August 25, 2018 • 50 mins
A & B revisit the age-old question in this classic episode: Is Catcalling Harassment? Spoiler Alert: Yes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, this is Annie and this is Bridget and you're
listening to stuff mob never told you. A couple of
weeks ago, we had an episode about cat calling in
Paris and how there's a new law in Paris that
(00:29):
is trying to tamp down on the cat calling there.
And we mentioned in the episode an episode that Kristen
and Caroline, previous host of this show, had done, called
is cat calling harassment? We kind of spoiled it the answers, yes,
(00:50):
but still still a good episode, um, and a great
a great primer or if you have want more examples
of cat calling after hearing that, one great episode to
listen to and it's a good dive and the research
around how damaging it can be, Like I learned a
lot about cat calling that I found very validating for
ways that I have felt. Yeah, and UM, I remember
(01:14):
at that time when they when that episode came out,
it was around the time of that video that we
talked about in the episode of the woman walking around
New York for eleven hours, and um, kind of the
response in social media from a lot of dudes was
can't you take a compliment? And at the time I
was working as the producer on the show and primarily
(01:35):
video and um we made a video going off of
that the Twitter kind of thread hashtag where it was
like if this happened to men, and it was so
funny to do O, hey, dude, really like your suit?
Oh man, I once accidentally cat called a man. Oh
(01:58):
I forgot about this. I was in I wasn't. I
was in a car and I saw who I had
just earlier, had just seen a male friend. And that
friend has a very He's very tall and has a
very particular gait about him, like he walks in a
very specific way. And in this car, I saw who
I thought from the back was my friend. Same gate,
(02:19):
We're in the same you know, same look. And I
was like, oh, this is gonna be funny. So I
rolled down the window and I drove up the side
him and I said pull over, that ass is too fat,
and thinking thinking this is my friend and he was
going to laugh and it would be amazing, but it
wasn't him, Like what happened? I did that play out?
I think I just like murmured sorry and drow and
(02:41):
I feeled out. He's telling that story of like the
time somebody stopped their car and said, oh, pull over.
That ass is too fat. But if he's a listening
to the show, and everything's gonna make sense to him
if it if he is, I am so sorry. I
was not. That was supposed to be a joke that
did in land. I will send you a free shirt
(03:02):
or something. I'm so sorry. That's funny. I had something
that wasn't kind of similar happened to me, but I
wasn't around, so I guess it didn't happen to me
at all. But a friend of mine saw someone who
he thought was me and running on the belt line
and he was on his bike and he like pedaled
up behind her, and he said, what are you running from?
(03:26):
And it wasn't me that woman went woman called the cops.
I mean, that would have scared me as well. But luckily,
he said, she laughed like he was, like, you're not
my friend, and she started laughing. So christis averted hopefully. Well.
(03:47):
The examples of cat calling well here in this episode
are a little less humorous, unfortunately unfortunately, So please enjoy.
We hope you learned a lot from the gossic episode
on cat calling. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we are revisiting a
(04:10):
topic that we talked about in two thousand eleven. But
we absolutely need to talk about it again because there
are lots of conversations going on these days about cat
calling and street harassment. Yeah, because I'm sure you guys
are familiar with the Hollyback video that just came out
(04:30):
not too long ago, featuring a woman she's an actress,
walking through the streets of New York for ten hours
and facing numerous cat calls and street harassment from men
on the street. The video itself attracted a lot of
controversy because of the way it was edited to edit
out a lot of white men who were doing cat
(04:52):
calling in various street harassment things UM to feature mostly
men of color. But that being said, the video it's
self sparked a huge conversation online between and among men
and women about what is street harassment? When is it
just complimenting, when is it something scary? And what does
(05:13):
it mean for all of us at large? Yeah, and
speaking of Hallaback, which is the nonprofit that UM produced
that viral video, we first talked about street harassment on
the podcast when Halliback was first gaining a lot of
Media Attention UM. It was founded in two thousand five
(05:34):
by Emily May and it was started specifically to attract
more attention to the issue of street harassment and to
facilitate bigger conversations about the frequency of street harassment and
how it very much is harassment, and also give people
tools to fight back and also connect with other people
(05:56):
on this issue. And the fact that pretty much any
time a woman says gender, transgender and gay men as
well leave their houses and walk down the sidewalk a
lot of times that means dealing with what we euphemistically
call cat calling. And speaking to that viral video as well,
I mean, the response to it just highlighted problems on
(06:20):
top of problems. For the very fact that Shoshanna Roberts,
who is the actress Senate, immediately received rape threats. She
has alerted the police in the neighborhood she lives in
that this is what's going on. She these are the
threats she's received, so in case something happens, they'll know
who she is when she calls. Yeah, And to me,
(06:41):
that's I mean, not to get off on a tangent,
but there's echoes of what's happening with the need of
sarches in there too, in terms of like, so you
you call out a problem, people say, no, it's not
a problem, but I'm going to threaten to kill you
or raypio or rape. Yeah, exactly. And so another issue
of course with things that this video sort of dug
(07:04):
up is the fact that a lot of people's response
to it is just women, this is your problem. I'm
just trying to give you a compliment. You're playing the
victim role. You just want to be the victim. You
just want attention, and you know, making it more about
the woman and it being her problem than it being
(07:24):
a social problem at large. It's just a compliment. Learn
how to take a compliment. Um. And if you're curious
on the difference between cat calls and compliments, you can
go to stuff I've Never told U's YouTube page and
watch the video if cat calls for compliments, in which
you'll get a lot of examples of the differences between
the two. So first up, though, let's define street harassment,
(07:47):
and also offers some statistics so we can get a
grasp of how often this is happening. This is not
just something happening to Shoshana Roberts when she is making
a video for Hollaback. So street harassment, to define it
is the sexual harassment of typically CIS and trans women
in public spaces by typically men who are strangers, and
(08:11):
that includes both verbal and nonverbal behavior. It tends to
be comments on the woman's physique and her very presence
in public a lot of the time. It also has
to do with smiling. Hey, woman over there, smile, smile.
Let's see you smile. So how common is it? There
was a nationally representative studies sponsored by Stop Street Harassment
(08:33):
which found that sixty of all women and of all
men had experienced it, and among the women had been
sexually touched, had been followed, and nine percent had been
forced to do something sexual. I think that is a
different way of saying sexual assault. UM. LGBT identified respondents
(08:55):
were also likelier to experience it. One statistic they highlighted
was it by age seventeen, seventy percent of LGBT individuals
experienced street harassment compared to of heterosexual people. And it
also happens around the world. Yeah. Um. The site medium
(09:16):
got into this by assigning diaries essentially to women in
cities all around the world. In New York, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Mexico City, Berlin in Italy, in Mongolia in
tel Aviv, Nairobi in Singapore. Um And based on these
women's experiences, they found that the woman in Mexico City
(09:39):
experienced the worst cat calling. She had a high of
twenty nine cat calls in a single week, versus Tel
Aviv in Los Angeles, which tied for the least cat
call heavy locations with just two each. And there were
a lot of common hallmarks for this kind of behavior. UM.
It tended to happen most often during COMMU time, specifically
(10:01):
when women were alone, although men doing the cat calling,
We're just as likely to be alone as with other men. UM.
And the most common form of it just commanded a smile.
They just want to see a smile, Carol Lone. Yeah.
I used to get this um all the time when
(10:23):
I took public transportation to work. Not that I would
not continue too, It's just I moved and blah blah blah.
I just don't want you to think poorly of me.
I wish I could take it anyway. UM. Yeah, I
used to get this all the time. And what was
so weird is I never got it from a man
in a business suit. I always got it from homeless
men who were hanging out at the train station. I
(10:45):
mean that's my personal experience. I know everyone has different experiences,
but and speaking to that experience, some people have talked
about the socio economic intersections with this, because it's a
lot about not compliments, obviously, but it has a lot
(11:05):
to do with power and power over public spaces and
cat calling and street harassment. I should say, is often
used as a tool by people who might feel more
economically and socially marginalized to assert their power. And so,
(11:26):
in speaking to the BBC about why some men do this,
Katherine Zipple, who is a sociology professor at Northeastern University, said, quote,
oftentimes it's not really about the women. It's just about
the men performing masculine acts for each other and establishing
a pecking order amongst themselves. What's really going on is
(11:47):
the dynamic among men, and in that it's so it's
so crucial to this conversation to understanding it that this
is the dynamic among men that's happening in public spaces,
right because and I mean this goes back forever as
far as the conflict that occurs and has always occurred
(12:08):
when women enter a public sphere. I mean, this is
not cat calling and street harassment is not a new conversation.
