On Harassment
In response to Kate Spencer punching a pervert on the subway (high-five!), my friends Lia and Melanie piped up with their own stories of harassment. Here’s mine:
I was only 14 years old when I received my first catcall verbal assault. I was on vacation with my friend Menia’s family in Wisconsin Dells, a tourist town made up entirely of water parks, mini golf courses and, presumably, child molesters. After an exhausting day of riding waterslides, Menia and I were strolling back to our hotel when a fellow across the street yelled, “Looking sexy, ladies!” Curious, I turned around to check out whatever Melanie Griffin-esque creatures were behind us and only then realized he was talking to us. “I feel like a piece of meat,” I said. “I love it!”
I was charmed by this old pervert’s remarks because I had never been called sexy. Nor had I been called pretty, cute, adorable or even “eh.” I was, to put it mildly, a hideous beast of a child. (Quick visual: cystic acne made only worse by an obsessive-compulsion to pick at my skin, Holocaust-sexy thinness, and deformed teeth that could one-up even the most seasoned of orthodontic patients.) So yeah, even though I questioned the man’s sanity/eyesight, I was ecstatic to be called sexy that day. And when I moved to New York City ten years later, I felt that same rush of excitement when strangers on the street hissed at me or announced their intentions for my ass (tap it, smack it, put it on a pony and watch it bounce, etc.). I may not have been as grotesque as I was at 14, but I was still insecure enough to appreciate a drunk bum’s admiration.
That feeling began to fade, though. Every day I walked 12 blocks to and from work on a route that made Times Square unavoidable. This area seemed like the apex of catcalling. Where hoots and hollers once boosted my self-esteem, the bombardment of them soon made me feel degraded and, frankly, not very special. (You said the same thing about my rack yesterday, bub. How about complimenting my artificially straightened teeth for once?)
Within three months of this twice-daily sexual taunting, I went from responding with a polite smile or “thank you” (it was the Midwestern thing to do) to ignoring them to going nut-crushingly ballistic. I yelled, I lectured, I told them their mothers would be ashamed! On one occasion, a be-suited Wall Street-looking guy who whispered “sweet titties” in my ear as he walked past got an earful right back. I stopped in the middle of an intersection, surrounded by a throng of people, and screamed, “You are a disgusting pig!” I watched him run away.
Emboldened by my new take-no-perverts approach, I was a sidewalk force to be reckoned with — to anyone who pissed me off, catcaller or otherwise. Jaywalking to work one morning, I accidentally stepped in front of a driver who was attempting to park. He laid on his horn and screamed something unintelligible out the window. Without thinking, I gave him the finger. I knew I was partially in the wrong, but the protective monster I had created was on a rampage and wasn’t yet aware of its boundaries. The driver didn’t take kindly to my bird-flipping, as demonstrated by the manner in which he exited his car and verbally tore me a new one. A lot of words spewed out of his mouth, but the only three I heard were: “You. Stupid. Cunt.” This wasn’t the first time a strange man on a NYC street threw the C-bomb at me, but it was the first time it was in reference to my entire being, and not just the area between my legs. It’s a hurtful word used in either context, made even hurting-er by the adjective modifying it. It was just too much for me to handle. I burst into tears, much to the delight of the man, and walked away, crying all the way to the office.
I had been working at Stuff magazine for a few months, but the men hadn’t yet adjusted to the extra estrogen pumping through the office, so when I walked in with a tear-stained face and a story reeking of “lady issues,” they froze. They just sat there and looked at me, then at each other, then at the floor, waiting for someone to do or say something to make my eyeballs stop watering. The now-defunct Stuff, in case you don’t remember, was a men’s magazine best known for its photos of scantily clad starlets and the sexually charged interviews that accompanied them (which — please don’t take my feminist badge away — even I’ve written). So when no one offered me his shoulder, I figured that any man who works for a magazine that sexually glorifies women wouldn’t understand the disgusting nature of street harassment. I turned around and sat down at my desk, hating New York and wishing death upon its male residents. But after a few minutes had passed, one by one, each guy quietly approached me and apologized for that jerk on the street, offering me a hug or a fist to beat him up. One of them even sent me an e-card. In it, he wrote, “On behalf of all the assholes of New York, I apologize. But just remember that we’re not all like that.”
