"Please realize that a few hurt feelings on your part are nothing..."

[tim]

"...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...

Poll #1759

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%)

Comments

[lindseykuper]

I'm vacillating between "It's not quite that bad for me, but close" and "a few whistles here and there".

I've had a guy come up to me at a coffee shop, sit at my table, and ask me questions for half an hour when I was trying to work. It was extraordinarily fucking annoying, but not what I'd call frightening. He didn't try to touch me.

I used to walk to work in Chicago through a neighborhood where there were lots of trucks being unloaded every morning, and I would get whistled at and catcalled every morning by the guys unloading the trucks. It was especially bad if I was wearing feminine shoes. On the other hand, I have fond memories of the truck guy who would actually say "Good morning!" to me, and I was sorry when I no longer saw him in the mornings because I'd had to start walking on the other side of the street since his colleagues had gotten unbearable. But again, this was all annoying, but not scary.