Kristen and I read one article that was like, oh,
this is a problem that goes all the way back
to the nineties seventies, and it definitely has roots much
much deeper, and that go back much much farther when
(12:30):
women first left the home to begin with. Exactly pretty
much as soon as we began entering the public sphere
on a day to day basis, this issue arose. And
a lot of this information is coming from a self
Freedman who is a scholar in Stanford's Claimant Institute for
Gender Research, and she also wrote the book Redefining Rape,
And just speaking of some etymology when it comes to
(12:52):
cat calling, I thought it was really interesting. The term
comes from theater. It goes back to the mid seventeenth
cent a combination of cat and call, originally denoting a
kind of whistle or squeaking instrument used to express disapproval. Now,
when we get into street harassment in the nineteenth century
(13:14):
and into the early twentieth century, it went by a
different name. It wasn't so much cat calling but mashing
and the masher, both of which also have theatrical roots. Yeah, this,
Kristen and I got so caught up in this reading
about the masters. It is fascinating stuff and it is
just further proof that the harassment of women in public
(13:38):
spaces is definitely not a new thing. So the term
mash comes from nineteenth century theater slang meaning a sweetheart
or a crush, typically of a male audience member on
a female actress, and for example, in eighty two a
theater guide to find mashers as quote, masculine theater goers
(13:59):
whose why I old ambition is to attract and hold
female attention. Now, the first time I heard about mashing
was actually um in reading about sort of the cultural
history of female friendship. And around the same time too,
you would describe having intensely strong, like platonically passionate feelings
for a girlfriend as a smash, and they would also
(14:23):
they would exchange these um mash notes to each other.
But outside of that realm and outside the theater world,
mashers became known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century as the aggressive male street flirt who quote were
usually depicted in newspapers and editorial cartoons as well dressed
(14:47):
white men whose behaviors were more irritating and comical than menacing.
And there were also men who viewed themselves as lady
killers along the lines of a Don Juan and other
Natalie dressed gentlemen, because that was another thing. They were
often very very snappy dressers. Um. And there was also
the Parisian version of the flneur, which is the detached
(15:11):
male spectator of the urban crowd. Yeah, basically men whose
quote unquote job it is to stand around and just
watch women and provide their commentary as if they are
at the theater, and also attract their attention through their
through their fashionable clothes like Dandy's. And I think it's
(15:32):
key to note though that in popular culture at the time,
like those editorial cartoons that Kristen mentioned, it is important
to mention that they were depicted as white. That's key
because these are snappily dressed gentlemen. They're they're mostly harmless ladies.
They're just they're just offering you a quirky kind of compliment.
(15:54):
They're just kind of annoying. It's no big deal because
at the time the percept shin of black men interacting
with society white society ladies was painted in an entirely
different picture at the time, of course, like even black
men making direct eye contact with a white woman would
have been considered outright sexual assault. And so when you
(16:18):
code nonviolent mashers as white it says a lot about
sort of racial divisions at the time. Yeah, because um,
really it was age of consent campaigns and these antimash
or initiatives that were mostly focused to white men, whereas
black men were considered violent sexual creatures, they were the rapists.
(16:42):
White men were only to be feared for perhaps whisking
away young woman who was too young to consent or
doing this mashing, when in reality Freeman talks about it
was native born white men because new immigrants to the
country were also lumped into us as well and considered
more deviant and more of a danger to um, white
(17:05):
American women, whereas it was often the white men who
were the worst when it came to street harassment, since
they claimed the streets as their territory. Which does that
sound familiar, Yeah, exactly, And so I mean, what's going
on here the social context that we're talking about, like
Kristen said, I mean, here are white men who have
(17:27):
you know, quote unquote been in charge. Then you have
this influx of women who have always been at the home, immigrants,
where did they even come from? And people just have
other classes and backgrounds. So suddenly white, these white men
that were talking about these masters, are having to assert
their perceived dominance over everyone around them all of a sudden,
(17:48):
for the first time in these urban spaces, you have gender, class,
and race all interacting and encountering one another in new
ways for the very time. And along with this, not
only do you just have generally women entering the public sphere,
but you also have the rise of department stores, this
whole consumer culture that would get wealthy women out of
(18:10):
their homes to go shopping. But also you have female
clerks who would be working at the department stores and
other jobs being open, those low level clerical jobs being
open more and more to women. And so meanwhile you
have mashing sort of being placed on the more benign
end of the sexual assault spectrum at the time because
(18:32):
it was less criticized and say underage sex and coercive seduction,
but nonetheless received national press attention right as can be
seen in the nineteen and six Chicago Tribune headline what
can be done to rid the Palmer House block of mashers?
And I mean this was, this was There was a
lot of editorial space dedicated to drawing attention to these,
(18:59):
you know, men who stood on street corners and hollered
at women and made it difficult for them to enter
and exit their buildings. Well in women's magazines also started
advising lady readers to avoid eye contact with men on
the street and from doing anything to call attention to themselves,
which also sounds awfully familiar to advice that we still
(19:19):
here as women today. Um. And there was a nineteen
o nine article in the New York Times, um supposedly
written by a working girl from Detroit, or maybe it
was a letter to the editor, um. And it noted
how she figured out that the blank looks on women's
faces on the subways were their quote armor against the
offensive stairs of the New York masher. I actually out
(19:43):
loud when I read that, said, oh yeah, oh yeah,
oh yeah, because don't you don't you feel your face
go dead? Well, you kind of do put on your
armor sometimes when you when you know you're about to
go into a public space. I'd do it any time.
I'd start as soon as I exit, I drive away.
When I'm jogging and hit the main thoroughfare, it's sort
(20:04):
of like, all right, here we go. And I mean,
I'm going to be completely honest here and say that
I'm not putting on my dead face because I think
I might encounter some annoying women on the train or
some annoying women at the mall or wherever. I'm putting
on my dead face because I know that if I
make eye contact with a man in a confined space,
whether that's on a train, in an elevator, whatever, I'm
(20:25):
opening myself up to entering into an interaction that I
might not want to be a part of. Yeah, and
we talked about how there was that Guardian article we
saw that said women have been fighting against street harassment
since the nineteen seventies with the Reclaim the Night movement,
but women really started hollying back in the United States
(20:48):
at least in the nineteen tens. And we're going to
talk about some of the ways that they started fighting
back against the masher, smashing the masher. When we come
right back from a wick break, So picking up in
the nineteen tens when women start hollowing back. As Kristen said, um,
(21:16):
they really were not going to stand for these distasteful
mashers on the street anymore, and they took matters into
their own hands. Initially, however, the press had enlisted men
to help protect women, but women were like, no, listen,
I'm busy fighting for the vote and fighting for equal
(21:36):
space and society, and I want my greater mobility. I
want my access to work and leisure activities. I'm not
going to let men interfere with my ability to give
from point A to point B. And so I'm going
to take boxing classes. I'm going to take self defense classes,
and as evidence by a photo that I found of
a woman poking a man with her hatpin, I'm gonna
(21:59):
learn how to defend myself in general. Yeah. In nineteen ten,
the Women's Equal Suffrage Association sought to confront mashers or
male flirts or as they called them, obnoxious all glows,
and they wanted to appoint special agents as female policemen
to patrol for mashers. And this was actually how some
(22:22):
of the very first female police officers were hired in
the US. I didn't know that that's when my brain exploded, Carol,
including one here in Atlanta. Yeah, but it was all
because women really wanted other women to help guide them
through the streets and keep their eyes peeled for the mashers.
But in the meantime, a number of women began taking
(22:44):
up exercise because this was also the early days of
physical exercise becoming part of you know, the the healthy
person's regimen. But some women also took boxing lessons to
protect themselves against mashers. One this is Frank Gilbert in Cleveland,
took boxing lessons and ended up clocking a streetcar masher.
(23:07):
And she told the press that she wanted to form
a self defense quote Society for the Suppression and Annihilation
of mashers. Don't mess with Mrs Frank Gilbert. She's probably
met because no one even knows her first name. Well,
and then speaking again of hat Pins, we get other
stories of women and girls actively defending themselves against mashers,
(23:32):
and these really were pressed Darling's these stories people loved
reading about them. And what was so great and what
I think we need more of today if we're continuing
themes today, the fact that the tone was respectful, it
was admiring, it was supportive that The general overall theme
of these stories was like, yeah, good for you. Women.
Don't take that awful mashing from those awful mashers on
(23:55):
the street corner. You need to defend yourself. And by
twenty around three hundred female police officers had been hired
around the country at larger municipal police forces, specifically to
deal with this masher problem. Which makes me realize that
we have not done a podcast on women and police officers.
(24:17):
But hey, now we have our jumping off point for that.
And I mean, speaking of legal issues, women who were
victims of street harassment were strongly encouraged to prosecute their tormentors.
There were a few brave souls who really stepped up
and said, no, I'm taking this guy to court, even
though it could mean dragging your good name through the mud,
even though people could perceive it as being some type
(24:38):
of scandal or you sort of speaking out of your
feminine womanly turn. Um. There's just a lot of women
at this time saying, look, you guys, you won't give
me the vote. Well that was earlier, but I mean,
I'm not going to stand up for this stuff anymore. Well,
it was especially radical for black women to prosecute and
(25:00):
in court as well, because up to this point, I
mean and still with this too, and we talked about
this in our episode on the history of a rape
in the United States, how all of the focus on
mashers was more concerned and really exclusively concerned over the
safety of white women on the streets, because this is
(25:21):
when we have the prevailing idea that, well, sexual assault
can't really happen to black women because they're hyper sexualized
to begin with. And you also still have, you know,
the construct of the black man as the violent rapists
targeting white women. But there was a lot of conversation
around street harassment in um, particularly in black newspapers, of
(25:44):
women talking to other women about this, and so by
the twenties you do start to see more black women too,
getting more directly involved in this because can you imagine
at the time, being a black woman bringing a charge
and math your charge against a white man. That would
have been I mean, I'm sure that would have been
scandalizing for some people. But then after women get the
(26:09):
vote with the nineteenth Amendment in and with the end
of World War One, we see the antimasher movement died down.
