Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Strange Subway Happening Part 2
Really, I could make this whole blog Weird Things That Happen to Me on the Subway, or, more appropriately, Weird Things That Happen to Me Because I am a Woman in NYC. But I'm still hoping that Oh, College will be restored soon and that will continue to be my forum for that. In the meantime, however, here is a funny story:
On Saturday morning, a morning on which I was feeling terrifically nasty and unpleasant for a variety of reasons, I took the R train from Prince St to Rector St. This is a feat on weekends, because the NQRW is, in the mysterious ways of MTA, rerouted from Canal St to DeKalb Ave in Brooklyn.
This in itself is worth remarking on. The NQRW in Manhattan is supposed to be a dark, underground train ride. One Saturday I found my R train suddenly bathed in sunlight and hurtling across the Manhattan bridge. Now that I know this, in standard New York fashion, I act totally unfazed when this happens and secretly delight in watching other, far n00bier subway riders' shock.
So I'm sitting in the Prince St station, listening to my iPod, which is basically a universal signal of don't-talk-to-me. And this guy comes up to me. Some people, you have a hard time determining, from the way they are dressed, whether they are chic hipster types or crazy people. This was one such dude. He was wearing a giant corduroy sport coat and green velvet dress pants and, if memory serves me, a bowler. So naturally I'm thinking, this might be a crazy person, or this might be a whole new level of ironi-style I haven't even been made conscious of yet!
He sat down next to me on the bench and said, "Good morning," which might seem like your standard run of the mill greeting, but in New York, when you are a woman sitting alone, and it is from a man who looks like he might be on drugs, it is an automatic bad sign.
"You look nice," he said, and I said thank you and laughed because, believe me, this was definitely not a morning on which I was looking particularly nice. This man then proceeded to ask me all about where I was from and where I was going, and I responded brusquely and curtly-- not because I am, as guys like these so frequently accuse me, a cold hearted bitch, but because this guy had this relatively creepy bug-eyed quality. Call it bullshit, but I believe women have a built in intuition for this sort of thing. If you don't happen to be of a gender that has to structure their behavior around fear of murder and rape, then perhaps you do not understand this.
"Twenty-six," he said. Twenty-six what? Twenty six dead woman skins are necessary to complete your dead-woman-skin sewing project? "I'm twenty-six. And you?"
"I'm twenty," I said.
"Do you want a Coke Zero? I have another one."
"No, no I'm okay, thanks."
"Are you sure? There are no calories!"
There was a nice refreshing pause in the conversation during which I willed the train to arrive.
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"Yes." The answer is always yes, even if, as in this case, it was a total lie.
"Just asking."
The train arrived and I walked a couple paces away in the hopes that I might discreetly get away from this guy who was making me uncomfortable. No such luck. He sat across from me, in one of those awkward L-shaped seats that MTA scrapped in its newer trains (because they are really inconvenient for anyone who has legs.)
Then, the kicker:
"I'm going to Staten Island."
There was such immense pride in this statement.
On Saturday morning, a morning on which I was feeling terrifically nasty and unpleasant for a variety of reasons, I took the R train from Prince St to Rector St. This is a feat on weekends, because the NQRW is, in the mysterious ways of MTA, rerouted from Canal St to DeKalb Ave in Brooklyn.
This in itself is worth remarking on. The NQRW in Manhattan is supposed to be a dark, underground train ride. One Saturday I found my R train suddenly bathed in sunlight and hurtling across the Manhattan bridge. Now that I know this, in standard New York fashion, I act totally unfazed when this happens and secretly delight in watching other, far n00bier subway riders' shock.
So I'm sitting in the Prince St station, listening to my iPod, which is basically a universal signal of don't-talk-to-me. And this guy comes up to me. Some people, you have a hard time determining, from the way they are dressed, whether they are chic hipster types or crazy people. This was one such dude. He was wearing a giant corduroy sport coat and green velvet dress pants and, if memory serves me, a bowler. So naturally I'm thinking, this might be a crazy person, or this might be a whole new level of ironi-style I haven't even been made conscious of yet!
He sat down next to me on the bench and said, "Good morning," which might seem like your standard run of the mill greeting, but in New York, when you are a woman sitting alone, and it is from a man who looks like he might be on drugs, it is an automatic bad sign.
