#NotAllMen will even read this
If you’re a young woman living in today’s society, you’ll know what I mean when I say ‘street harassment’. We’ve all, or almost all, experienced the way in which the male half of the species can ruin our vibe or throw us off kilter by saying (let’s be honest, shouting) or doing something to/at us, and I’m pretty sure we’re all sick of it. I, for one, could happily go the rest of my life without having a man make kissing noises at me as I walk down the street, or tell me I look good in an unbelievably creepy way. We can all agree that it would be for the better, but the main problem is that men don’t seem to get it.
Yes, at this point if you’re a bloke you’re probably thinking #NotAllMen, but for a minute just assume that this is irrelevant and make the decision to read on anyway. It doesn’t have to be all men, it just has to be enough. When I’m walking on my own I assume as a default that I’m going to be harassed, and if that’s not enough to convince you there’s a problem then you need this blog post much more than you know.
Countless times in the past I have been walking around and encountered a man walking the opposite way. Occasionally, one of these men tells me to ‘smile’. Sure, this seems harmless enough, but it’s not just that he wants me to be happy. The first couple of times it happens you don’t think much of it, but after a while you start to get sick of men you don’t know ordering you around. No, I don’t want to smile, I don’t exist on this earth to show you my teeth, please return to the hovel you came from. Not only is this order rather annoying, it’s also low-key rather sinister. If it happens to come to pass that you don’t smile for them, often they kick off and call you a bitch, or get aggressive, as if you owed them it, and by not grinning madly you’ve done them an injustice. It’s a tiny little thing, but it’s symptomatic of the kind of entitlement that harassment is born from. If you’re still not convinced, think of it this way; have you ever heard a woman do this to a man?
If we traverse the more obvious avenues of sexual harassment incidence, we naturally arrive at the rampant phenomenon of men shouting things at women in the street. Sometimes it takes its direct form, with a male person literally just calling out to a woman to tell her she’s ‘fit’, he’d ‘smash that’ or requesting (demanding) she ‘show [him] [her] tits’. Yes, all of these things have been shouted at me. Regularly. I’m twenty-one. It’s been happening since I was 15. The first might seem like I’m being over-sensitive, but it’s the delivery of that one that gets me the most. Yesterday I was on a plane flying home from Berlin, and an air steward told me he liked my hair, that I have no problem with, same for if I had been in a club and a man had come up to me and told me I was pretty, or any other compliment you care to imagine. Receiving a compliment is not offensive, but having it shouted at you when you’re minding your own business turns it from a nice thing to intimidation. Again, in a club a male person of any age is welcome to come up to me and pay me a compliment about whatever aspect of myself he finds appealing, but this is only appreciated when he isn’t expecting anything in return, as if he’s doing me a favour by bringing to my attention the fact that the way I am appeals to him. If you can honestly say that you could tell a girl that she has a great figure and a) not say it in a creepy way, as well as b) be perfectly happy if you could then walk away and never see her again, then sure, go ahead, but don’t do it in a way that makes her feel unsafe, or makes her want to run away. A friend of mine on several occasions has shouted at a girl on the street, while I’m with him, and been confused/annoyed when I told him he should stop. He doesn’t understand how much that incident could have affected her because it’s never ever happened to him. Again, as I said earlier, once or twice I could ignore, but it’s the fact that I now expect it when I walk past a group of lads that I have a huge problem with. The same goes for men who beep their horns and lean out of their car window to shout at you when they drive past. No matter what the words he says are, it is never designed as a compliment. In his head he might think ‘this girl is attractive, I’m going to tell her’, but you’ve not actually made her feel better, you’ve basically jump-scared her then made her hyper-aware that she’s being objectified, and, I hate to break, that’s not complimentary. It makes it worse that I explained to my friend that that kind of behaviour makes women uncomfortable, and he replied to tell me I was wrong. Sorry love, but as a man who has never experienced this, you cannot tell me what makes women scared. If you’ve got a spare 10:59 then it’s definitely worth giving this video a watch, I defy anyone to tell me it’s not a big deal after seeing the point illustrated with reversed genders. If I’m telling you that a certain behaviour makes people uncomfortable, I want to hear ‘Sorry, I won’t do it again’, not ‘shut up’, ‘get over it’, or ‘no it doesn’t’.