I mean, it really reached this fever pitch and then
fades away as if it never happened. Almost. Yeah, but
it's I mean, the context of it fading away is
(26:29):
sort of ikey, because you you lose that whole idea
of chivalrous masculinity and men enlisting men to help protect
women from guys like that to the assertion of a
more aggressive ideal of manhood. Around the same time that
(26:49):
female flirtation becomes more popular and popularly depicted by actresses
on screen light Clara Bow and so you get this intimate,
this this prevailing notion that things like cat calling and
street harassment are almost just more comical and normalized because hey,
(27:11):
they want to flirt with me. Yeah, it's almost the
other side of the coin of we have the the
emergence of the new woman. We have a sexuality starting
to kind of become slightly more uh normalized in terms
of women expressing it as well as men. And so
with that though, it is that idea of well you
(27:33):
want this, don't you. So here you go, like, why
why would it be strange at all for me to
comment on your body if you're wearing clothes that are
more revealing than ever before and if you're wearing makeup
like an actress on the screen and you are actively
flirting with men, well then why are you Why don't
you want to be talked to and yelled out on
(27:55):
the street? And a still friedman sums up this this
transition pretty well. Uh in redefining rape, she writes. After
the nineteen twenties, the negotiation of urban space for the
purposes of wage earning, shopping, or flirtation increasingly took the
form of individual resistance rather than a social movement. For
a short period, however, the revolt against the masher provided
(28:17):
a political response to sexual vulnerability. Tributes to self defense,
suffragious visions of police authority, the willingness of black women
to report white men to authorities, and the reactions of
black men all contested white men's sexual entitlements. And I mean,
I think that goes back to what I was saying
about how great it was that newspapers back then we're
(28:40):
cheering women on for taking these men on. I mean,
that's on the one hand, women, you shouldn't have to
defend yourselves against these men. It shouldn't be happening. But
the fact that they are being vocal and active, physically
active about standing up to these guys and ended up
being cheered on for it. I mean, I think that's
an amazing thing. Well, and it's just so incredible to think,
(29:02):
in mind boggling to think about the fact that we've
been literally fighting for freedom in a public space for
a century plus now, since we've been in a public
space exactly. And so the question then is why why
now this sort of twenty one century antimash er movement revival? Um.
(29:29):
I think a lot of it has to do with
feminism and technology, kind of the the perfect intersection of
those two things. Because if you look in the nineteen seventies,
Second Way feminists absolutely focused on street harassment. They started
the Reclaim the Night also known as Take Back the
Night initiatives UM, which again you have the focus on
(29:51):
street harassment as more women entering the public and male
dominated spaces of women, you know, sort of the revived
idea of hey, we and go get jobs perhaps, um.
But then again it sort of dies down a bit
until two thousand five when Emily May starts Hollow Back,
which really started, I mean an incredible movement. Yeah, And
(30:15):
this is it's such a product of its time in
terms of being a digital thing, and you know, you
go back to women who are taking boxing classes at
the turn of the twentieth century and saying, I'm not
going to put up with this. I'm going to learn
how to defend myself. And then you fast forward to
the two thousands and you have women who are actually
snapping cell phone pictures of the guys who are verbally
(30:37):
attacking them, or, in the case of the woman who
inspired hollyback efforts, she snapped a cell phone picture of
a guy who was publicly masturbating while staring at her,
which she was then able to use successfully in his prosecution. Yeah,
because while while cat calling is not illegal in New
York City, it is in fact illegal to masturbate in
(30:57):
public just f y I UM. But by taking on
street harassment from the social media approach, it has empowered
men and women to identify and call out their harassers.
And Emily May has talked before about how um the
idea evolved to not just from uh, the that initial
(31:18):
cell phone photo, but also in conversations with guy friends
of hers about the experience of walking around and one
of them commenting, like, you walked down a completely different
metaphorically speaking sidewalk than I do. Just like they hadn't
even realized before that experience of what street harassment feels like.
(31:42):
And I think that's why a lot of times, in
response to these conversations, the knee jerk deflection is it's
just a compliment. Why are you victimizing yourself? But the
fact that it typically happens when you are isolated or
possibly with other women. But I don't think I've ever
gotten yelled at when I've been with a male friend
(32:04):
or a boyfriend, or a brother or a father, whoever. Um,
it's very specific in that kind of approach. It's intended
to make you feel vulnerable, right exactly, And I mean
in terms of perspective. There was the one kind of
social experiment that we read about where a woman dressed
up like a man and a man dressed up like
a woman, and they sent them on their way through
(32:25):
the streets, and the woman felt reported that she felt
such relief at being invisible for once, that just being
able to freaking walk down the street from point A
to point B. Whereas the man who was wearing fake
breasts and everything, I mean, he was dressed as a woman. Uh,
found himself, putting on his jacket to avoid to try
(32:47):
to deflect people staring at him at his fake chest,
UM and wishing that he had more clothes on because
he just felt so gross being stared up. Well, and
we heard from a gay guy not too long ago
wrote into us UM because he has long hair, he
tends to wear tighter jeans. And I believe we even
read the letter on UM a podcast episode a while back.
(33:10):
But he was walking down the street going home or
going somewhere and was aggressively yelled at by a guy
in a car who mistook him for a woman. And
he said that he was so it was so terrifying
because the person followed him for a little while and
he finally turned around and yelled back at him. But
(33:31):
he had never experienced that before. And the following I
don't know if you've experienced this before, Caroline, but UM,
I'll never forget being in Bushwick in New York once
with a girlfriend of mine and we were walking somewhere
and we were followed for a few blocks. It was terrifying.
We eventually ducked into a bar we happened to run
(33:53):
across just to be around other people. UM and and
he's taught talked about this guy, this listener in his
letter talked about how afterwards he was just so confused
and I was wondering what he had done to bring
it on himself. And the answer is nothing, because this
is an issue that has been going on in this
(34:15):
fight for safety and public spaces for so long. Yeah,
And I mean that's where that's where I mean what
you just said is where it's evident that this is
a problem of individuals. Certainly, it's a problem of the
men who choose to harass people, men and women on
the street, but it's also part of such a huge
(34:38):
cultural issue of of women's not only women's safety and
and men's safety too, but of allowing people to just exist,
allowing people to go about their business in public well,
and we need to I want to re emphasize as well,
the fact that a lot of these conversations are focused
(35:00):
on usually since gender women, but trans women are at
much heightened levels not only for being at risk of
street harassment, but outright violence and attack in public spaces
as well. And that's something that you know needs to
be addressed too. And it's not just something that's happening
(35:20):
in the US, even though um, a New Zealand camera
crew conducted the same kind of social experiment as the
Hollyback video where they had a model, an actual model,
go out on the street and walk around in a
busy place and she got a key cat called zero times.
She got stopped once for someone like asking her for directions,
(35:41):
And so it raised a question of, well, what's going on,
what's the difference here? Um, And and I don't I mean, honestly,
I don't know the answer, but I mean, it's certainly
been an issue, to the point that there are now
women only subway cars and taxi services in places like
India and Japan in order to shield women from street harassment.
(36:03):
But I mean, something like that causes its own problems
because Okay, great, you're in your woman only train car,
You're you're not gonna get groped, you're not gonna get harassed.
But suddenly, um, that separates the sexes completely. So a
man who would be harassing someone when he does see
a woman, it's an even rare occurrence, and he's even
(36:23):
more likely to harass. Yeah, I mean, it's it's definitely
been a huge problem in Indian there's a lot of
grassroots activism going on there to tackle it, as well
as just the issue of sexual harassment more generally speaking. UM,
I thought it was really interesting that in two thousand eleven,
Bangladesh officially did away with the eve teasing euphemism cat
(36:46):
calling um was known by probably still is euphemistically known
as eve teasing, or I should say street harassments euphemistically
known as eve teasing, and uh, the courts did away
with that in Bangladesh to categorize it as a form
of sexual harassment. And also in Nepal there was a
law pass allowing police to immediately arrest someone suspected of
(37:08):
street harassment without a warrant. So clearly this is I mean,
it's not just something going on in American streets. This
is a global conversation that's happening. Um. And there are
questions too in the US about laws regarding public harassment,
because the thing about street harassment is that the kinds
(37:29):
of horror, horrifying and sexually forward things that are yelled
at women. If you say that in a public space,
if you say that at a workplace or a school,
they're already laws in place to protect people against that,
but not so on the streets. Yeah, and so this
gets into the issue of what's called fighting words. Legally,
(37:49):
and in our country, we have protections against fighting words,
things like yelling fire in a theater or saying something
to another human being that create an unsafe situation. They
actually got their start as a way to essentially prevent
guys from challenging each other to duels and then killing
(38:10):
each other over an argument. And so while that legally
has trickled down through the years, no such protection exists
to women or men when it comes to street harassment
and the language used when people do harass people on
the street. Yeah. I mean I have a feeling that
that's probably never going to happen, that the fighting word
(38:32):
its action will be amended to that, but it definitely
changes the way I thought about how it operates in
a public space. Um. But the thing about it is, Caroline,
there are plenty of people who aren't men who also say,
oh my gosh, this is not harassment. It's still a compliment.
