When a compliment isn’t a compliment:
Thoughts on street harassment
Imagine you’re back in college and working on a term paper at the library. You asked a friend to review it for you once you finish the first draft, and then you’ll ship it off to your professor for her official verdict. But as you’re pecking away, someone walks up by and starts reading over your shoulder, offering some color commentary:
“Oooh that’s a great font! The formatting looks so good!”
“You should use the Oxford comma. It will make you seem smarter.”
“Goddamn you are smart! Want to come study with me some time? You are so smart! Come on, join my study group!”
And then throughout the course of the evening, three other people pop up behind you and offer their own variations of that feedback.
You wanted to hear what a couple people thought about your paper (and, really, by extension your intellectual abilities), but you didn’t ask for, want, or need the feedback of these strangers. You find it distracting. You find it completely unhelpful, because they’ve only glanced superficially at one page over your shoulder, but haven’t pored through the entire essay you’ve spent days on. Yes, it’s mostly complimentary, but that’s beside the point: They aren’t offering feedback in a way that’s helpful to you at that point, or that’s based on truly knowing your academic work.
It’s probably pretty clear where I’m going with this.
Now imagine this uninvited commentary is about your body — your physical existence in this world, which you have no choice but to bring with you everywhere you go — peppered throughout every day of your life.
When my best friend notices my new haircut and tells me it’s hot, I’m relieved I got her stamp of approval. I blush, and get a quick flutter of butterflies, when my partner tells me I look beautiful. This is because these people know me deeply as a person. They share their pride when I succeed at something at school or work; they point out when I’m doing something particularly generous for others; they tell me I make the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookies. And sometimes they compliment my physical attributes.
These compliments all add up to recognizing me as a fully-formed human person. I have a body, and I don’t want to deny my fundamental corporeality. But as it turns out, there’s more to me than a mass of flesh and bones. And there’s much more to me than the individual parts of my body. I’m not tits. I’m not a butt. I’m not curly hair. I’m not a short skirt. I’m not a frown. I’m a person. Unfortunately, given that I am more specifically a woman-person, that can be hard for some people (#notallmen, but only men) to grok.
Women are time and again denied the ability to reconcile their body with their mind: beautiful* women probably aren’t smart; those who wear skirts of a certain length** aren’t stopping, if not outright requesting, sexual violence against them; the gametes*** chilling in our reproductive organs are a matter of national politics.
*imagine the world’s biggest air-quotes around that — “beautiful” in all the ways our culture has taught us to understand it.
**want to know just how long your skirts must be? well, first tell us your age, your weight, your skin color, the time of day.
***it’s not just the fertilized ones anymore; what form of birth control you choose to take, and when you take it, can constitute a political act.
Street harassment elides my humanity. It turns me into less than the sum of my parts. It implicitly tells me, day after day, leaving-the-house after leaving-the-house, that I am a body, not a person. And what’s more: I am a body, but I don’t have that body. It doesn’t belong to me.
No matter how “complimentary” (repeat world’s biggest air quotes here) or fleeting, street harassment can serve as yet another reminder that our bodies are what define us, and yet do not belong to us. It’s not about the content of each individual phrase impersonally thrown our way; it’s the cumulative effect of so many signals telling women that they can be judged at any time, at any place, for any one single piece of our overall being, according to a constantly shifting set of standards.
And it can make us feel really fucking unsafe. We’re told time and again of all the ways that our appearance (wearing that) or behaviors (walking there) are the cause of violence — mostly of a sexual nature — against us. The comments flung at us as we try to simply get from here to there are yet another reminder of our potential vulnerability. Not just our the vulnerability of our physical safety, but the vulnerability to fall into the pernicious double-bind of victimhood and culpability.
Street harassment occurs in that liminal state between where we were and where we are trying to get. We cannot pass through the world freely, on our own terms. Walking down the street shouldn’t require an act of bravery.
