street harassment

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.

If you read popular anti-street harassment blogs and media coverage of the topic, a pattern of perpetrator name-calling rapidly emerges, and some of the most prevalent terms you'll hear to describe the guys who "holla" at women and girls in public spaces are "pervert," "asshole," and "creep." I've always felt uneasy at this type of dehumanizing, knee-jerk response, and at this defining stage of street harassment, it would be wise to interrogate its purpose and meaning in shaping a new narrative regarding violence against women.

In the process of creating a "movement" to end street harassment, we must interrogate the full scope of the problem that ableism brings to the issue itself, the way the issue is shaped by ableist anti-street harassment activists, and the holistic effectiveness of solutions. If who might be left out of an anti-street harassment movement's framing and tactics fails to be a central concern to activists who say that all people deserve equal access to the streets, then it ain't gonna be a true revolution.

Before I ever met Transport Workers Union organizer Cheska Tolentino, I knew I was going to like her. Over lunch one day our mutual friend (and my Hey, Shorty! co-author), Meghan Huppuch, said to me with a grin, "You haven't met Cheska yet? Oh, you're gonna like her... a lot." Meghan and Cheska had been working together for a year in a coalition effort to increase subway safety called New Yorkers for Safe Transit. I was a new member of that coalition and was still in the process of meeting all the others. Any rave review from Meghan is good enough for me, and sure enough, when Cheska and I met, wouldn't you know I liked her? A lot.

A question was raised in the comments of the first post of this series* that comes up over and over again in discussions of street harassment: how do we establish (and maintain) healthy and authentic selves in a sociocultural environment that is hostile to who we are?

Okay, so the question wasn’t exactly posed like that. Instead, Alexandra complained about when men she doesn't know command her to smile, Franchesca wrote about negotiating beauty and arrogance, Danielle wondered "how much is them and how much is me?" and TFIsabel asked why some women are harassed more than others. In spite of their differences, all these comments have the common theme of our trying to figure out how to balance personal responsibility for shaping both ourselves and the culture in which we live with the responsibility street harassers also hold for these things. What I appreciate most about these comments is that they all point out that while street harassment is not the fault of the victims, our choices do play a role in constructing the environment in which these scenarios occur—therefore, we are not powerless to stop it.