(38:53):
And before we close out the podcast, we do need
to address that. Um, there was a woman or is
a woman. She's not dead. Derrie Lawick, who kind of
became the poster gal of pro cat callers when she
wrote an op ed in the New York Posts that
went viral for kind of all the wrong reasons because
(39:14):
it was headlined, Hey, ladies, cat calls are flattering, deal
with it, and I'm not going to waste my breath
going over um all of her reasons why she enjoyed
being cat called. Um. But there was a study we
found from the journal Sexuality and Culture from two thousand
and ten looking closer at the context of cat calling
(39:35):
to dig into that question of well is it complimentary?
Because you do find, like in pretty much anything you
read about it, there's always a subset of people saying, well,
I kinda like it. I gotta like hearing that I
look good. Yeah, And there were, for instance, there were
a lot of comments under the video of the actors
who was walking through New York. There were a lot
(39:57):
of comments um, calling her a lot of dirty words
and saying it's women like this that are the reason
that men are afraid to come talk to me and
tell me I look nice. Like what's wrong with a
man uh coming in saying hello and giving me his
number whatever? And it's like, WHOA. These are different things,
but it is important to discuss context well. And also, Caroline,
(40:21):
there's the risk of forgetting to smile some days if
people don't tell you to. You know, I forget all
the time. It's not until I walk into work and
Kristin yells at me from across the room to smile
that I even remember. Yeah, I'm just trying to compliment
you girl, I know. But yeah. So this this study
that Kristen is talking about found that lower contextual threat
(40:44):
levels do have a bearing on how women perceive the
cat calling, the harassment, the the eye contact, whatever it
may be. Yeah, because there's this whole thing of harassment
is in the eye of the whole older in terms
to how um threatening it feels. And so this study
(41:06):
conducted a lot of experiments and highlighted perception variables. In
other words, the key things sort of influence that threat level,
and that includes age, marital status, sex attractiveness, familiarity status,
job status of the perpetrator, demographic sexual identity, and attitudes
(41:28):
toward women of the observer. So that's also looking at
how we as outsiders perceived the people watching the video
of the woman walking through New York for ten hours,
how we perceive that and whether that is or is
not harassment, And it really focused in on the attractiveness
and age of the harasser, as well as being alone
(41:50):
or with friends, as the major context factors for how
fearful a woman was at the prospect of these different
street harassments and areas they were presented with. Because there
is a sticky question of well, if he's young and hot,
maybe maybe it's maybe it is more of a compliment
than harassment. Yeah, but I mean when you when you
(42:14):
mix and match all of these perception variables, I mean,
that has a lot to do with it. I don't
care how hot the guy is, if he is, like physically,
if he's following me down the street yelling at me,
I mean, that's still going to be a high threat
situation that I'm going to perceive. You know. Yes, there
are so many different variables to take into account. But
(42:35):
um and and I don't discount that a lot of
people will say, well, it's not as threatening if he's
good looking, or if he's rich, or if he's driving
a Bentley or whatever, um as opposed to if he's
a guy sitting sitting on a stoop outside of his apartment.
But there's still I don't know, there's just so many
contextual threat things to take into account, because well that
(42:57):
was the thing too in all of these studies that
they conducted, even when sort of playing around with those
different variables, it never found like nothing completely mitigated all
the negative impacts on the recipient in terms of feelings
of self objectification, feelings of safety. There was never a
(43:20):
perfect scenario when it was like a guy saying something
lude or threatening or inappropriate and the recipient was like,
and I feel great, and I feel like a strong
and powerful person walking through the streets. There is there's
no no way you slice and dice it. Does it
(43:41):
not have a negative outcome, even if it's a small one. Yeah, exactly.
And also as I was reading all of this too
and thinking about the kinds of especially the more lewd
things that are said on or even just the lewd
implications that are made in very but mine statements, um,
(44:02):
and even just in the looks, you can just be
looked up and down and feel as violated as you
would if a guy propositioned you for sex right then
and there. And I feel like it says also so
much about in many ways how sexually backward our society
is when this kind of sexual communication in a public
(44:24):
space is often deemed complimentary and benign, whereas we still
can't get sexual consent in communication between two people in
private spaces, like straightened out, Like why is that? I mean,
there's so many there's so many layers. And also I
feel like too, the whole thing of well, if he's attractive,
then it's a compliment also leads to the question of well,
(44:47):
why is being called hot by a stranger like the
the best most validating thing for a woman, you know?
Like why is being called beautiful the the most coveted
kind of compliment a woman can receive in our society too?
There are lots of layers to this, so I mean, yeah, exactly.
(45:08):
And I think that the historical context of all this
is so important to take into account, especially if you
do argue that cat calling is totally benign because it's
actually not well, because it's not about compliments. It's about power.
(45:29):
It's all about power in the same way that rape
is not about sex, it's about power. And and am
I saying that all men who tell women to smile
are rapists? No? But it's still it is a fact
of it's an issue of power. Yeah, because I have
a hard time thinking that the men who yelled at
me to smile, we're yelling at other men to smile.
(45:51):
I have a hard time believing that it was just like, gosh,
darn it, you guys, I just want the world to
be a happier place at this train, but just see
more smiles. Yeah, And and so I mean when you,
when you look at that, look at things in the
context of that, I think that says a lot too.
And so it's really important to not just have this
(46:13):
conversation with adults and fellow people in the world who
get cat called and harassed on the streets in public
against their will. I think it's important to talk to
kids about these issues too, maybe not go into so
many gruesome details, perhaps, but to discuss issues of consent
and what is and is not appropriate. And we want
(46:35):
to acknowledge to before we close out that this is
we're talking about a very slim minority of men who
are doing this. But the reaction of that slim minority
behavior to the you know, the majority's reaction to it
says a lot. Yeah. But now we want to hear
from our listeners because I have a feeling that lots
(46:56):
of people have lots of things to say, and we
want to hear from every body on this because everybody
has a stake in this, because at some point we
probably all exist in public spaces. So mom Stuff at
house stuffworks dot Com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast and messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with you.
(47:22):
So I've got a letter here from someone who would
like to remain anonymous about our episode on Lady Lawyers,
and she writes, as a practicing lawyer, I can tell
you that shaming does happen in court. Early in my career,
I was at a federal court hearing with senior partners,
and because I had forgotten to drop off my dry
cleaning after work, I had to wear a royal blue
(47:43):
pinstripe skirt suit to court. I was the only person
not wearing black or gray, while not a single one
of the male partners who I worked with ever made
a comment about it. At the end of the hearing,
a thirty five to forty five year old male Department
of Justice attorney walked around to our two able to
the opposite side where I was standing, came up, stood
(48:04):
right behind me, leaned in and whispered nice suit. Needless
to say, I vowed that I would never again wear
anything but black or gray to court. While I still
wouldn't wear a royal blue suit to federal court. There
is a lot of theater involved in going to court,
and part of the show is playing to your audience.
I have friends who single male colleagues put on wedding
(48:24):
bands before trials because studies have shown that juries trust
married men more than single men. Like Michael J. Fox's
character on The Good Wife, I think most lawyers would
gladly alter their appearance or exaggerate a disability to sway
the jury or the judge in their client's favor. In
response to your question about how big this problem is,
(48:45):
it isn't a big problem because, unlike TV, most lawyers
and don't go to court so often. So thanks for
that insight. So I have a letter here from Lauren
uh in response to our Lady Lawyer's dress code episode.
She might not agree with the author of that last letter,
Christian in terms of staying true to just black and gray.
(49:06):
She says, as a lady lawyer, I am very conscious
of what I wear at the court. I'm a Midwestern,
middle class raised gal, but at thirty five, I became
a named partner in a Boston law firm through sheer,
hard work and a few smarts. As unfortunate as it is,
women in the courtroom do need to think about what
they wear and how they wear it, much more than
our male counterparts. However, this does not mean that women
(49:28):
should shirk their individuality. Wear a skirt suit that hits
just below the knee and a modest button up shirt,
but make the suit red. I've found that so long
as the length and neckline are appropriate and what comes
from your mouth is intelligent, judges and fellow lawyers will
respect you. I never wear black suits and I always
wear stiletto heels. Ask anyone in my court house and
(49:50):
they will tell you I am a force to be reckoned.
With lots of love to you, ladies, and if any
lady lawyer or hopeful lady lawyers in the Boston area,
I would love to help her six eed in any
way I can. So thank you, Lauren, and thanks to
everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot com is our email address, and for links
to all of our social media as well as all
(50:10):
of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one with
links to our sources so you can read all about
the history of smashing the mashers. Head on over to
stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com.
