The truth about street harassment

It seems quite fitting that it’s currently anti-street harassment week, as I’ve been meaning to put together my thoughts on the subject for a while. Firstly I would like to say that I actually don’t suffer street harassment anywhere near as badly as I did when I was younger. When I first moved to London when I was 18, it sometimes felt like I was on the recieving end of whistles, catcalls and shouts on a daily basis.

I don’t think this has anything to do with how attractive I was back then compared to now, or how I dressed. I would put it largely down to the fact that I was much younger and more vulnerable-looking back then – more of an easy victim. I also think harassment is more common in London, as the anonymity of the city makes it easier to get away with. And I think these two factors tell you everything you need to know about the mindset and motivations of men who engage in this type of behaviour.

There are still far too many people who think that street harassment is just a bit of harmless flirting, or that you should feel ‘flattered’ when a guy shouts something disgusting at you in the street. Just recently, The Guardian‘s article on plans to make street harassment a criminal offence was met by a barrage of grumbling comments insisting that this law would somehow make ordinary flirting a crime.

Well, as every woman who has been on the receiving end of such harassment can testify, flattered is definitely not how you feel. Intimidated, scared and humiliated are more accurate descriptions – and the perpretrators know this. Not once has a man who has shouted at me in the street or honked his horn at me ever tried to actually engage me in conversation or ask me out on a date. These guys aren’t after a new girlfriend – they’re simply trying to boost their egos by making themselves feel powerful and dominant. They’re nothing but bullies, picking on and intimidating people weaker and smaller than them – i.e. women – to make themsleves feel better.

But even when people recognise the unpleasant nature of harassment, there still seems to be an attitude that women should ‘just get on with’. It’s like back in school when parents’ and teachers’ advice for dealing with bullies is to ‘just ignore them’. And largely we do just ignore them and walk on by. Sometimes this is because we don’t have the energy to confront them, sometimes because we don’t want them to get the satisfaction of a reaction from us, and sometimes because we’ve previously experienced them turn nasty and aggressive when we turn around and stick up for ourselves.

But that doesn’t help the feelings of fear or humiliation. ‘Just ignoring them’ doesn’t take away the nervousness you feel when you see a group of lads walking towards you, and it doesn’t stop you crossing the road to avoid them just in case. It doesn’t stop you avoiding certain areas or roads at certain times of the day. In short, your freedom of movement and involvement in public space is still curtailed and restricted even if you try to ignore harassment.

And, to be honest, I think the ultimate effects of ignoring street harassment may be even more serious that this. Because I just can’t shake the feeling that, if you let the ‘small’ things such as street harassment breed untouched, it just creates fertile conditions for the bigger stuff to grow.

Just last week a Mumsnet survey revealed that one in 10 women have been raped and 35% have been sexually assaulted. Rape is about power, dominance and the refusal to respect another person’s bodily autonomy – the same things that street harassment is about. If we refuse to challenge these notions – that men need to be powerful and dominant, that male sexuality is all about aggression, and that women’s body’s are public property – when they manifest in lower-level ways, why are we surprised when they then manifest themselves in far more serious ways?

There are a lot of poisitive things women are doing to combat harassment right now. We are sharing our stories, coming up with tactics to deal with it, and campaigning for better laws surrounding it. But I think the problem is that street harassment still boils down to antiquated – yet still heavily engrained – notions that male sexuality is all about power and that to be a ‘real man’ means dominating another person. As long as there are men buying into this degrading and damaging stereotype, then there will still be men who get a kick out of harassing women. To really start fighting male-on-female sexual violence in all its forms, we need to pick apart the cult of masculinity and ensure men reject its clasp themselves.

“Now I have all the dates I want!” How adverts have been making us feel shitty for decades

It seems fitting that I stumbled across these vintage ads the same day I learnt that H&M has admitted using fake bodies in its online swimwear and lingerie galleries. Yep, they’ve created a computer-generated body and super-imposed models’ heads on to it, changing the skin colour to match. Because even professional models are apparently not perfect enough these days.

