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"Please realize that a few hurt feelings on your part are nothing..."
"...compared to what women have to sacrifice to feel safe."
A friend linked to this post, from a woman talking about her experiences with constant, lifelong street harassment (and worse) from men. Reading it, I thought, "huh, this doesn't jibe with my experience having been perceived as female for 26 years." It's not that her experiences, or those of lots of women like her, are anything but real -- just, it's never been like this for me and I can't recall any of my female friends ever saying it was bad for them. Maybe I was just never attractive enough to appear on the radar of random male douchebags; sure, there was the time a guy at the beach told me he'd like to spend some time when me when I was 11 standing next to my mom, and the various guys who have driven by in cars while delivering shouted feedback about the amount of hair on my body, and the guy in a Pizza Hut parking lot in Baltimore who (when I was 16) asked me if I had a boyfriend, and when I said yes, asked if that meant I could still date someone else. But I have few enough of those stories that I can itemize them, and I've never feared for my physical safety whether while walking alone in Oakland at night or on a frat house roof deck (not that I've ever been on one anyway).
So I'm curious...
A friend linked to this post, from a woman talking about her experiences with constant, lifelong street harassment (and worse) from men. Reading it, I thought, "huh, this doesn't jibe with my experience having been perceived as female for 26 years." It's not that her experiences, or those of lots of women like her, are anything but real -- just, it's never been like this for me and I can't recall any of my female friends ever saying it was bad for them. Maybe I was just never attractive enough to appear on the radar of random male douchebags; sure, there was the time a guy at the beach told me he'd like to spend some time when me when I was 11 standing next to my mom, and the various guys who have driven by in cars while delivering shouted feedback about the amount of hair on my body, and the guy in a Pizza Hut parking lot in Baltimore who (when I was 16) asked me if I had a boyfriend, and when I said yes, asked if that meant I could still date someone else. But I have few enough of those stories that I can itemize them, and I've never feared for my physical safety whether while walking alone in Oakland at night or on a frat house roof deck (not that I've ever been on one anyway).
So I'm curious...
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 22
A question for women and people who have been perceived as women at some point: How much do the commenter's experiences resonate with you?
If anything I've gotten *more* harassment and threats than the commenter has.
3 (13.6%)
Yeah, sounds about right.
3 (13.6%)
It's not quite that bad for me, but close.
4 (18.2%)
Sure, I've gotten a few whistles here and there, but nothing remotely like what she talks about.
7 (31.8%)
I have never gotten any such comments or feared for my safety. Maybe I'm wearing an invisible burqa.
0 (0.0%)
I was too lazy to read the comment, but I wanted to click the clicky thing.
1 (4.5%)
I am a cisgender man, and will therefore take this opportunity to practice my listening skills.
4 (18.2%)
no subject
I do not remember much street harassment - perhaps because I rarely go more than a couple of blocks without my ipod (I like music and Visible Earbuds help prevent strangers from approaching me). So even if I am being catcalled, I'm not noticing it.
My main problem (and the thing that rattles me worst) are the Nice Guys who engage me in pleasant superficial conversation, then ask for my phone number. Which I always wind up giving them, because I'm too shaken to come up with a fake one or to tell them to fuck off.
I feel very safe. Some of this is core personality, and some is being from New Orleans but living in Boston ("my mom got mugged on our front porch, and we live in a nice part of town," as I am fond of saying). But most of it is because all my bad experiences have been with men I knew. The statistics and my experiences reinforce each other: the guy I have never seen before and will never see again is not going to grope me because no one else ever has; my boyfriend raped me repeatedly and any other guy who gets that close might damn well do the same thing.
(That's probably why the Nice Guys on the train freak me out so much. They're trying to force their way over that line between stranger and acquaintance, and they're heading in the direction that loses my trust.)
no subject