"You look nice," he said, and I said thank you and laughed because, believe me, this was definitely not a morning on which I was looking particularly nice. This man then proceeded to ask me all about where I was from and where I was going, and I responded brusquely and curtly-- not because I am, as guys like these so frequently accuse me, a cold hearted bitch, but because this guy had this relatively creepy bug-eyed quality. Call it bullshit, but I believe women have a built in intuition for this sort of thing. If you don't happen to be of a gender that has to structure their behavior around fear of murder and rape, then perhaps you do not understand this.
"Twenty-six," he said. Twenty-six what? Twenty six dead woman skins are necessary to complete your dead-woman-skin sewing project? "I'm twenty-six. And you?"
"I'm twenty," I said.
"Do you want a Coke Zero? I have another one."
"No, no I'm okay, thanks."
"Are you sure? There are no calories!"
There was a nice refreshing pause in the conversation during which I willed the train to arrive.
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"Yes." The answer is always yes, even if, as in this case, it was a total lie.
"Just asking."
The train arrived and I walked a couple paces away in the hopes that I might discreetly get away from this guy who was making me uncomfortable. No such luck. He sat across from me, in one of those awkward L-shaped seats that MTA scrapped in its newer trains (because they are really inconvenient for anyone who has legs.)
Then, the kicker:
"I'm going to Staten Island."
There was such immense pride in this statement.
A Funny Thing Happened on the 4 Train
(or, Bitch I Didn't Push Your Fucking Kid)
A crowded subway car is a great way to watch New Yorkers. In a city of over 9 million people, in which we are quite literally stacked on top of one another, we still avoid human interaction with such a fervent intensity as to avoid making eye contact with the person whose face is stuck in our armpit (I am tall). I used to think it was a privacy thing-- we want our commutes, our walk down the block, to be exclusively our time. But when New Yorkers do get involved in confrontation, they often approach it with such zeal, with such unbridled passion...it's a pastime. It's enough to reduce your average Connecticut suburbanite to tears.
I got on a really crowded train the other day. I'm tempted to say it was the most crowded train I'd ever been on, but ever since I started taking the L train into Manhattan every morning, and watched the massive influx of A-line haircuts and skinny jeans at the Bedford Ave stop fit themselves like Tetris pieces against one another's frail beer-nourished bodies and reusable Whole Foods tote bags, my definition of crowded has changed.
But this was a very full 4 train, no doubt about it, headed downtown from 42nd St. After I got on, I noticed a family of three trying to wedge themselves in behind me -- a very young couple, the woman dressed in what I would call "post graduate Hot Topic chic," which is sort of trashy. Their son was probably around 7 and had a long rat tail (why? why? why do parents do this to their children?)
I always try to be really considerate on the train. I operate under the assumption that there is always someone more deserving than I of that freshly vacated seat. (This is less selflessness as it is a combination of me being a good person and me having my fair share of white guilt.) And so, this family is pushing me onto the train, holding one anothers' wrists, and I step aside to let them squeeze into an air pocket around the center pole.
I was wedged between the pole at the end of the seat and the women, who was wearing long lacy black gloves and a pleated skirt with a lot of chains and straps and other bondage accoutrement (wait, is this still a style people seriously wear?) The train lurched, bodies shifted, it was the kind of thing that happens a hundred times a day, I'm telling you.
It didn't take long, in this tightly packed brick of bodies, for me to notice the woman glaring up at me. I met her eyes and she kept them there, for a second, cold and loathing and heavily lined with black gunk. Then she turned to her son, who was entirely committed to his PSP, and started stroking his hair in a vaguely maternal way.
"Bitch thinks she gonna push you one more time she's gonna get pushed the fuck off this train."
It's funny how even the most crowded subway car maintains this eerie silence. There is very little chatter. One loud voice can carry, even over the roaring static of the subway. This was one such voice.
It took me a second to realize this woman was talking about me. I kept looking in the other direction, away from the woman and her son, thinking, "wait? me? I'm the bitch?"
"I swear to fucking God, you do whatever you want to ME. you can push me or hit me, but you do one single thing to my kid, well," and she made a noise of exasperation that suggested even she couldn't fathom the pure hell that awaited someone who fucked with her son.
It's always awkward when someone does not speak directly to you, but rather speaks in a way that's obviously intended for you to hear. This woman was talking to her kid,
running his rattail through her fingers and telling him she'd fuck up the bitch who did him wrong again. But the occasional sideways glance she shot me made it clear that I was said bitch, and I better watch out where I'm pushing.
I rolled my eyes, thinking, God, a little human contact is par for the course on MTA. I am not a particularly large person and doubt the force of my girth could have done much serious damage. Besides why would I deliberately push a child?
