Comments on: Street Harassment, or ‘How I Learned to Stop Loving Cat Noises When They Come from Creepy Dudes’

By: Miranda

Miranda — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:04:40 +0000

In reply to Russell. So basically everyone should avoid being dickish. But I think some guys who catcall don't even think about it, or class it as dickish. They think they're "appreciating the goods" which is a problem because, well, I am not up for that. Nor am I goods. But when they think they're being jokey, flirty or even friendly, it's hard to get through.

By: Miranda

Miranda — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:24:09 +0000

In reply to Russell.

I think the specific issue with gendered street harassment is that it uses gendered language in a way which also infers that the woman is there as a sexual commodity, rather than solely as a target of abuse. This is why it’s difficult to tackle and is treated on blogs like this one with a degree of specificity – it is often insidiously “appreciative”, which other forms of abuse aren’t – when you cycle people aren’t going to offer the excuse that they were “just being nice”, right?

This is not to say that you don’t suffer, or to compare suffering levels (a waste of time for all!) but just to explain why I think the feminist reaction to ‘street harassment’ is levelled in specific terms.

Homophobic, sexist, trans*phobic abuse etc often all come about because of the same horrible patriarchal (or kyriarchal if you prefer as this also expands it further into race and class) rule-set. It happens, as you say, because of objections to deviation from a favoured form (be it white, cis, male, straight, thin, some or all of the above), yes. And none of it is nice. I’ve had “nice tits” followed by “are you gay or something then?” which I think neatly illustrates the *interrelated* nasty power structures at play.

But it’s not all the same thing, too. Here is Markgraf on harassment post-slutwalk – http://www.badreputation.org.uk/2011/06/21/slutwalk-where-are-we/ – this was not a “flirtatious/threatening” catcall, it was an invasive interrogation and it became full-on scary bullying.

However, I think it’s worth saying that the gendered harassment of the sort Hannah is noting, which is different in tone to the above example, does happen, and is no less gendered and disturbing because it happens to other people in different (even more serious) forms.

To conclude, I do agree that these forms cross over and stuff and reflect a bunch of intersecting power structures, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t talk about that!

By: Russell

Russell — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:11:33 +0000

I felt that it was appropriate to comment to point out that street harassment of different kinds isn’t necessarily restricted just to women, without having any intent of derailing the discussion. I’m relatively frequently subjected to similar “drive-by shouting” when out cycling. No doubt this is sadly a more frequent experience for women, but I feel that it does reveal that what is actually under attack here is not simply the state of being female but any perceived deviation from a SWM norm, of which being a motorist is taken as being part of. Being a cyclist, walking while fat, or being female are all “deviations” from this standard which render the victim vulnerable to harassment of this kind. I said above that it wasn’t my intention to derail, and I hope this isn’t taken that way, but I wanted to speak up to show how experiences can be shared.

(there was supposed to be something else about how feminism is wonderful because it highlights problems that affect women as well as other people but I couldn’t make it not sound massively patronising and sexist so I’ll just leave this here instead and walk off mumbling)