iLiza's eyes

It can be dangerous to wear a skirt in New York City.

A male friend of mine was recently very shocked to find this out on a walk with myself and another female. “Yeah!” we told him. “There are comments from men all the time. No matter what you’re wearing or what you look like: always men saying rude things.”

His response was a genuine, “Really?!?!”

It’s always surprising to me when men don’t realize what women go through as they walk through the streets of the city. Not that they should realize: it doesn’t happen to them and it almost never happens to a woman who is walking with a man. It’s really only the woman trudging blocks through the city, independent and without protection, who feels the eyes or hears the dirty comments behind them. And it’s only that woman who is affected: it’s only her who is the prey.

For those of you who aren’t that woman, I will tell you from shared personal experience that some men in New York have an endless storage of explicit remarks intended for females of all shapes, sizes, colors and attire walking alone, and those comments come in all different forms: from cars, from across the street, from right beside her in her ear, from the subway, walking in the opposite direction, or even in collective form—like from the workmen near my work who sit in a row against the buildings and all turn their heads and make comments under their breath to every woman who walks by.

What I think many men, including my friends, don’t realize is how very poisonous and sexually violating such commentary on the street is—how severely it can destroy a leisurely walk and leave a women feeling truly invaded and dirty.

Perhaps this sounds dramatic, but it’s not. From talking to my female counterparts, I’ve learned that we all go through it, we all feel severely degraded by it and we all make clothing choices based on the assumption that if we wear a certain type of outfit (any type of skirt or dress, shorts above the knee, tank tops, etc), we’ll get even more comments than usual. Men have a hard time understanding this, not because they don’t care or are unsympathetic, but because they just don’t have anything with which to compare it.

Today I got to thinking about how aggressively I was striding down the street on the way to work. No, not strutting, but striding: using my full concentration to keep my hips still, my face forward, my eyes dead in my head and not darting around, consciously resisting the urge to turn in response to any noise, calls, even car honks that might result in eye contact with hissing predator. And I walked fast.

But behind my dead eyes, I was thinking. I was thinking about the fact that people think New Yorkers are such jerks. New York has a reputation for coldness: people who walk along without eye contact or kindness, who push and shove in a world where we’re each just a nameless, hollow face. I realize I am one of those (dare I say “bitchy?”) women who gives New York that reputation. But I feel I have no other choice. Do any of us women here have any other choice?

New York is home to some of the smartest, most beautiful and stylish, most powerful and educated women in the world. And at the same time it’s the collision point of classes, races, cultural backgrounds and international social standards. On these streets we see combinations of people that will never match, yet they must share the same sidewalk everyday.

I believe that the catcalling and jeering that women get on the streets of New York with such abnormal regularity is the manifestation of a power struggle in an ecosystem where each individual is competing for every aspect of survival. By whistling and degrading, some men have found a fantastic way to compete against the woman who they believe—either accidentally or purposely—is using her femininity to the same ends. It seems almost like a sexual game, a mating ritual, but one into which women involuntarily enter just by living in this city, and which these men start in order to equalize a threat or feeling of inadequacy.

If this is true, my feminist side would love to say that the remarks on the street have no bearing, and are in fact a poor method of competition because they are immediately forgotten. But I cannot. The feeling alone of guardedness and anger that must be exerted to avoid such degrading comments on the street is enough to impact a woman’s energy and her feeling of self-worth. Her personal style, her manner of behavior and walking, even her possible desire to make eye contact on the street or enjoy her personal surroundings or look people in the eye is stifled by those seemingly meaningless comments.

So maybe women are perpetuating the bad New York City reputation of coldness in order to preserve their own self-worth. I know I am.

posted by iliza @ 10:21 AM