But now feast your eyes on these retro ads for weight-gain products (I think they actually mean ‘boob gain’ seeing as all the models still have teeny tiny waists). See, the media and fashion industries nowadays use subtle, sneaky manipulation to warp your body image and make you feel worthless, but back in the good old days they didn’t bother with any of that smoke and mirrors stuff – they just straight out told you that you were too ugly!

Hmmmm, I can’t actually decide which is worse?

Images courtesy of Retronaut

Sexist online abuse: Why it’s not just bloggers that are targets

There’s been a lot of discussion online over the past week about the sexist abuse female bloggers put up with from internet trolls. It all kicked off with an article by Helen Lewis-Hasteley in the New Statesman asking female writers for their experiences, carried on to a panel discussion in The Guardian, and has been covered by dozens more bloggers and columnists.

Internet trolls: Definitely not as cute as this...

We all know that anyone expressing an opinion on the internet – male or female – is likely to receive insults and abuse of some kind. Some people take the cloak of anonymity as a green light to act like a prize twat and say things they’d never say to someone’s face.  But females, particularly ones writing about politics or feminism, seem to encounter a particularly nasty, sexualised, gender-based strain of abuse.

Sometimes you’ll get called ‘Ugly’, ‘Lesbian’, or ‘Hairy’ (as if not being attractive automatically makes everything a person says worthless and their opinions invalid). Other times it gets far more sinister – many female bloggers have reported finding rape and death threats in their inboxes.

I wanted to add my two cents about my on experiences of online harassment to highlight the fact that it’s not just bloggers that are targeted. If you’re a female involved in politics or campaigning in any way, be prepared to become a target. Personally, the worst abuse I ever encountered was when I was volunteering for all-female environmental campaigning group Climate Rush.

Vile messages were often left on our Facebook page, one particularly nasty one that sticks in my mind is: “You’re not real women – real women are to be respected, all you lot are good for is to be f***ed in the **** and left for dead in the gutter.” Once someone got hold of a member’s personal email address and sent her an anonymous message calling her a w**** and threatening to throw sulphuric acid in her face.

On top of this we had a lot of “Who’d wanna shag any of you lot?” and “You’re all hairy lezzers!” type comments, which to be honest I find pretty funny, especially as I’m neither a lesbian or particularly hairy (and even if I was, so bloody what?). I also think that if you’re going to use childish insults against me then you obviously don’t have a single well-formed argument with which to disagree with me. However, the actual threats of violence were terrifying. Knowing someone had got hold of one of our personal email addresses (which wasn’t publicly available), and contacted us anonymously, did make me question my safety and if what I was doing was worth it.

I also am certain that we received these comments and threats because of our gender. I’ve seen male bloggers and activists called many things online, but they are usually non-gender specific insults, such as ‘naive hippy’, ‘dirty hippy’, or even ‘d***head’ (yep, internet trolls are such wordsmiths). I have never once seen a man told he should shut up because he’s ugly and no one wants to sleep with him.

Looking back, I think the threats did make me more nervous about expressing my opinions about certain subjects too strongly online, and caused me to take a more softly-softly approach. People abuse and harass in this way because they want someone to shut up, and I’m sad to say that, for me, it worked for a while.

But now, hearing all the women speaking out recently has been really inspiring, and made me realise how important it is that we keep exposing these cowards (because that is what they are) and don’t waste our precious time getting distracted and engaging in discourse with them and, most importantly, don’t let them shut us up. If we want to change all those awful stats, like the fact 4/5 MP’s are still male, then we need to rally against this because I strongly believe it is putting young women off engaging in politics, writing and campaigning.

