street harassment

Here are my picks of the most interesting feminist news of the morning. Enjoy! And add links I missed to the comments. 

• An artist removes Barbie's makeup! [Sociological Images]

• Guantanamo detainees are still on hunger strike. Here, one detainee writes an essay on how Guantanamo is killing him. [New York Times] 

• The tax law of marriage encourages dual-income couples to not get hitched, but incentivizes marriage for couples with only one income. Does that make any sense? [New York Times] 

• Meanwhile, Uruguay legalized same-sex marriage! [Autostraddle] 

• Speaking of which, marriage is great, but many LGBT people of color could really use some job security, too. [Colorlines] 

• With some Republicans' reversal on same-sex marriage, the GOP is losing some of its homophobic base. [Towleroad]

• Here are 18 illustrated responses to street harassment, including a bunch of great comics. [Buzzfeed]

• This weekend in heartthrob relations: Justin Beiber visits Anne Frank's house and wishes she could have been a Beleiber. [Racialicious] 

• First to Die: On race and horror in Evil Dead.  [Feminist Wire] 

• Rookie rounds up the best coming-of-age movies for teens. Oh, the nostalgia. [Rookie] 

• Ooooo! Absurdly sexist Avengers shirts! [Feministing]

This is Anti-Street Harrassment Week, the perfect time to highlight this great subway campaign the group iHollaback launched in Philadelphia. 

Every city could use this! 

Until then, check out our list of ways straight dudes can prevent street harassment. 

Via

Almost every woman knows why strangers hooting and hollering at people on the street is a problem. More than 80 percent of women experience gender-based street harassment: unwanted sexual comments, demands for a smile, leering, whistling, following, and groping. Many men do, too, especially in the queer community.

This week is International Anti-Street Harassment Week—a perfect opportunity to engage people who may not otherwise be aware that this is a widespread problem, especially straight men.

Here are three ideas—and resources—for ways straight dudes can be street harassment allies.

Fed up with catcalls, street harassment awareness group Hollaback Philly has raised $7,000 to write, draw, and print a comic book about how all those daily "hey, good lookin"s add up to a major problem.   

Catch a sneak peek of the project below the cut! 

Having recently returned to New York from Detroit's Allied Media Conference and two stops in the Midwest on my nationwide book tour, I am feeling reinvigorated by the innovative grassroots organizing work happening all over the country, enabling participation in communities of support and healing. Being a radical activist can be alienating, from both mainstream society and those who broker power in organizations that participate in more traditional types of organizing. Coming into this series I was unsure of how readers might respond to some of my less popular criticisms of street harassment's framing, but given the overwhelmingly positive response, I end this series feeling hopeful about street harassment's future in the grand scheme of social justice.

The disdain in many comments on street harassment is palpable and the message they hold is clear: if you're a girl or woman who likes receiving overt sexual attention from men and boys in public, it's because you lack the self-respect necessary to throw off the confines of external validation regarding female sexuality and beauty.

When over 200 press outlets worldwide covered the street harassment hearing in New York City, the photo that accompanied the popularly distributed article depicted four construction workers watching a woman walk by. Despite the fine print reading that none of the construction workers in the picture were actually harassing women, their guilt is implied in the composition of the image, the fact that its accompanying an article on street harassment, and a widely held stereotype about construction workers' propensities to cat call women. Whether working-class men truly engage in harassing behaviors more than men from other socioeconomic groups is up for debate, but because they're stereotyped as such from the jump, the workers themselves and the women who pass by work sites are taught to expect the men to act that way.

I wrote in Part I about the problem of a "neutral" women representing all victims of street harassment, and in this post I want to tell a story about how I've seen this happen in my own work. I will also provide strategies that anti-street harassment activists who conform (in various ways) to the "neutral" woman standard can constructively use their own visibility to better represent the breadth of street harassment's victims beyond the traditional archetype.

In my last post I wrote about a few of the problems I've observed regarding the way anti-street harassment blogs and the media construct "perpetrators" of harassment. In this post I want to build on those thoughts by bringing in their construction of "victims" as well. Collective Action for Safe Spaces asked in the comments of my first post of this series for an analysis of the roles race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual identity play in street harassment, and I think this is a good place to dig into that more deeply. However, this will be a multi-part post because these issues require too much unpacking for just one entry.

Filmmaker and educator Nuala Cabral entered into anti-street harassment activism in 2009 with her short film Walking Home. Her aim is to use her artistic talents "as a tool to build understanding, share silenced voices and provoke social change." I spoke with her about what she's been up to during the last two years and what her plans are in Philly this summer.