When we got on the bus he started doing it to some other girl….
I was standing waiting for the bus at the bus stop and the guy walks up to me. Starts asking me if I am a model and if I have money. Kept asking me how he looks. Touched my shoulder a couple of times. I decided to get on my phone with my mom to try to get him to stop interacting with me. When we got on the bus he started doing it to some other girl.
When I didn’t say it back they got more aggressive with their language.
I missed the bus after my late class. which was the last bus for another two hours. I decided to walk the three miles home on a Friday night. as I passed one of the bars a man and his friend walked passed me then decided to yell in my face hi! and when I didn’t say it back they got more aggressive with their language. I was 500 feet from my apartment so decided to continue to ignore them and get home as quickly as possible.
Street Harassment Workshop at USM!
Join us to talk about how we can fight street harassment!
When: Monday, April 16, 4:30-6:30
Where: Sullivan Gym Multi-Purpose Room, University of Southern Maine Portland Campus
What: A workshop about street harassment and how you can respond!
Call 780-4169 to pre-register (pre-registration suggested, but not required)
Free for those affiliated with USM, $5 for community members
“I felt so uncomfortable for the rest of vacation that I didn’t even go swimming.”
I am so glad to find this group! It helps to identify that this sort of harassment is real and should not be expected to be taken as “flattery.” I have experienced this crap since I was 12 or 13. Once I was with my sister and cousin (aged 11-13) walking down a road at night in a rural town and these guys in a car yelled out at us. We thought that it was over but then we saw them turning around to follow us. As we were crossing a driveway, they pulled in and we ran into these woods as fast as we could and luckily they didn’t follow us further.
Once I was on vacation with my family when I was 13 and we were eating dinner. This creepy old guy at a different table, who was with a woman by the way, made eye contact with me and waved. My dad asked if I knew the guy and I was so embarrassed I looked down. The guy made a pouting face at me. I felt so uncomfortable for the rest of the vacation that I didn’t even go swimming.
This sort of harassment has continued throughout my life and has always affected my feeling of safety and empowerment and I’m in my 20′s now. Since it’s been nice out it’s gotten worse and men have been honking a lot at me lately. I always return to that feeling of shame when I was so young.
Now I currently work with the typical men that would be street harassers. Constant comments about hot women and liking to watch porn and women working out in yoga pants. I’ve talked to my boss about it and she did a sexual harassment training. It’s been a struggle to stand up to these guys and I feel like I need to keep the peace and just work with them. We are doing stressful work and you would just think they would know better. It’s a complete culture of machismo and misogyny I am finding.
Strangely enough this sort of harassment doesn’t just happen to adult women and this can be very traumatic to girls just trying to grow up.
Spring Forward – Hollaback! Launch Party!
Come hang out with Hollaback! Portland, Maine, drink some $2.50 draft beers, and learn about how you can be part of Portland’s most badass movement to end street harassment!
in the grocery store parking lot….
I was putting groceries in my car today and someone just came up said “Nice ass” and proceeded to cop a feel. Needless to say I was a little embarrassed/offended.
Why I Hollaback – Carlin’s Story
I was outside the Back Cove Hannaford, loading groceries into the backseat of my car, when a scene unfolded right before my eyes. Two fellows outside the giant automatic doors hollered at a young woman who was exiting. I wasn’t quite sure what was said – but it startled the woman enough that she turned her head in their direction. This seemed to encourage the louder of the two men, who launched into increasingly graphic requests for her to give them even more attention. It was sooo cliché it was utterly dismissable – it was as if this guy had distilled every word, phrase, and grunt, and inflection that the “men-are-pigs/construction worker/street hustler” stereotypes have to offer.
Except this wasn’t a movie, or a coffee break joke, or an amusing anecdote shared by a friend. This was real, and I was staring at it.
Each and every one of us has a myriad of options when the street harassment card is dealt – whether we are the victim or the bystander. But what was really going on here? Was it a fact that these two men had transformed a woman’s innocuous visit to the grocery store into something she did not want? Was she appalled? Maybe she was even fearful. Or… was this perhaps appealing to her? Or maybe just slight discomfort. I didn’t know. How WAS I to know? But wait – how were THEY to know, either…?
What was apparent was that the woman had focused her gaze on the ground in front of her, she’d drawn in her shoulders and arms, and quickened her feet – scurrying steps interspersed with little gliding hops. She looked like she wanted to be anywhere but right there, in that parking lot, subject to a random act of sexism.
And the men were laughing. The laughs mixed with resentful chatter, now that she was getting into her car – damned if she did. Damned if she didn’t. But at least it was over. For now. This time. Phew.
I wish I could say this was an isolated incident. I wish I could say I had never seen this before, and that I’d never see it again. But that would be an outrageous lie. I CAN say that it’s never happened to me. But then, many of us men can say that. Many of us know nothing of the irritation, disgust, and/or dread that acccompanies such experiences.
If we listen to the women in our lives we hear these stories – sisters, girlfriends, aunts, partners, coworkers. It is an everyday hazard of merely walking outside in a populated place. Because it’s normalized, should we just learn to live with it? Should we – and by we, I actually mean women – accept that our personages are intrinsically on display for the world to notice, make comments, and feel free to engage us? Where is the boundary? Can one man’s flirtation be another woman’s harassment?