Hi, this is Annie and this is Bridget and you're
listening to stuff mob never told you. A couple of
weeks ago, we had an episode about cat calling in
Paris and how there's a new law in Paris that
(00:29):
is trying to tamp down on the cat calling there.
And we mentioned in the episode an episode that Kristen
and Caroline, previous host of this show, had done, called
is cat calling harassment? We kind of spoiled it the answers, yes,
(00:50):
but still still a good episode, um, and a great
a great primer or if you have want more examples
of cat calling after hearing that, one great episode to
listen to and it's a good dive and the research
around how damaging it can be, Like I learned a
lot about cat calling that I found very validating for
ways that I have felt. Yeah, and UM, I remember
(01:14):
at that time when they when that episode came out,
it was around the time of that video that we
talked about in the episode of the woman walking around
New York for eleven hours, and um, kind of the
response in social media from a lot of dudes was
can't you take a compliment? And at the time I
was working as the producer on the show and primarily
(01:35):
video and um we made a video going off of
that the Twitter kind of thread hashtag where it was
like if this happened to men, and it was so
funny to do O, hey, dude, really like your suit?
Oh man, I once accidentally cat called a man. Oh
(01:58):
I forgot about this. I was in I wasn't. I
was in a car and I saw who I had
just earlier, had just seen a male friend. And that
friend has a very He's very tall and has a
very particular gait about him, like he walks in a
very specific way. And in this car, I saw who
I thought from the back was my friend. Same gate,
(02:19):
We're in the same you know, same look. And I
was like, oh, this is gonna be funny. So I
rolled down the window and I drove up the side
him and I said pull over, that ass is too fat,
and thinking thinking this is my friend and he was
going to laugh and it would be amazing, but it
wasn't him, Like what happened? I did that play out?
I think I just like murmured sorry and drow and
(02:41):
I feeled out. He's telling that story of like the
time somebody stopped their car and said, oh, pull over.
That ass is too fat. But if he's a listening
to the show, and everything's gonna make sense to him
if it if he is, I am so sorry. I
was not. That was supposed to be a joke that
did in land. I will send you a free shirt
(03:02):
or something. I'm so sorry. That's funny. I had something
that wasn't kind of similar happened to me, but I
wasn't around, so I guess it didn't happen to me
at all. But a friend of mine saw someone who
he thought was me and running on the belt line
and he was on his bike and he like pedaled
up behind her, and he said, what are you running from?
(03:26):
And it wasn't me that woman went woman called the cops.
I mean, that would have scared me as well. But luckily,
he said, she laughed like he was, like, you're not
my friend, and she started laughing. So christis averted hopefully. Well.
(03:47):
The examples of cat calling well here in this episode
are a little less humorous, unfortunately unfortunately, So please enjoy.
We hope you learned a lot from the gossic episode
on cat calling. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we are revisiting a
(04:10):
topic that we talked about in two thousand eleven. But
we absolutely need to talk about it again because there
are lots of conversations going on these days about cat
calling and street harassment. Yeah, because I'm sure you guys
are familiar with the Hollyback video that just came out
(04:30):
not too long ago, featuring a woman she's an actress,
walking through the streets of New York for ten hours
and facing numerous cat calls and street harassment from men
on the street. The video itself attracted a lot of
controversy because of the way it was edited to edit
out a lot of white men who were doing cat
(04:52):
calling in various street harassment things UM to feature mostly
men of color. But that being said, the video it's
self sparked a huge conversation online between and among men
and women about what is street harassment? When is it
just complimenting, when is it something scary? And what does
(05:13):
it mean for all of us at large? Yeah, and
speaking of Hallaback, which is the nonprofit that UM produced
that viral video, we first talked about street harassment on
the podcast when Halliback was first gaining a lot of
Media Attention UM. It was founded in two thousand five
(05:34):
by Emily May and it was started specifically to attract
more attention to the issue of street harassment and to
facilitate bigger conversations about the frequency of street harassment and
how it very much is harassment, and also give people
tools to fight back and also connect with other people
(05:56):
on this issue. And the fact that pretty much any
time a woman says gender, transgender and gay men as
well leave their houses and walk down the sidewalk a
lot of times that means dealing with what we euphemistically
call cat calling. And speaking to that viral video as well,
I mean, the response to it just highlighted problems on
(06:20):
top of problems. For the very fact that Shoshanna Roberts,
who is the actress Senate, immediately received rape threats. She
has alerted the police in the neighborhood she lives in
that this is what's going on. She these are the
threats she's received, so in case something happens, they'll know
who she is when she calls. Yeah, And to me,
(06:41):
that's I mean, not to get off on a tangent,
but there's echoes of what's happening with the need of
sarches in there too, in terms of like, so you
you call out a problem, people say, no, it's not
a problem, but I'm going to threaten to kill you
or raypio or rape. Yeah, exactly. And so another issue
of course with things that this video sort of dug
(07:04):
up is the fact that a lot of people's response
to it is just women, this is your problem. I'm
just trying to give you a compliment. You're playing the
victim role. You just want to be the victim. You
just want attention, and you know, making it more about
the woman and it being her problem than it being
(07:24):
a social problem at large. It's just a compliment. Learn
how to take a compliment. Um. And if you're curious
on the difference between cat calls and compliments, you can
go to stuff I've Never told U's YouTube page and
watch the video if cat calls for compliments, in which
you'll get a lot of examples of the differences between
the two. So first up, though, let's define street harassment,
(07:47):
and also offers some statistics so we can get a
grasp of how often this is happening. This is not
just something happening to Shoshana Roberts when she is making
a video for Hollaback. So street harassment, to define it
is the sexual harassment of typically CIS and trans women
in public spaces by typically men who are strangers, and
(08:11):
that includes both verbal and nonverbal behavior. It tends to
be comments on the woman's physique and her very presence
in public a lot of the time. It also has
to do with smiling. Hey, woman over there, smile, smile.
Let's see you smile. So how common is it? There
was a nationally representative studies sponsored by Stop Street Harassment
(08:33):
which found that sixty of all women and of all
men had experienced it, and among the women had been
sexually touched, had been followed, and nine percent had been
forced to do something sexual. I think that is a
different way of saying sexual assault. UM. LGBT identified respondents
(08:55):
were also likelier to experience it. One statistic they highlighted
was it by age seventeen, seventy percent of LGBT individuals
experienced street harassment compared to of heterosexual people. And it
also happens around the world. Yeah. Um. The site medium
(09:16):
got into this by assigning diaries essentially to women in
cities all around the world. In New York, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Mexico City, Berlin in Italy, in Mongolia in
tel Aviv, Nairobi in Singapore. Um And based on these
women's experiences, they found that the woman in Mexico City
(09:39):
experienced the worst cat calling. She had a high of
twenty nine cat calls in a single week, versus Tel
Aviv in Los Angeles, which tied for the least cat
call heavy locations with just two each. And there were
a lot of common hallmarks for this kind of behavior. UM.
It tended to happen most often during COMMU time, specifically
(10:01):
when women were alone, although men doing the cat calling,
We're just as likely to be alone as with other men. UM.
And the most common form of it just commanded a smile.
They just want to see a smile, Carol Lone. Yeah.
I used to get this um all the time when
(10:23):
I took public transportation to work. Not that I would
not continue too, It's just I moved and blah blah blah.
I just don't want you to think poorly of me.
I wish I could take it anyway. UM. Yeah, I
used to get this all the time. And what was
so weird is I never got it from a man
in a business suit. I always got it from homeless
men who were hanging out at the train station. I
(10:45):
mean that's my personal experience. I know everyone has different experiences,
but and speaking to that experience, some people have talked
about the socio economic intersections with this, because it's a
lot about not compliments, obviously, but it has a lot
(11:05):
to do with power and power over public spaces and
cat calling and street harassment. I should say, is often
used as a tool by people who might feel more
economically and socially marginalized to assert their power. And so,
(11:26):
in speaking to the BBC about why some men do this,
Katherine Zipple, who is a sociology professor at Northeastern University, said, quote,
oftentimes it's not really about the women. It's just about
the men performing masculine acts for each other and establishing
a pecking order amongst themselves. What's really going on is
(11:47):
the dynamic among men, and in that it's so it's
so crucial to this conversation to understanding it that this
is the dynamic among men that's happening in public spaces,
right because and I mean this goes back forever as
far as the conflict that occurs and has always occurred
(12:08):
when women enter a public sphere. I mean, this is
not cat calling and street harassment is not a new conversation.