But my native, willingly unobtrusive suburbanite betrayed me, and I thought, "why doesn't this person like me? Why have I been falsely accused of wishing ill will upon her son? How can I straighten this up? Why would she think I want to hurt her child? What did I do?"
It is this type of thinking that truly separates people who live in cities from people who don't. For the Yankee, everything must be personal. For the New Yorker, sensitivity is switch-operated: if your son is jostled on the subway, it's an outrage, but if a woman threatens to push you off the train for said outrage, it's best not to read too far into it.
In conclusion, bitch, I didn't push your kid. Also, if I ever have a child, you better believe that the jackass who thinks they're gonna push that kid around is gonna get pushed the fuck off this train.
A crowded subway car is a great way to watch New Yorkers. In a city of over 9 million people, in which we are quite literally stacked on top of one another, we still avoid human interaction with such a fervent intensity as to avoid making eye contact with the person whose face is stuck in our armpit (I am tall). I used to think it was a privacy thing-- we want our commutes, our walk down the block, to be exclusively our time. But when New Yorkers do get involved in confrontation, they often approach it with such zeal, with such unbridled passion...it's a pastime. It's enough to reduce your average Connecticut suburbanite to tears.
I got on a really crowded train the other day. I'm tempted to say it was the most crowded train I'd ever been on, but ever since I started taking the L train into Manhattan every morning, and watched the massive influx of A-line haircuts and skinny jeans at the Bedford Ave stop fit themselves like Tetris pieces against one another's frail beer-nourished bodies and reusable Whole Foods tote bags, my definition of crowded has changed.
But this was a very full 4 train, no doubt about it, headed downtown from 42nd St. After I got on, I noticed a family of three trying to wedge themselves in behind me -- a very young couple, the woman dressed in what I would call "post graduate Hot Topic chic," which is sort of trashy. Their son was probably around 7 and had a long rat tail (why? why? why do parents do this to their children?)
I always try to be really considerate on the train. I operate under the assumption that there is always someone more deserving than I of that freshly vacated seat. (This is less selflessness as it is a combination of me being a good person and me having my fair share of white guilt.) And so, this family is pushing me onto the train, holding one anothers' wrists, and I step aside to let them squeeze into an air pocket around the center pole.
I was wedged between the pole at the end of the seat and the women, who was wearing long lacy black gloves and a pleated skirt with a lot of chains and straps and other bondage accoutrement (wait, is this still a style people seriously wear?) The train lurched, bodies shifted, it was the kind of thing that happens a hundred times a day, I'm telling you.
It didn't take long, in this tightly packed brick of bodies, for me to notice the woman glaring up at me. I met her eyes and she kept them there, for a second, cold and loathing and heavily lined with black gunk. Then she turned to her son, who was entirely committed to his PSP, and started stroking his hair in a vaguely maternal way.
"Bitch thinks she gonna push you one more time she's gonna get pushed the fuck off this train."
It's funny how even the most crowded subway car maintains this eerie silence. There is very little chatter. One loud voice can carry, even over the roaring static of the subway. This was one such voice.
It took me a second to realize this woman was talking about me. I kept looking in the other direction, away from the woman and her son, thinking, "wait? me? I'm the bitch?"
"I swear to fucking God, you do whatever you want to ME. you can push me or hit me, but you do one single thing to my kid, well," and she made a noise of exasperation that suggested even she couldn't fathom the pure hell that awaited someone who fucked with her son.
It's always awkward when someone does not speak directly to you, but rather speaks in a way that's obviously intended for you to hear. This woman was talking to her kid,
running his rattail through her fingers and telling him she'd fuck up the bitch who did him wrong again. But the occasional sideways glance she shot me made it clear that I was said bitch, and I better watch out where I'm pushing.
I rolled my eyes, thinking, God, a little human contact is par for the course on MTA. I am not a particularly large person and doubt the force of my girth could have done much serious damage. Besides why would I deliberately push a child?
But my native, willingly unobtrusive suburbanite betrayed me, and I thought, "why doesn't this person like me? Why have I been falsely accused of wishing ill will upon her son? How can I straighten this up? Why would she think I want to hurt her child? What did I do?"
It is this type of thinking that truly separates people who live in cities from people who don't. For the Yankee, everything must be personal. For the New Yorker, sensitivity is switch-operated: if your son is jostled on the subway, it's an outrage, but if a woman threatens to push you off the train for said outrage, it's best not to read too far into it.
In conclusion, bitch, I didn't push your kid. Also, if I ever have a child, you better believe that the jackass who thinks they're gonna push that kid around is gonna get pushed the fuck off this train.
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