Aren’t we all just getting too sensitive and PC for our own good? Shouldn’t we all just lighten up and laugh it off? Look, I’m all for personal freedoms, but is a harmless little whistle or well-meaning compliment really an infringement…?
Back to the afternoon at Hannaford. I got in my car and made a little loop so I could pass by those two men. They were walking away, still yukking it up and I stopped and rolled down the window. A thousand things were racing through my head. “You two disgust me!! Do you have any daughters?? How dare you harass that woman!? I wish you were made to feel like a piece of meat every time you went outside! Fuck you for making men look even worse than we already do!” Some classic male responses, interestingly – outrage, anger, and violent retribution!
I didn’t actually ever say any of that. As a man, I understand the sometimes very volatile nature of confronting other men on their behavior. (Men, after all, get to fear men’s violence, too) Instead, I took the “I don’t know you guys, and you probably didn’t mean anything by it… BUT, I think that was some pretty offensive stuff back there, and that woman didn’t deserve to be treated like that.” They got angry and indignant. “Who the hell do YOU think you are? It’s none of your business WHAT we do!”
“Well, you kind of make it my business when you’re yelling across the parking lot. Look guys, I’m not trying to judge your character, I just think you can treat people with more respect. It’s about respect. Know what I’m sayin’?” They seemed to soften a little bit and the “eff you” rhetoric shifted to “Hey, man, we’re not trying to hurt anybody. Yeah, it’s not very respectful…”
I drove away under no delusion that I had “fixed” these men, or that I had chivalrously fulfilled any enlightened-man-to the-rescue quota for the week. It was about seeing injustice, calling it out and imploring the offenders to – at the very least – think about those actions a little more carefully. That sequence of accountability always begins with one’s self.
I hollaback because I have women in my life that I care about deeply. I hollaback because I know that I inherited an unjust power, privilege, and influence – merely because I was born male. I hollaback to demonstrate that men can be part of the solution! I hollaback because feminism and all forms of equality activism benefit humanity. I hollaback to help shape a world where we can all be free to be who we are when we want. I hollaback so that my future daughter can be valued and respected for the entire palette that composes her being!
In honor of Black History Month, and his recent birthday, I’ll leave you with another man’s words that were aimed at a not altogether unconnected societal ill.
“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr
Why I Hollaback – Laura’s Story
Three years ago my fiancé Chris and I decided to embark on the simultaneously most rewarding and maddening journey one could ever take. We decided to become parents. After months of research and me whining every night, we became the proud doggy parents of the cutest black mystery mutt named Bailey. A year after that we decided since we both LOVED getting up 3 times in the middle of the night in the dead of winter to take one dog out, we would adopt a
second puppy and do the same thing all over again…thus came our second dog, the most adorable little dachshund named Pika.
Not to brag, but I have to tell you, I am a kick ass dog mom. I spend more money on their food than I do on mine. I am about to pay 500 dollars to get their teeth cleaned (while totally forgoing whitening mine for my own wedding!) I buy them expensive toys from Planet Dog like a good Portland dog owner, and I pay 10 dollars each Saturday so they can play in an indoor dog park during the winter. And the kicker– I take them for long walks (yes, even in the winter, even though I slip on salt and sand!)
About a year ago I was forced to change the route of my daily dog walks. A group of men used to hang outside on their porch and as I would walk by with my dogs they would yell out things about my appearance. I couldn’t figure it out at first. I wasn’t wearing anything revealing, or looking like I was inviting their comments. But then I realized—I had been experiencing this same thing since high school, showing up wearing pajama pants and STILL getting unwanted comments. I was angry I had to change my routine, because I really liked the path I took on my walk. But I felt helpless; I didn’t know what to do, so my answer like many women’s solutions was to try to ignore the problem because I didn’t have an outlet to change it. This is why I’m so glad I found Hollaback! I now have a supportive community that has my back and a way to safely combat street harassment.
Sometimes I hear people sometimes defending street harassment—that it’s not a bad thing, I mean who doesn’t like getting compliments? I guess there’s some truth to that, I mean I like getting compliments too! But you know what? Street harassment is different than just getting compliments. Street harassment is invasive, it’s personal, it’s unwanted and unwarranted, and most importantly it makes me feel uncomfortable and fearful.
I am of course a woman writing my story and can speak only from my experience. I’m fortunate enough to know many great feminist men in my personal and professional lives who have told me of their stories of being cat-called or honked at. So I do know that men experience street harassment as well, and it’s never okay—but what I also know, is that the street harassment of women in entirely different. Because of gender inequities, because of power dynamics, because men don’t walk the streets at night in fear that they will be raped by women, street harassment of women is different. Because I can go outside in the middle of the winter, bundled up from head to toe, just to walk my dogs, and still be hollered at, I know it has nothing to do with my appearance and everything to do with men believing they have the right to invade my personal space, my comfort, and my streets.
I hollaback so that no woman ever has to put her head down when she walks. That we no longer have to look ashamed, or walk faster to get away. I hollaback so that we can finally talk about street harassment—how it’s not normal, how it’s not flattering, and how it makes us feel unsafe. I strongly believe that the personal is political. That when we all find a place to come together and talk about our experiences with street harassment, we’ll realize we’re not alone. That this issue is greater than ourselves, and together we can make our streets and our space safe again.
So, welcome to Hollaback, Portland Maine! This is why I hollaback. Why do you?