I’m not sure if censorship/ greater moderation is the answer. The internet is too wild a beast to tame, plus shutting these people up often adds fuel to their fire, causing them to shout “but it’s my freeeeeeeedom of speeeeeeeech, you evil fascist censors!”. I also think taking away anonymity is a massively dark pathway that we really don’t want to walk down. However, I think some kind of ‘naming and shaming’ blog to post abusive comments on could be good, if only to show other women who are receiving harassment that they’re not alone and to provide help and support.

Some people have suggested that the women speaking out at present are ‘belittling’ the abuse the abuse that men receive. This isn’t the case – I am sure some prominet male campaigners and writers receive some very nasty stuff. But this is a subject we can only talk about our own personal experiences of and, in my case, the worst abuse I have received is gender-based, so this is what I am going to talk about. If you are a male activist/ blogger fed up with the harassment you receive, then by all means blog about it, write about it, tweet about it – no one is stopping you!

All in all, I think the best way to beat these trolls is to ignore them, carry on writing, working together and supporting each other until we become a force and voice significantly stronger than them. Hopefully our voices will one day drown out theirs.

Want to read what other writers have been saying? Hannah Pool at The Guardian has written about the racist and sexist abuse she receives as a black writer, Suzanne Moore has detailed the harassment she’s received even before the days of the interwebs, Sianushka has written about the the various forms of sexist online abuse and the excuses people make for them, and Cath Elliott has detailed the horrific comments she was subjected to earlier this year, and how she dealt with them.

(Picture by Cali4beach, shared under creative commons)

Goldielocks vs The Dolly Rockers…

You might have seen rumours flying around the twittersphere on Goldielocks‘ beef with The Dolly Rockers (no, I hadn’t heard of them until now either), and now Goldie has set the record straight on her blog about what went on…

Ok, now I don’t condone shouting insults at strangers when drunk – she was lucky she was on stage in an, errrr, ‘upmarket’ establishment or she could’ve had a few handfuls of those goldie locks ripped right out. And also, insulting people can kind of hurt their feelings, yeah? But apart from that, I agree with every point she makes. I’m actually dumbfounded that, now us girls can get an education and become CEOs and whatever the fuck else we want to do, the women celebrated in the media are mostly banal, hypersexualised and praised more for their boobs than their brains.

There are loads of girls out there, like Goldielocks, who are smart and funny and using their talent and brains to acheive success and do something worthwhile instead of just flashing their baps. But they’re not the ones the media pays any attention to. No wonder those surveys come back with schoolgirls saying they’d rather be glamour models than doctors or teachers when every time you open a magazine or turn on the TV you’re bombarded with the message that the absolute most important thing for you to be, as a female, is sexy and attractive to men.

No doubt there will be replies of ‘oh but it’s empowering to dress up all sexy and get attention, plus they’re making loads of money yeah?’, just like the women who go to pole dancing classes like to claim it makes them feel empowered. Well if it’s so damn empowering, why don’t you see men doing it? The images of male power in the media are not topless boybands thrustings their crotches at the audience (they just get laughed at) but politicians and high-ranking businessmen – people who have gained power from talent, drive, ambition and brains, not from making themselves sexually attractive and available to the opposite sex.

Plus, the idea that being sexually attractive bestows power on you is a total oxymoron. Power, by it’s very definition, stands on its own, not on another person’s terms. Think about it: it is the person looking at you who decides whether you are attractive, whether they want to bang you or not. They bestow the label of sexual attractiveness on you – you don’t create it yourself. They decide whether you are sexy – the power lies with them, not you. The minute they change their minds – poof! – your allusion of power is gone. True empowerment happens on your own terms, not someone else’s.

But, having said all that, there is something Goldielocks gets wrong. She describes The Dolly Rockers as a band, and says they perform songs. I disagree. Watch the video below – seriously, what the fuck is this? How is this even music? It looks like Girls Aloud doing a Devvo impression. I’m guessing it might be a joke, but then again I’m normally kind of smart and understand jokes whereas I don’t understand this one fucking bit. Can anyone explain?

And now, as an antidote to all that nastiness, here’s Goldielock’s (fucking awesome) choon, Smash & Grab…