By Catarina Dutilh Novaes
Related to my post on the invisibility of sexual harassment earlier this week, here’s a video that has been making the rounds on the Internet, and rightly so: a woman walks on the streets of NYC, and a hidden camera captures the unsolicited comments and aggressive attempts at making contact by numerous men she runs into. Now, that’s a good way to make (street) harassment more visible!
Street harassment (of women in particular) is a pervasive and seriously threatening phenomenon. It might look like these are all ‘innocent’ remarks and compliments, but as a woman you never know what to expect when you reject the advances: will the guy get angry and violent? What is the best approach: be ‘nice’ in your rejection, be firm and tell them to f*** off, say nothing? In practice, it means that women internalize the idea that they are in constant danger when walking on the streets. Even now, I still catch myself constantly monitoring the surroundings for possible threats around me. (I must say, however, that there is quite some geographical variation in the phenomenon: here in the Netherlands I have always experienced considerable less street harassment than in the other places I’ve lived -- Brazil, Paris and NYC.) It becomes part of ‘normal’ life, so much so that we do not even notice much how heavy it is to carry this burden – one that we most certainly should not be carrying.
UPDATE: critics have been pointing out (correctly, to my mind) that there's an uncomfortable dimension of racial profiling in the video above (virtually all the harassers are black or latinos). For a more 'neutral' discussion of street harassment, see the video at the bottom of this Slate article.
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