Kristen and I read one article that was like, oh,
this is a problem that goes all the way back
to the nineties seventies, and it definitely has roots much
much deeper, and that go back much much farther when
(12:30):
women first left the home to begin with. Exactly pretty
much as soon as we began entering the public sphere
on a day to day basis, this issue arose. And
a lot of this information is coming from a self
Freedman who is a scholar in Stanford's Claimant Institute for
Gender Research, and she also wrote the book Redefining Rape,
And just speaking of some etymology when it comes to
(12:52):
cat calling, I thought it was really interesting. The term
comes from theater. It goes back to the mid seventeenth
cent a combination of cat and call, originally denoting a
kind of whistle or squeaking instrument used to express disapproval. Now,
when we get into street harassment in the nineteenth century
(13:14):
and into the early twentieth century, it went by a
different name. It wasn't so much cat calling but mashing
and the masher, both of which also have theatrical roots. Yeah, this,
Kristen and I got so caught up in this reading
about the masters. It is fascinating stuff and it is
just further proof that the harassment of women in public
(13:38):
spaces is definitely not a new thing. So the term
mash comes from nineteenth century theater slang meaning a sweetheart
or a crush, typically of a male audience member on
a female actress, and for example, in eighty two a
theater guide to find mashers as quote, masculine theater goers
(13:59):
whose why I old ambition is to attract and hold
female attention. Now, the first time I heard about mashing
was actually um in reading about sort of the cultural
history of female friendship. And around the same time too,
you would describe having intensely strong, like platonically passionate feelings
for a girlfriend as a smash, and they would also
(14:23):
they would exchange these um mash notes to each other.
But outside of that realm and outside the theater world,
mashers became known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century as the aggressive male street flirt who quote were
usually depicted in newspapers and editorial cartoons as well dressed
(14:47):
white men whose behaviors were more irritating and comical than menacing.
And there were also men who viewed themselves as lady
killers along the lines of a Don Juan and other
Natalie dressed gentlemen, because that was another thing. They were
often very very snappy dressers. Um. And there was also
the Parisian version of the flneur, which is the detached
(15:11):
male spectator of the urban crowd. Yeah, basically men whose
quote unquote job it is to stand around and just
watch women and provide their commentary as if they are
at the theater, and also attract their attention through their
through their fashionable clothes like Dandy's. And I think it's
(15:32):
key to note though that in popular culture at the time,
like those editorial cartoons that Kristen mentioned, it is important
to mention that they were depicted as white. That's key
because these are snappily dressed gentlemen. They're they're mostly harmless ladies.
They're just they're just offering you a quirky kind of compliment.
(15:54):
They're just kind of annoying. It's no big deal because
at the time the percept shin of black men interacting
with society white society ladies was painted in an entirely
different picture at the time, of course, like even black
men making direct eye contact with a white woman would
have been considered outright sexual assault. And so when you
(16:18):
code nonviolent mashers as white it says a lot about
sort of racial divisions at the time. Yeah, because um,
really it was age of consent campaigns and these antimash
or initiatives that were mostly focused to white men, whereas
black men were considered violent sexual creatures, they were the rapists.
(16:42):
White men were only to be feared for perhaps whisking
away young woman who was too young to consent or
doing this mashing, when in reality Freeman talks about it
was native born white men because new immigrants to the
country were also lumped into us as well and considered
more deviant and more of a danger to um, white
(17:05):
American women, whereas it was often the white men who
were the worst when it came to street harassment, since
they claimed the streets as their territory. Which does that
sound familiar, Yeah, exactly, And so I mean, what's going
on here the social context that we're talking about, like
Kristen said, I mean, here are white men who have
(17:27):
you know, quote unquote been in charge. Then you have
this influx of women who have always been at the home, immigrants,
where did they even come from? And people just have
other classes and backgrounds. So suddenly white, these white men
that were talking about these masters, are having to assert
their perceived dominance over everyone around them all of a sudden,
(17:48):
for the first time in these urban spaces, you have gender, class,
and race all interacting and encountering one another in new
ways for the very time. And along with this, not
only do you just have generally women entering the public sphere,
but you also have the rise of department stores, this
whole consumer culture that would get wealthy women out of
(18:10):
their homes to go shopping. But also you have female
clerks who would be working at the department stores and
other jobs being open, those low level clerical jobs being
open more and more to women. And so meanwhile you
have mashing sort of being placed on the more benign
end of the sexual assault spectrum at the time because
(18:32):
it was less criticized and say underage sex and coercive seduction,
but nonetheless received national press attention right as can be
seen in the nineteen and six Chicago Tribune headline what
can be done to rid the Palmer House block of mashers?
And I mean this was, this was There was a
lot of editorial space dedicated to drawing attention to these,
(18:59):
you know, men who stood on street corners and hollered
at women and made it difficult for them to enter
and exit their buildings. Well in women's magazines also started
advising lady readers to avoid eye contact with men on
the street and from doing anything to call attention to themselves,
which also sounds awfully familiar to advice that we still
(19:19):
here as women today. Um. And there was a nineteen
o nine article in the New York Times, um supposedly
written by a working girl from Detroit, or maybe it
was a letter to the editor, um. And it noted
how she figured out that the blank looks on women's
faces on the subways were their quote armor against the
offensive stairs of the New York masher. I actually out
(19:43):
loud when I read that, said, oh yeah, oh yeah,
oh yeah, because don't you don't you feel your face
go dead? Well, you kind of do put on your
armor sometimes when you when you know you're about to
go into a public space. I'd do it any time.
I'd start as soon as I exit, I drive away.
When I'm jogging and hit the main thoroughfare, it's sort
(20:04):
of like, all right, here we go. And I mean,
I'm going to be completely honest here and say that
I'm not putting on my dead face because I think
I might encounter some annoying women on the train or
some annoying women at the mall or wherever. I'm putting
on my dead face because I know that if I
make eye contact with a man in a confined space,
whether that's on a train, in an elevator, whatever, I'm
(20:25):
opening myself up to entering into an interaction that I
might not want to be a part of. Yeah, and
we talked about how there was that Guardian article we
saw that said women have been fighting against street harassment
since the nineteen seventies with the Reclaim the Night movement,
but women really started hollying back in the United States
(20:48):
at least in the nineteen tens. And we're going to
talk about some of the ways that they started fighting
back against the masher, smashing the masher. When we come
right back from a wick break, So picking up in
the nineteen tens when women start hollowing back. As Kristen said, um,
(21:16):
they really were not going to stand for these distasteful
mashers on the street anymore, and they took matters into
their own hands. Initially, however, the press had enlisted men
to help protect women, but women were like, no, listen,
I'm busy fighting for the vote and fighting for equal
(21:36):
space and society, and I want my greater mobility. I
want my access to work and leisure activities. I'm not
going to let men interfere with my ability to give
from point A to point B. And so I'm going
to take boxing classes. I'm going to take self defense classes,
and as evidence by a photo that I found of
a woman poking a man with her hatpin, I'm gonna
(21:59):
learn how to defend myself in general. Yeah. In nineteen ten,
the Women's Equal Suffrage Association sought to confront mashers or
male flirts or as they called them, obnoxious all glows,
and they wanted to appoint special agents as female policemen
to patrol for mashers. And this was actually how some
(22:22):
of the very first female police officers were hired in
the US. I didn't know that that's when my brain exploded, Carol,
including one here in Atlanta. Yeah, but it was all
because women really wanted other women to help guide them
through the streets and keep their eyes peeled for the mashers.
But in the meantime, a number of women began taking
(22:44):
up exercise because this was also the early days of
physical exercise becoming part of you know, the the healthy
person's regimen. But some women also took boxing lessons to
protect themselves against mashers. One this is Frank Gilbert in Cleveland,
took boxing lessons and ended up clocking a streetcar masher.
(23:07):
And she told the press that she wanted to form
a self defense quote Society for the Suppression and Annihilation
of mashers. Don't mess with Mrs Frank Gilbert. She's probably
met because no one even knows her first name. Well,
and then speaking again of hat Pins, we get other
stories of women and girls actively defending themselves against mashers,
(23:32):
and these really were pressed Darling's these stories people loved
reading about them. And what was so great and what
I think we need more of today if we're continuing
themes today, the fact that the tone was respectful, it
was admiring, it was supportive that The general overall theme
of these stories was like, yeah, good for you. Women.
Don't take that awful mashing from those awful mashers on
(23:55):
the street corner. You need to defend yourself. And by
twenty around three hundred female police officers had been hired
around the country at larger municipal police forces, specifically to
deal with this masher problem. Which makes me realize that
we have not done a podcast on women and police officers.
(24:17):
But hey, now we have our jumping off point for that.
And I mean, speaking of legal issues, women who were
victims of street harassment were strongly encouraged to prosecute their tormentors.
There were a few brave souls who really stepped up
and said, no, I'm taking this guy to court, even
though it could mean dragging your good name through the mud,
even though people could perceive it as being some type
(24:38):
of scandal or you sort of speaking out of your
feminine womanly turn. Um. There's just a lot of women
at this time saying, look, you guys, you won't give
me the vote. Well that was earlier, but I mean,
I'm not going to stand up for this stuff anymore. Well,
it was especially radical for black women to prosecute and
(25:00):
in court as well, because up to this point, I
mean and still with this too, and we talked about
this in our episode on the history of a rape
in the United States, how all of the focus on
mashers was more concerned and really exclusively concerned over the
safety of white women on the streets, because this is
(25:21):
when we have the prevailing idea that, well, sexual assault
can't really happen to black women because they're hyper sexualized
to begin with. And you also still have, you know,
the construct of the black man as the violent rapists
targeting white women. But there was a lot of conversation
around street harassment in um, particularly in black newspapers, of
(25:44):
women talking to other women about this, and so by
the twenties you do start to see more black women too,
getting more directly involved in this because can you imagine
at the time, being a black woman bringing a charge
and math your charge against a white man. That would
have been I mean, I'm sure that would have been
scandalizing for some people. But then after women get the
(26:09):
vote with the nineteenth Amendment in and with the end
of World War One, we see the antimasher movement died down.
