Street harassment consists of any comment or action occurring in a public place between strangers that is unwelcome, disrespectful, threatening or harassing, and is often motivated by gender. While harassment, specificallythat of a sexual nature, is illegal in the workplace, it is still legal in the streets. Even worse, many see it as commonplace, often being motivated by a “natural reaction” to a woman’s appearance. A large part of this issue of a lack of empathy towards women’s experiences, and this is in part due to privilege.
“Of Dogs and Lizards,” is a parable on social privilege written by a blogger by the name of Sindelókë. This parable becomes increasingly relevant when discussing issues motivated by privilege, such as street harassment. Here is a basic summary of the parable:
There is a house inhabited by a big, shaggy Nordic dog and a gecko that is best adapted to living in a muggy rainforest. The dog often turns on the air conditioning because he is used to the cold and can’t deal with the heat. Unfortunately, the gecko can’t really control the temperature because she has tiny fingers and can’t work the thermostat. For the most part, she has to live with the temperature the dog chooses, which is much too cold for her. Over time, the cold temperature makes her sluggish and sick and affects her entire universe, and when she wants to do anything she has to move through the cold house. This gecko knows nothing else because this is how her world is, but she copes. Part of her has always thought, “hey, it shouldn’t be like this,” and one day she sees the dog messing with the air conditioning and says, “it makes me really cold when you do that.” But the dog just looks at her, shrugs, and keeps turning the dial down.
This is not because the dog is a jerk; it’s because he doesn’t understand what the gecko has just said. As he is a Nordic dog and the word “cold” is completely meaningless to him. He’s never been cold his entire life and he lives in an environment that is perfectly suited to him and his comfort level. So the gecko says “how would you like it if I turned the temperature down on you?” and he shrugs it off. But, of course she can’t make him cold, because she doesn’t have the power to inflict the same harm on him that he does on her. This is the type of pain he cannot ever understand because the world they live in will always be slanted in his favour.”
Most privilege is like this.
A man has the privilege of walking past a group of women without worrying about comments being hurled at him, being looked at suggestively, or being catcalled, at least not on a consistent basis. Often a man might think, “I’d love if that happened to me.” That response is the perfect example of male privilege.
This article is not intended to insinuate that men are to blame, but it seems that many discussions about street harassment result in men attempting to shift the blame off themselves, with everything from: “it’s a natural reaction,” to “she shouldn’t have been dressing that way,” to “you should take it as a compliment.” And while women harassing men on the street does happen, gender inequality means that power dynamics, frequency, underlying threats of rape, and impact on the harassed person’s life makes the situations rarely comparable.
Being catcalled while walking down the street is not a compliment, it is an act of power, aggression, and the “need to assert some sort of authority over women,” stated Pia Glenn in her article “The man on the street.” The act of commenting on a woman’s body reduces her to the “complimented” body part – an object. What gives a stranger the right to make another so uncomfortable because they “naturally reacted” to a woman’s body? Making unwelcome comments disregards them as a real person with values and emotions, and reduces them to a thing to be commented on without regard for the respect they deserve.
Most men will never know what it is like to be a female who encounters street harassment. Ask any female and they will tell you that they’ve experienced street harassment at least once in their life, and for many, they have experienced it more times than they can count. In a 2008 study conducted by Stop Street Harassment, out of 811 women, almost one-in-four had experienced street harassment by age 12, and nearly 90 per cent had experienced it by age 19.
The fear of street harassment is great enough that many women will walk past a group of men with their heads down, decide not to wear shorts or “revealing” tops on a hot summer day, or fear walking home alone at night. Harassment has the ability to alter someone’s life to the point where they no longer feel safe or respected in their community – to the point where they feel as if the streets no longer belong to them. This is an issue because it limits women’s ability to exist in public as comfortably as men.
What’s worse is when women have the courage to come forward to speak about their experiences with harassment and others downplay their emotions, often telling them they are overreacting. To downplay their experiences, even in your own thoughts, is a failure to recognize your own privilege.
Creating an open dialogue about street harassment is a positive first step, but we must go further and put talk into action. If you are a male, promise to never harass a woman on the street, whether verbally or otherwise, and if you see a friend doing it, stop and tell them why it’s wrong. The next time you feel the urge to comment on a female’s body, think about how it might make her feel to be reduced to a single body part – think about what the receiver hears when you believe you are being “complimentary.”
The parable of privilege makes an important point: sometimes we must recognize our own privilege, take the time to really listen to others struggles, and not just rely on our own judgments. Though we can all try our best to put ourselves in another’s shoes, no matter how hard we try to understand, sometimes we just can’t.
We must not only create an open dialogue about these issues, but we must also take action and educate others. Street harassment is still harassment. As long as it continues to occur, and as long as no one stands up against it, it will continue to marginalize women. That is why it needs to stop.