Street Harassment Makes Me Feel Like a Tourist
Crosswalks are rare in Bangkok.
Less rare, for a foreigner at least, is the feeling that one is about to choose between being run over or performing a Vin Diesel-like somersault over the front of an oncoming car. After a week in Bangkok, I was walking back to my hostel and thinking about having survived another day as a pedestrian, when I realized that I’d experienced no street harassment anywhere in the city.
Harassment is too familiar at home.
I had been dressing only slightly more modestly than I do on commute days in the United States. I’d taken public transportation, passed by construction sites, and woven through crowded markets. Still, my main problem had been crossing the street, not appearing as a woman.
The same held true at night. People wanted to show me the right way to eat sticky rice and tell me when to walk through an intersection, but there was no leering, no invasive questions, no comments about how I walked or smiled.
I started thinking about how street harassment can make someone feel like a tourist in their own city.
While walking around a Bangkok tourist mecca, the Grand Palace, I noticed that everything anyone said to me — “Madame, are you hungry?”; “Where are you from?”; “Do you want a tour of the old city?” — was because I was a tourist.
I knew I was lucky to be a tourist in the first place. But there was something off-putting about walking around the Grand Palace and feeling seen as a tourist and only a tourist.
This way of being seen as a tourist who might spend money at any moment provided a script for my interactions with locals. When people communicated with me, the script involved them offering travel-related services for me to consume.
Attempts to bond with someone over a cute baby, an overheard radio lyric or a fashion mishap were not part of the script.
My awareness of these roles made me walk like someone getting through a place rather than being in it: sunglasses on, gazing straight ahead, and humming too loudly to hear the noise of the street.
At worst, these acts of self-isolation bring on a leaden feeling of loneliness.
The experience of street harassment in Berkeley is similar in some ways to being treated like a tourist, but without the privileges of travelling or the sense that one can always return home and become just a stranger on the street.
Recently, I was at the 19th Street Oakland BART station after a perfect morning that involved the Oakland Museum of California (on the free day) and a pile of dumplings in Chinatown. My smile bordered on aggressive. I momentarily made eye contact with a guy who was waiting for the same train, and something about the look he gave me made me decide to walk down the platform to get into another car. There was a quickening in his eyes and a flicker of lip movement that suggested a misinterpretation of our eye contact.
He followed me into the other car and sat about six rows away, facing me. He watched me the whole train ride. I tried to keep my gaze down. By Ashby, my home stop, I was holding my arms and shoulders in a tense bundle. Two blocks from the station, I turned around and saw that the man was about 100 feet away and still following me. I changed my route so that I’d end up in a grocery store instead of home. By the time I’d entered Berkeley Bowl, I had to fight off a familiar, full-body sadness. I’d lost him, but the feeling lingered.
The grocery store was the right place to go for more reasons than its safety. Talking to a stranger about tomatoes in the bargain bin seemed a natural antidote to being followed.
Urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote about how the life of a city can be measured by the micro-interactions that strangers share on the sidewalk. She had in mind everything from admiring people’s pets and asking for directions to simply exchanging morning greetings. These interactions depend on something that feels impossible in the case of the tourist outside the Grand Palace or the woman harassed on the street corner. Signalling that you share a community with others involves a simple but hard to define practice: making others feel like you see them just as people going about their lives in a place that you share.
In this and other experiences of harassment, I feel myself being reduced to one small part of my identity — a woman in a certain age range — rather than a person who is a worker, student, appreciator-of-babies and fellow city-dweller.
This sense that people are interacting with you on the basis of one part of your identity rather than as just another human on the street is not unique to the female experience of street harassment. Many interactions involving discrimination have to do with being treated as a person defined solely by a single feature of identity rather than as just another stranger going about her/his life on the street.
I often respond to street harassment by taking on a made-up persona. When I started commuting alone regularly, I became convinced that there was some tendency in America to sexualize angry women rather than sad women. With that in mind, I came up with this story about being someone whose fiancé, a soldier, had recently been killed. (Nicholas Sparks and other proponents of formulaic hetero-love stories, rejoice.) I got into the habit of conjuring the story and taking on the life of this other woman when I met the eyes of someone who’d harassed me.
Creating a new persona is a cliché of being a tourist. With no past and no person or community you’re accountable to, pretending to be someone else makes sense. Street harassment does more than just make me feel seen like a tourist.
It actually makes me more inclined to behave like one in my own town.
[Thanks for reading. This story originally appeared on ripple.co. If you like what you read, please check out more of our stories.]
