Walking to Class is Political

I'm so convinced that cat-calling is a game to remind women they are strange and small and alone.

I'm called at because I am a deviation from the norm. I am weird in my femaleness. It makes me abnormal. That is how deeply centralized the male perspective is in our society. Because I am female (and perhaps additionally because I am young and white and female, with blonde hair down to my breasts, which are also very female), I am a deviation.

This is a hard pill to swallow, because I have always been female. I will always be female. But, in this city, two decades into my femaleness, I am strange for it.

There is a reason I write so much about cat-calling. It's because, no matter how often it happens, I am horrified by it. It's a manipulation. I act like stone, I act as though I'm fascinated by the ground or the sky or my nails, I bite the insides of my cheeks and recite the French alphabet in my head, and I pretend I do not hear anything. I pretend I cannot feel slippery eyes that leave slug residue on my skin. But I hear and feel everything and it echoes in my ears for blocks and blocks and makes my body shiver with the knowledge it is being assessed.

They say, sexy, blondie, baby.
I say nothing, nothing nothing.

I long ago got over being scared by the actual act of cat-calling (for the most part). But that does not mean I am not still scared into silence. It is the principle of it, the gross gender disparity that it represents, that horrifies me.

Let me try to explain this: I cannot respond. It is a fact of my life here that I will be called at, I will be harassed, I will be told explicitly what men want to do with my strange and foreign body, I will be threatened, I will be spoken to in ways that are deeply condescending. But I will not respond. Because by responding, I am engaging, and by engaging, I will be seen to give the impression that continued harassment will invoke continued response. This, I guess, is considered something close to a conversation.

I know this to be true, as does any other woman who has at one time or another lost her patience and snapped back at her tormentor. Non-responsiveness often [though not always] makes him lose interest fairly quickly, as soon as you walk away and your strange foreign female sel is no longer distractingly apparent. Responding, telling him to fuck off, to shut up, to go away, to leave me alone, is rarely obeyed. It always seems to incite further harassment, sometimes scarier, sometimes meaner, often more condescending.

It reminds you that while it might seem that the point of the game is to have sex with you, the real point of the game is to make sure you know you are small and strange and profoundly sexual.

I write so much about cat-calling because I'm not allowed to say these things to men on the street. I obey that rule out of my own self-interest. It enrages me and scares me and makes me deeply aware of the fucked up uneven power relationship that STILL EXISTS between men and women, no matter what anyone tells you about how feminism is archaic and unnecessary.

I write about cat calling so much because it happens to me every single day without fail. Often, multiple times, and across a varying spectrum of awfulness. The worst make me feel dirty, a little guilty, somehow marred. The best just make me very, very mad.