My Latest Suitor: Tales from a Bus Stop in Camden

So, here’s a thing that happened to me the other day:

I’m on my way to uni. I’m early, for once, and feeling pleased with myself for rolling out of bed and into a presentable outfit and a full face of makeup with time enough to spare for a quick trip to Costa. I’ve still got a travelcard loaded on my Oyster, so I decide to take the bus.

It’s 9 am. The bus stop is busy, but the buses are running late: Standard. Without paying too much attention to the other people waiting around, I perch on the bench and pull out my phone to check Twitter and kill some time. Also standard.

And then the man I sat next to reaches over and hits me in the arm.

He’s about 65 and, well, large. He wants to know if I’m Italian. In fact, he tries to talk to me first in Italian. His front teeth are missing. But I was brought up to be friendly, or at least polite. I’m not Italian, I say, and smile, and go back to my phone. Conversation over — or so I think.

He hits me in the arm again.

“Where are you from?”

My go-to answer is Switzerland. He asks me my name — what possesses me to give him my real name is beyond me. I’m torn between profound discomfort and a strange, ingrained desire not to offend. “Heidi,” I say — repeat. By now, four people are watching this exchange from behind their smart phones.

He asks me what international school I’m in — he thinks I’m at high school! I’m at an age now where being ID’d in Sainsbury’s buying a bottle of wine for cooking with is a nice bit of flattery, but suddenly I’m questioning — what? My choice of skirt? My shoes? What have I done to transport myself back nearly seven years in time?

I could get up. I could get up and walk away, but that would be rude. This man is about five times my size, but he’s old and, I think, not very well. I’m sure he’s waiting for the bus to St. Barts. I could out–stroll him, almost definitely. And yet — I don’t want to cause a scene. So I sit put — and why shouldn’t I, anyway? I’ve just as much right to sit down while waiting for the long-lost 253 to Euston Station as he does.

He hits me in the arm again and shoves himself closer along the bench. A young man at the other side of the bus stop snorts out a laugh which, for some reason, I pretend not to hear.

“I want to take you out.”

I just blink at him, and then look back at my phone. Passive aggressive dismissal in the extreme. But he is not to be deterred. He hits me in the arm again and scoots ever closer. “Heidi. I want to take you out. To a nice Italian meal. You call me. Call me!” He grabs my hand and shoves a bit of paper in it. It’s got his phone number on it.

“I think you should give this to someone else,” I say, and try to hand it back. He frowns, and then his bus pulls up. He grabs my hand and kisses it — KISSES IT, this strange man I’ve never met — before he heaves himself onto the bus.

I’m left at the bus stop with a young girl pretending she hasn’t seen a thing and a young man my age who, now my Italian friend has left, is giggling to himself and winking at me in a chummy sort of way. A ‘well wasn’t that a fun experience we just shared together’ sort of way.

And then, I do something unfathomable: I laugh along with him.

I can still feel that strange man’s lips on my hand and yet here I sit, laughing about my inability to extricate myself from a situation that made me violently uncomfortable because of my own mistaken sense of politeness.

It doesn’t matter that I could have walked away. I could have — should have — been firmer. Should have simply got up, moved away, hopped on a different bus. But at the same time, at least four other people witnessed an older and larger man physically accost me in broad daylight, thinking I was a teenager, and not a single person lifted a finger to do anything about it. Including myself.

This is not by any means the most extreme form of street harassment I’ve been subject to. In the grand scale of things, this is just a drop in the bucket, and it’s particularly harmless as well. But ever since it happened, I’ve been getting progressively more and more angry about the whole thing: at myself and my conscious decision to sit there and put up with it, at the young man who thought the whole thing was so damn funny, at the man who thought that it was alright to hit me until I paid attention to him and proceed to insinuate himself into my space, all the time thinking I was a teenager.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about the young girl who was also at the bus stop, pretending not to see but watching it all, and I’m just kicking myself for not doing what would have been so easily done if it weren’t for my own internalised need to adhere to expected societal norms of politeness and propriety.

My Tumblr dashboard just turned up this article on Feministing.com from 2010: Why do strange men think they’re allowed to touch me? It begs another question: why do I let strange men get away with touching me? And almost more importantly, why do others stand by while it happens and expect me to laugh it off after the fact?

Here’s the thing: even though he was older, and probably quite ill, if that man had decided even to backhand me before I could move out of the way, he’d have knocked me to the floor. And even though I probably would have been able to get away, I still don’t think I should have had to. I should be able to sit and wait for a bus without being harassed. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume they’re harassing me right off the bat—but nearly nine times out of ten, when a strange man talks to me in the street, it is to harass me. And nine times out of ten, I look down, make myself as inconspicuous as possible, and try to ignore it. Because what else is there to do?

I don’t have an answer to that question. I don’t know what else there is to do. I can’t put myself in danger in order to stand up to strange men who may or may not take that as an excuse to harm me physically, nor do I think we should be encouraging anyone else to do so. But at the same time, I would like to reject the idea that we as a society cannot make a change regarding this behaviour. I’m making a conscious decision, if ever I’m in a similar situation — around other people, in broad daylight — when this happens, that I will kick up a fuss, because to let even small instances like this pass as normal in broad daylight, is to accept the status quo and, as that chalk drawing above says, to tacitly accept whatever else may be happening in the dark and behind closed doors.

Street harassment is nebulous — it tends to be physically harmless and therefore officially un-punishable — but its cumulative effects are myriad and serious. No one should be made to feel uncomfortable and placed unwillingly into a threatening situation. We have to stop allowing it to pass as normal behaviour, because it is abusive and detrimental. I resent the fact that I must second-guess every man who speaks to me unprompted in the street — but my wariness is born out of the pragmatism and self-preservation that comes from experience. I dare to hope for a change in society, where such pragmatism is no longer quite so necessary.