours in NYC (and the variety of comments she received as she does) went viral in April 2014, a lot of the responses (particularly by men) were around defending a man (or anyone's) right to approach someone in the street or defending the particular comments being made as not being 'really harassment'. They were just complimenting her afterall, right? Yet is it not a woman's right to accept whether she wants to have her time in a public space interrupted by a stranger? In the video posted below, an experiment that makes fathers watch their daughters being catcalled by strangers whilst walking around, shows how men are often unaware of the extent of this problem for women; the last father in the video originally minimised the comments, he agreed after-all that his daughter was pretty and that a man would want to express that to her, but after he witnesses a man follow his daughter for a few minutes, his attitude changes. He concludes the video with "Our women, our daughters, our mothers and wives deserve to be treated with respect". Respect is the boundary that distinguishes the compliment from the catcall; when a man disrespects a woman's right to be in the street, her right to wear what she pleases, her right to expose her femininity proudly or her right to walk on her own undisturbed. I would like to move away from an approach to street harassment that accepts women being catcalled regularly as an inevitable reality and rather move in to a direction where men and women can openly discuss what they believe are the respectable boundaries of public space interactions. This requires us to be honest and up-front as men and women with each other, to have an open-minded and understanding approach to the perspective of the other, and to be able to look for solutions that will stop women from feeling fear and discomfort in big city streets.

I want to move away from a world where 'Feminism' - and discussions that take in to account the inequalities that burden our interactions as both men and women - as being a bad world. Rather, I believe Feminism is the platform through which we can share our experiences, ideas, and find the solutions to society imposed gender-boundaries. Whilst catcalling might seem like a 'small' and to many 'unimportant' issue, it is an issue that affects a majority of women in big metropolises and that is perfectly representative of the way women are constantly objectified by a sometimes undesired male gaze. According to the largest International cross-cultural study of Street Harassment by Cornell researchers for Hollaback!, 84% of women globally report their first experiences of harassment occuring prior to them being 17 years old and 70% of women reported being followed. Despite often being invisible to men, this is in fact an issue that affects (primarily young) women on a vast, global scale and needs to be spoken about more openly and urgently. We cannot deny the need for Feminism - not a Feminism that blames men for all problems, nor a Feminism that excludes different women from sharing their experiences, nor a Feminism that judges its members for their actions - but a Feminism that empowers us as both men and women to move beyond the restrictions and unrequited realities of our genders. A Feminism that understands that there IS an issue where women are being sexually objectified and men are being brought up as insensitive and disrespectful. Let's stop focusing our energy on denying the need or denigrating the word 'Feminism' and start moving to creating a world where both men and women can feel equal and respected, regardless of the words we use to name the discussion.

Social experiment video by YouTube channel The Scene in which fathers are shown footage of their daughters being catcalled on public streets.

#feminism #womensrights #streetharassment #gender #genderequality #catcalling