I mean, it really reached this fever pitch and then
fades away as if it never happened. Almost. Yeah, but
it's I mean, the context of it fading away is
(26:29):
sort of ikey, because you you lose that whole idea
of chivalrous masculinity and men enlisting men to help protect
women from guys like that to the assertion of a
more aggressive ideal of manhood. Around the same time that
(26:49):
female flirtation becomes more popular and popularly depicted by actresses
on screen light Clara Bow and so you get this intimate,
this this prevailing notion that things like cat calling and
street harassment are almost just more comical and normalized because hey,
(27:11):
they want to flirt with me. Yeah, it's almost the
other side of the coin of we have the the
emergence of the new woman. We have a sexuality starting
to kind of become slightly more uh normalized in terms
of women expressing it as well as men. And so
with that though, it is that idea of well you
(27:33):
want this, don't you. So here you go, like, why
why would it be strange at all for me to
comment on your body if you're wearing clothes that are
more revealing than ever before and if you're wearing makeup
like an actress on the screen and you are actively
flirting with men, well then why are you Why don't
you want to be talked to and yelled out on
(27:55):
the street? And a still friedman sums up this this
transition pretty well. Uh in redefining rape, she writes. After
the nineteen twenties, the negotiation of urban space for the
purposes of wage earning, shopping, or flirtation increasingly took the
form of individual resistance rather than a social movement. For
a short period, however, the revolt against the masher provided
(28:17):
a political response to sexual vulnerability. Tributes to self defense,
suffragious visions of police authority, the willingness of black women
to report white men to authorities, and the reactions of
black men all contested white men's sexual entitlements. And I mean,
I think that goes back to what I was saying
about how great it was that newspapers back then we're
(28:40):
cheering women on for taking these men on. I mean,
that's on the one hand, women, you shouldn't have to
defend yourselves against these men. It shouldn't be happening. But
the fact that they are being vocal and active, physically
active about standing up to these guys and ended up
being cheered on for it. I mean, I think that's
an amazing thing. Well, and it's just so incredible to think,
(29:02):
in mind boggling to think about the fact that we've
been literally fighting for freedom in a public space for
a century plus now, since we've been in a public
space exactly. And so the question then is why why
now this sort of twenty one century antimash er movement revival? Um.
(29:29):
I think a lot of it has to do with
feminism and technology, kind of the the perfect intersection of
those two things. Because if you look in the nineteen seventies,
Second Way feminists absolutely focused on street harassment. They started
the Reclaim the Night also known as Take Back the
Night initiatives UM, which again you have the focus on
(29:51):
street harassment as more women entering the public and male
dominated spaces of women, you know, sort of the revived
idea of hey, we and go get jobs perhaps, um.
But then again it sort of dies down a bit
until two thousand five when Emily May starts Hollow Back,
which really started, I mean an incredible movement. Yeah, And
(30:15):
this is it's such a product of its time in
terms of being a digital thing, and you know, you
go back to women who are taking boxing classes at
the turn of the twentieth century and saying, I'm not
going to put up with this. I'm going to learn
how to defend myself. And then you fast forward to
the two thousands and you have women who are actually
snapping cell phone pictures of the guys who are verbally
(30:37):
attacking them, or, in the case of the woman who
inspired hollyback efforts, she snapped a cell phone picture of
a guy who was publicly masturbating while staring at her,
which she was then able to use successfully in his prosecution. Yeah,
because while while cat calling is not illegal in New
York City, it is in fact illegal to masturbate in
(30:57):
public just f y I UM. But by taking on
street harassment from the social media approach, it has empowered
men and women to identify and call out their harassers.
And Emily May has talked before about how um the
idea evolved to not just from uh, the that initial
(31:18):
cell phone photo, but also in conversations with guy friends
of hers about the experience of walking around and one
of them commenting, like, you walked down a completely different
metaphorically speaking sidewalk than I do. Just like they hadn't
even realized before that experience of what street harassment feels like.
(31:42):
And I think that's why a lot of times, in
response to these conversations, the knee jerk deflection is it's
just a compliment. Why are you victimizing yourself? But the
fact that it typically happens when you are isolated or
possibly with other women. But I don't think I've ever
gotten yelled at when I've been with a male friend
(32:04):
or a boyfriend, or a brother or a father, whoever. Um,
it's very specific in that kind of approach. It's intended
to make you feel vulnerable, right exactly, And I mean
in terms of perspective. There was the one kind of
social experiment that we read about where a woman dressed
up like a man and a man dressed up like
a woman, and they sent them on their way through
(32:25):
the streets, and the woman felt reported that she felt
such relief at being invisible for once, that just being
able to freaking walk down the street from point A
to point B. Whereas the man who was wearing fake
breasts and everything, I mean, he was dressed as a woman. Uh,
found himself, putting on his jacket to avoid to try
(32:47):
to deflect people staring at him at his fake chest,
UM and wishing that he had more clothes on because
he just felt so gross being stared up. Well, and
we heard from a gay guy not too long ago
wrote into us UM because he has long hair, he
tends to wear tighter jeans. And I believe we even
read the letter on UM a podcast episode a while back.
(33:10):
But he was walking down the street going home or
going somewhere and was aggressively yelled at by a guy
in a car who mistook him for a woman. And
he said that he was so it was so terrifying
because the person followed him for a little while and
he finally turned around and yelled back at him. But
(33:31):
he had never experienced that before. And the following I
don't know if you've experienced this before, Caroline, but UM,
I'll never forget being in Bushwick in New York once
with a girlfriend of mine and we were walking somewhere
and we were followed for a few blocks. It was terrifying.
We eventually ducked into a bar we happened to run
(33:53):
across just to be around other people. UM and and
he's taught talked about this guy, this listener in his
letter talked about how afterwards he was just so confused
and I was wondering what he had done to bring
it on himself. And the answer is nothing, because this
is an issue that has been going on in this
(34:15):
fight for safety and public spaces for so long. Yeah,
And I mean that's where that's where I mean what
you just said is where it's evident that this is
a problem of individuals. Certainly, it's a problem of the
men who choose to harass people, men and women on
the street, but it's also part of such a huge
(34:38):
cultural issue of of women's not only women's safety and
and men's safety too, but of allowing people to just exist,
allowing people to go about their business in public well,
and we need to I want to re emphasize as well,
the fact that a lot of these conversations are focused
(35:00):
on usually since gender women, but trans women are at
much heightened levels not only for being at risk of
street harassment, but outright violence and attack in public spaces
as well. And that's something that you know needs to
be addressed too. And it's not just something that's happening
(35:20):
in the US, even though um, a New Zealand camera
crew conducted the same kind of social experiment as the
Hollyback video where they had a model, an actual model,
go out on the street and walk around in a
busy place and she got a key cat called zero times.
She got stopped once for someone like asking her for directions,
(35:41):
And so it raised a question of, well, what's going on,
what's the difference here? Um, And and I don't I mean, honestly,
I don't know the answer, but I mean, it's certainly
been an issue, to the point that there are now
women only subway cars and taxi services in places like
India and Japan in order to shield women from street harassment.
(36:03):
But I mean, something like that causes its own problems
because Okay, great, you're in your woman only train car,
You're you're not gonna get groped, you're not gonna get harassed.
But suddenly, um, that separates the sexes completely. So a
man who would be harassing someone when he does see
a woman, it's an even rare occurrence, and he's even
(36:23):
more likely to harass. Yeah, I mean, it's it's definitely
been a huge problem in Indian there's a lot of
grassroots activism going on there to tackle it, as well
as just the issue of sexual harassment more generally speaking. UM,
I thought it was really interesting that in two thousand eleven,
Bangladesh officially did away with the eve teasing euphemism cat
(36:46):
calling um was known by probably still is euphemistically known
as eve teasing, or I should say street harassments euphemistically
known as eve teasing, and uh, the courts did away
with that in Bangladesh to categorize it as a form
of sexual harassment. And also in Nepal there was a
law pass allowing police to immediately arrest someone suspected of
(37:08):
street harassment without a warrant. So clearly this is I mean,
it's not just something going on in American streets. This
is a global conversation that's happening. Um. And there are
questions too in the US about laws regarding public harassment,
because the thing about street harassment is that the kinds
(37:29):
of horror, horrifying and sexually forward things that are yelled
at women. If you say that in a public space,
if you say that at a workplace or a school,
they're already laws in place to protect people against that,
but not so on the streets. Yeah, and so this
gets into the issue of what's called fighting words. Legally,
(37:49):
and in our country, we have protections against fighting words,
things like yelling fire in a theater or saying something
to another human being that create an unsafe situation. They
actually got their start as a way to essentially prevent
guys from challenging each other to duels and then killing
(38:10):
each other over an argument. And so while that legally
has trickled down through the years, no such protection exists
to women or men when it comes to street harassment
and the language used when people do harass people on
the street. Yeah. I mean I have a feeling that
that's probably never going to happen, that the fighting word
(38:32):
its action will be amended to that, but it definitely
changes the way I thought about how it operates in
a public space. Um. But the thing about it is, Caroline,
there are plenty of people who aren't men who also say,
oh my gosh, this is not harassment. It's still a compliment.
