Hollerin’ Season

Image: Flickr / chriscardinal

Yesterday I stopped at the grocery store to pick up some yogurt to go with dinner. On my way in, a store employee lingering outside smiled at me. I smiled and nodded and walked in. On my way out, I vaguely heard someone else calling to me, “Hey baby! Baby!” Quietly, then louder and more insistent.

I hurried through the parking lot, trying to ignore the person cat-calling me. The store employee who had smiled at me earlier then started calling to me from 30 feet away as I headed to my car. “Hey miss lady! Alright now!” I glanced at him, and it was clear he didn’t want anything but my attention.

Annoyed, I got into my car where my dog was waiting. As I was exited the parking lot, another man flagged me down, pointing to my headlights. Thinking something was wrong, I slowed to a stop. He smiled and said, “I like your dog.”

Me: “Thanks.”
Him: “Are you single?”
Me: “No.”
Him: “Are you really not single?”
Me: “On my way to my man’s house right now.” [True fact: The easiest way to get a strange man to leave you alone is to tell him that you're someone else's property. Equally true fact: It doesn't always work.]
Him: “Do you want to make a friend?”
Me: [Blank stare, preparing to pull off]
Him: “Well, do you need some CDs, DVDs…?”

I drove away.

As harassment goes, it certainly wasn’t the worst I’ve experienced. Neither of these men made remarks about my body or called me a bitch because I wasn’t receptive. Neither of them blocked my path. (All of these things have happened to me. All of these things have probably happened to all of the women you know.) It was just a deluge of unwanted attention. I joked about it — the bootleg DVD offer was funny — to my boyfriend when I got to his house. But I was joking because it was so infuriating. And I knew that if I were at the store with him, it wouldn’t have happened. Being a woman alone in public means I can’t even buy a tub of yogurt without fielding unwanted advances.

I left that grocery store never wanting to go back. I’ll avoid it if I’m by myself. Here’s the thing street harassment apologists don’t seem to understand when they say “don’t get offended just because a man says hello to you.” It’s just plain stressful being approached by multiple male strangers — especially when I don’t know how they’ll react to my disinterest. I’ve been yelled at, I’ve been cursed out, and physically intimidated. I’ve also been wished a blessed day. But the unpredictability is what makes it so upsetting. Even as I make the choice to avoid certain places, I hate it, because it’s just another example of the ways street harassment limits women’s access to public spaces.

Of course, I don’t have a choice much of the time. Standing at the bus stop on Rhode Island Avenue on fine mornings means being called to by all kinds of men who are sitting, bored, in their cars on their way to work. There are different methods of dealing. There’s snapping back, there’s being silent, and there’s being polite and dismissive. Still, the result of each tactic depends solely on the guy and whether he’s willing to leave me alone; it has little do with whether I desire to be left alone.

It seems there’s only one thing to do when warm weather arrives and, as my friend Dayo puts it, “hollerin’ season” has arrived: Put my game face on.

Ben and Jane

Historian Jill Lepore has an op-ed in the Times comparing the life of Benjamin Franklin with his closest sister, Jane Mecom, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I read something so relevant to my interests in the NYT.

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

At 17, he ran away from home. At 15, she married: she was probably pregnant, as were, at the time, a third of all brides. She and her brother wrote to each other all their lives: they were each other’s dearest friends. (He wrote more letters to her than to anyone.) His letters are learned, warm, funny, delightful; hers are misspelled, fretful and full of sorrow. “Nothing but troble can you her from me,” she warned. It’s extraordinary that she could write at all.

“I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed.

He would have none of it. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.” He was, sadly, right.

It continues this way, sketching the trajectory of their lives, and the fact that Mecom bore 12 children and buried 11 — something that surely stood in the way of any self-improvement she wished for. Lepore writes, “the story of Jane Mecom is a reminder that, especially for women, escaping poverty has always depended on the opportunity for an education and the ability to control the size of their families.”

There’s nothing I can add to this excellent essay, of course, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

As an aside, I hit my 20-article limit last week, and the site kindly informed me. But I keep clicking links and have yet to be blocked by a paywall.

In Defense of the Short Men

My colleague and friend Kay Steiger tweeted something this morning that made a lot of people defensive:

My position on this: Women who won't date short men on that fact alone are bigots http://bit.ly/dFSosI—
  (@kaysteiger) April 13, 2011

Declared History’s Greatest Monster by many, she followed it up with an awesome blog post this afternoon:

Height discrimination seems to be one of the last socially accepted irrational dating biases. If you’re short, there’s literally nothing you can do about that. When I say that I think women who refuse to date a man simply because of his height I usually get a litany of reasons defending this position—pretty much all of which are irrational.

I’m just not attracted to short men.
Fine. I don’t really get why you’d eliminate an entire population simply based on height, but there is some evolutionary psychology to back up the idea that women tend to be attracted to greater height. But if we’re totally being honest, there are tons of “evolutionary” romantic biases that modern people work around pretty effectively: People tend to be attracted to people that look most like them, women are “attracted” to wealthier men, or that women evolutionarily want to be more submissive to men. Why we adhere to the height “evolution” reason and tend to reject others as biased is beyond me.

Short men have a “Napoleon” complex.
I don’t have any scientific data to back this up or anything, but I’m pretty sure Napoleonism isn’t a universal trait among men under a certain height. What women mean when they say this is they once dated a short guy who was an asshole and so they’ve taken to assuming all short men are assholes.

And so on. Go read the rest, it’s good.

I just want to follow this up with something one of my followers brought up, and something Kay touched on a bit, but bears teasing out. Women are socially conditioned to want to feel smaller than men. Superhero women are smaller than superhero men (mostly). Wanting a bigger guy than oneself is often about wanting to feel small and protected, and less visible. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting what you want, but casting aspersions on a whole group of men because of personal preference quite literally is bigotry. And if we’re getting personal, I actually have a slight preference for shorter men because I’m only 5’3″ and I like looking a guy in the eye. It also makes other logistics easier. But! I would never not date a much taller man because of that, and people, I suspect, would call me crazy if I said I just wasn’t into tall guys.