Talking Back To Street Harassers: An Interview with Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
By Jaimee A. Swift
Hey, baby! You’re looking real good in that dress!”
“Why aren’t you talking to me — I said, hello!”
“Smile, woman! You’d look prettier if you did.”
Irrespective of geographic location, race, age, language, sexual orientation and culture, thousands of women and girls experience street harassment.
According to the nonprofit organization Stop Street Harassment (SSH), street harassment begins around puberty. While street harassment is most frequent for teenagers and women in their twenties, the chance of it happening never goes away.
Street harassment is a human rights violation because it limits a person’s ability to be in public–especially women’s–and includes unwanted whistling, leering or sexist, homophobic, racist and transphobic slurs; persistent requests for someone’s name, number or destination after they’ve said no; as well as sexual names, comments and demands, following, flashing, public masturbation, groping, sexual assault and rape.
There is one woman, however, who is leading a revolutionary art-infused platform to combat street and sexual harassment. Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is shattering these culturally embedded, misogynistic behaviors by encouraging women and girls to stop accepting street harassment; telling men and boys to stop believing that they have autonomy over women’s and girls’ bodies, feelings and emotions; and informing men that they need to stop telling women to smile.
A Brooklyn-based painter and illustrator, Fazlalizadeh is the creator of Stop Telling Women to Smile, a traveling visual art series that uses the power of art to end street harassment and promote gender equity and female empowerment.
First seen in Brooklyn in the fall of 2012, her portraits of women, composed with captions that speak directly to offenders outside in public spaces, can now be found in various locations, including Mexico, Germany, Canada, France and the United Kingdom. Taking women’s voices and faces, and putting them in the street, Stop Telling Women to Smile creates a bold presence for women and girls in an environment where they are so often made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
In honor of International Anti-Street Harassment Week, I chatted with Fazlalizadeh on why she started Stop Telling Women to Smile and how art, activism, and advocacy are essential to social justice.
Q: You hear about tragic incidents such as Mary Spears who was shot in Detroit after denying a man’s advances or Janese Talton-Jackson who was also shot in the street just because she said “no” to street harassment. Did these examples of gender-based violence inspire you to start this project?
A: Those were incidents that were a huge part of the project. When I started this project, I wanted to talk specifically about everyday street harassment and how I was treated outdoors on the street and the way that my friends, family members and colleagues were treated out in the street by men. And those incidences really range from smaller, more insidious moments like telling a woman to smile to actual physical violence and assault.
I think that talking about these smaller micro-aggressions that women see every day and the smaller oppressions that go unnoticed or are unassuming to the general public are important. Calling a woman “sweetheart” or “honey” or telling a woman to smile–all of these things are normalized and accepted as small moments that are not a big deal.
With this project, I was trying to point out that these moments are a big deal, and they also influence these dangerous instances of women actually being killed and assaulted by men because men feel entitled to their bodies. In doing this project and traveling with this project and meeting so many women and listening to their experiences, [it’s] really what composes the project as a whole. It really brings it all together when we talk about violence against women–whether it is verbal or physical–and how it is all related to street harassment.