(38:53):
And before we close out the podcast, we do need
to address that. Um, there was a woman or is
a woman. She's not dead. Derrie Lawick, who kind of
became the poster gal of pro cat callers when she
wrote an op ed in the New York Posts that
went viral for kind of all the wrong reasons because
(39:14):
it was headlined, Hey, ladies, cat calls are flattering, deal
with it, and I'm not going to waste my breath
going over um all of her reasons why she enjoyed
being cat called. Um. But there was a study we
found from the journal Sexuality and Culture from two thousand
and ten looking closer at the context of cat calling
(39:35):
to dig into that question of well is it complimentary?
Because you do find, like in pretty much anything you
read about it, there's always a subset of people saying, well,
I kinda like it. I gotta like hearing that I
look good. Yeah, And there were, for instance, there were
a lot of comments under the video of the actors
who was walking through New York. There were a lot
(39:57):
of comments um, calling her a lot of dirty words
and saying it's women like this that are the reason
that men are afraid to come talk to me and
tell me I look nice. Like what's wrong with a
man uh coming in saying hello and giving me his
number whatever? And it's like, WHOA. These are different things,
but it is important to discuss context well. And also, Caroline,
(40:21):
there's the risk of forgetting to smile some days if
people don't tell you to. You know, I forget all
the time. It's not until I walk into work and
Kristin yells at me from across the room to smile
that I even remember. Yeah, I'm just trying to compliment
you girl, I know. But yeah. So this this study
that Kristen is talking about found that lower contextual threat
(40:44):
levels do have a bearing on how women perceive the
cat calling, the harassment, the the eye contact, whatever it
may be. Yeah, because there's this whole thing of harassment
is in the eye of the whole older in terms
to how um threatening it feels. And so this study
(41:06):
conducted a lot of experiments and highlighted perception variables. In
other words, the key things sort of influence that threat level,
and that includes age, marital status, sex attractiveness, familiarity status,
job status of the perpetrator, demographic sexual identity, and attitudes
(41:28):
toward women of the observer. So that's also looking at
how we as outsiders perceived the people watching the video
of the woman walking through New York for ten hours,
how we perceive that and whether that is or is
not harassment, And it really focused in on the attractiveness
and age of the harasser, as well as being alone
(41:50):
or with friends, as the major context factors for how
fearful a woman was at the prospect of these different
street harassments and areas they were presented with. Because there
is a sticky question of well, if he's young and hot,
maybe maybe it's maybe it is more of a compliment
than harassment. Yeah, but I mean when you when you
(42:14):
mix and match all of these perception variables, I mean,
that has a lot to do with it. I don't
care how hot the guy is, if he is, like physically,
if he's following me down the street yelling at me,
I mean, that's still going to be a high threat
situation that I'm going to perceive. You know. Yes, there
are so many different variables to take into account. But
(42:35):
um and and I don't discount that a lot of
people will say, well, it's not as threatening if he's
good looking, or if he's rich, or if he's driving
a Bentley or whatever, um as opposed to if he's
a guy sitting sitting on a stoop outside of his apartment.
But there's still I don't know, there's just so many
contextual threat things to take into account, because well that
(42:57):
was the thing too in all of these studies that
they conducted, even when sort of playing around with those
different variables, it never found like nothing completely mitigated all
the negative impacts on the recipient in terms of feelings
of self objectification, feelings of safety. There was never a
(43:20):
perfect scenario when it was like a guy saying something
lude or threatening or inappropriate and the recipient was like,
and I feel great, and I feel like a strong
and powerful person walking through the streets. There is there's
no no way you slice and dice it. Does it
(43:41):
not have a negative outcome, even if it's a small one. Yeah, exactly.
And also as I was reading all of this too
and thinking about the kinds of especially the more lewd
things that are said on or even just the lewd
implications that are made in very but mine statements, um,
(44:02):
and even just in the looks, you can just be
looked up and down and feel as violated as you
would if a guy propositioned you for sex right then
and there. And I feel like it says also so
much about in many ways how sexually backward our society
is when this kind of sexual communication in a public
(44:24):
space is often deemed complimentary and benign, whereas we still
can't get sexual consent in communication between two people in
private spaces, like straightened out, Like why is that? I mean,
there's so many there's so many layers. And also I
feel like too, the whole thing of well, if he's attractive,
then it's a compliment also leads to the question of well,
(44:47):
why is being called hot by a stranger like the
the best most validating thing for a woman, you know?
Like why is being called beautiful the the most coveted
kind of compliment a woman can receive in our society too?
There are lots of layers to this, so I mean, yeah, exactly.
(45:08):
And I think that the historical context of all this
is so important to take into account, especially if you
do argue that cat calling is totally benign because it's
actually not well, because it's not about compliments. It's about power.
(45:29):
It's all about power in the same way that rape
is not about sex, it's about power. And and am
I saying that all men who tell women to smile
are rapists? No? But it's still it is a fact
of it's an issue of power. Yeah, because I have
a hard time thinking that the men who yelled at
me to smile, we're yelling at other men to smile.
(45:51):
I have a hard time believing that it was just like, gosh,
darn it, you guys, I just want the world to
be a happier place at this train, but just see
more smiles. Yeah, And and so I mean when you,
when you look at that, look at things in the
context of that, I think that says a lot too.
And so it's really important to not just have this
(46:13):
conversation with adults and fellow people in the world who
get cat called and harassed on the streets in public
against their will. I think it's important to talk to
kids about these issues too, maybe not go into so
many gruesome details, perhaps, but to discuss issues of consent
and what is and is not appropriate. And we want
(46:35):
to acknowledge to before we close out that this is
we're talking about a very slim minority of men who
are doing this. But the reaction of that slim minority
behavior to the you know, the majority's reaction to it
says a lot. Yeah. But now we want to hear
from our listeners because I have a feeling that lots
(46:56):
of people have lots of things to say, and we
want to hear from every body on this because everybody
has a stake in this, because at some point we
probably all exist in public spaces. So mom Stuff at
house stuffworks dot Com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast and messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with you.
(47:22):
So I've got a letter here from someone who would
like to remain anonymous about our episode on Lady Lawyers,
and she writes, as a practicing lawyer, I can tell
you that shaming does happen in court. Early in my career,
I was at a federal court hearing with senior partners,
and because I had forgotten to drop off my dry
cleaning after work, I had to wear a royal blue
(47:43):
pinstripe skirt suit to court. I was the only person
not wearing black or gray, while not a single one
of the male partners who I worked with ever made
a comment about it. At the end of the hearing,
a thirty five to forty five year old male Department
of Justice attorney walked around to our two able to
the opposite side where I was standing, came up, stood
(48:04):
right behind me, leaned in and whispered nice suit. Needless
to say, I vowed that I would never again wear
anything but black or gray to court. While I still
wouldn't wear a royal blue suit to federal court. There
is a lot of theater involved in going to court,
and part of the show is playing to your audience.
I have friends who single male colleagues put on wedding
(48:24):
bands before trials because studies have shown that juries trust
married men more than single men. Like Michael J. Fox's
character on The Good Wife, I think most lawyers would
gladly alter their appearance or exaggerate a disability to sway
the jury or the judge in their client's favor. In
response to your question about how big this problem is,
(48:45):
it isn't a big problem because, unlike TV, most lawyers
and don't go to court so often. So thanks for
that insight. So I have a letter here from Lauren
uh in response to our Lady Lawyer's dress code episode.
She might not agree with the author of that last letter,
Christian in terms of staying true to just black and gray.
(49:06):
She says, as a lady lawyer, I am very conscious
of what I wear at the court. I'm a Midwestern,
middle class raised gal, but at thirty five, I became
a named partner in a Boston law firm through sheer,
hard work and a few smarts. As unfortunate as it is,
women in the courtroom do need to think about what
they wear and how they wear it, much more than
our male counterparts. However, this does not mean that women
(49:28):
should shirk their individuality. Wear a skirt suit that hits
just below the knee and a modest button up shirt,
but make the suit red. I've found that so long
as the length and neckline are appropriate and what comes
from your mouth is intelligent, judges and fellow lawyers will
respect you. I never wear black suits and I always
wear stiletto heels. Ask anyone in my court house and
(49:50):
they will tell you I am a force to be reckoned.
With lots of love to you, ladies, and if any
lady lawyer or hopeful lady lawyers in the Boston area,
I would love to help her six eed in any
way I can. So thank you, Lauren, and thanks to
everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff at how stuff
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