Even more eerily, often a man won’t leave a woman alone unless she has a ‘decent’ excuse. The kind of excuses that might work include the following:
- “I’m seventeen”
- “I have a boyfriend”
That’s it. That’s kind of the whole list. I’ve told boys that I’m a lesbian before, I’ve even told them I had a girlfriend; a lot of the time this just makes it worse. The fetishisation of lesbian sex in the context of male gratification has led to a generation of men who seem to think that despite a woman having no interest in men, maybe he can be the one to ‘turn them straight’. The ‘underage excuse’ usually puts them off only because they’re scared of being caught by the law, and a boyfriend might stop them because in their mind you’re already someone else’s property. Basically, they’ll stop if they fear repercussions; either they might get caught by law enforcement, or some great big lad could beat them up. This, of course, doesn’t always work; a friend of mine told me the other day that her having a boyfriend just ended up with the boy hitting on her telling her that ‘he doesn’t have to find out’, because despite the fact that she was not at all interested in the boy, he still thinks he has a chance to get somewhere. The fact that we as young women have to have a list of pre-prepared excuses in our heads in the first place is a horrible and frightening thought, because god forbid we tell them straight that we simply do not want to talk to them, we as young women (and older women, too) know all too well that there is a high probability that the male in question could easily become violent. In certain national studies domestic abuse statistics show that up to 70% of women have experienced sexual or physical violence within a relationship, and that’s not including incidents in which the victim and perpetrator were not romantically involved.
A recent study by the Harvard Business Review found that millennial men are much less likely to think of women as their equals that their fathers, contrary to popular belief. It is generally assumed that overall this generation have a much more progressive outlook on a number of topics, but in reality “41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older” and “three-quarters of Millennial women anticipate that their careers will be at least as important as their partners … half the men in their generation expect that their own careers will take priority”. An article written by Townhall columnist John Hawkins in October 2015 sums up my argument perfectly, when it opens with the following words:
Men have it rougher in America than most people realize. In part, that’s because they’re one of the few groups (along with white people, conservatives and Christians) it’s cool to crap on at every opportunity. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a non-stop assault on masculinity in America.
As I’ve said before, it is not every man who is guilty of this, but if you allow yourself to act like you’ve never been a perpetrator of this kind of behaviour in any of its facets, rather than examining your own actions with a fine tooth-comb, you are disrespecting every woman who has ever felt unsafe as a result of the way a man has treated her. If you’re wondering why she flinches when you walk past her at less than a metre’s distance, take a second to think about every time you’ve seen sexual harassment happen around you and you’ve not taken it upon yourself to say anything against it. It’s a sad fact of the matter that if you are not part of the solution then you are, passively, a part of the problem. It’s not just a woman’s problem if she feels like men pose a threat to her, and if it takes someone to say “imagine if that was your mother/daughter” to make you realise you find it abhorrent then it’s about time you made a conscious effort to fix the problem. No, it might not be all men, but how am I supposed to know that you’re not one of the bad guys? I’m sick of walking home at night and tensing up when a car drives past, I don’t want to have to tell my future daughters to ‘be careful’ if they should go on a date, I want to feel secure in the knowledge that I could say anything to any man without the ever-looming possibility that I might be subjected to some form of violence ringing like a funeral bell in the caverns of my ears. Sexual harassment harms men and women, even more so those who lie in between (or indeed completely outside of gender), so why does it always have to be the women who are the most outraged at this kind of behaviour. It’s no longer permissible to turn a blind eye when safety is threatened by sexual harassment, it’s high time we all turned an eye inward and looked at how we might be complicit, and the sooner we do that the sooner we can see it off for good.
