This week has been a very long week for many reasons. I started a new job which surprised me in the ways I was not prepared for it. My partner traveled to Denmark for a one month language course. This is my first full month in which I am not seeing my shrink of nine years. And I have been getting an unusual amount of verbal street harassment. All of the men who harassed me were old enough to be my dad. Most of the time I responded quietly by putting imaginary blinders on like to the guy in his dad-van who said hello to me as I crossed the street in front of him or by keeping the blinders on and flipping the harasser off like with the construction worker to made kissing noises at me and then yelled. Those responses make me feel defeated: to avoid responding so as not to make a scene.
The possibility of making a scene made me feel safe when I lived in New York City. In New York City there are almost always enough people around to be able to form an audience. I am an actor. I know audiences. In New York City I would often throw my voice after a man who gave me a lewd look and address behavior directly when a man told me what he thought of my body. "Creepy!" I would announce to the street after a man leered as he walked by me. "I don't want to know that!" or "Keep your thoughts to yourself!" I would say when l a man told me I was cute or beautiful or "looked pretty good in those boots for a white girl." This response makes me feel safe because I publicly address the behavior and it lets the men know that I am neither ashamed nor scared by what they said to me because I address it in a loud, public voice. In the San Francisco Bay Area, however, harassers are often in cars or approach me when there's no other people on the street. Street harassment in the Bay Area feels much more sinister because it feels like a secret rather than a performance. When I am silent, it is the fear of not being believed by others in the court of public opinion that makes it easy to imagine that if I did challenge one of these harassers that he would say something along the lines of Angelo in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, "Say what you can, my false o're-weighs your true" (II, iv).
So yesterday I had enough of being harassed finally and addressed a man as I would have in New York. I was extra aware of how on-edge I was about men too. Earlier, I had been in the eucalyptus grove on campus, and I had just caught a Tentacool on Pokemon Go when a young man asked me if he could ask me a question. I said yes in the most unfriendly manner possible because I thought that I neither had the choice nor did I want him to think I was a prime target. It turned out he wanted directions to the library. I got almost gushy about the libraries here because I wanted to make up for the fact that I had been initially so hostile to him. I felt shocked that I had assumed that the sweet nerdy dude was going to harass me. But then, on reflection, I fear that every person who presents as a cis hetro male is going to harass me unless they act in a way to make them seem less frightening, like by smiling a lot and not checking me out.
Anyway, I was almost home and this white guy old enough to be my dad wearing a sweatshirt walks by me. As we pass (and as I'm staring straight ahead making sure that there's a good sidewalk square between us) he say, "You're beautiful." In the next beat, I loudly shoot back, "I don't want to know that from you!" I hear him muttering things behind me but I'm already muting it, trying to listen only if his footsteps are coming closer or further away. I jay walk on a busy street. When I reach the other side I realize two things: that that felt good and I felt finally proud and loving to myself and that an arrow had lodged itself in my belly and was focusing itself there. The arrow was fear. When I got home I discovered that my door handle also has a tiny lock on it, like on bathrooms in bookshops, and I locked it too. I sat down on my steps to take off my shoes and a Moment of Duh hit me. This week I have been walking much more to get to my new job and not once have been walking with a man. And I was so disgusted with the fact that men talk at women on the street about their bodies when they are not accompanied by a man that I sat down and wrote this.
