I am a thirty-seven-year-old, heterosexual, middle-class white woman, wearing junior-sized clothes a shade on the beatnik side of trendiness. I am divorced and childless, and live with my cat and my plants in New York City.
I am walking home, and this shabby, drunk man is following me, saying, “Mama, oh mamma, baby, please, I wanna fuck you, I give good tongue, oh sweetheart, PLEASE.”
“Oh, leave me alone, don’t you have anything better to do?” I exclaim in annoyance.
He sniggers, then turns away.
After I get inside the lobby of my building, I wonder, What was that man trying to do? Did he want to degrade me, attack me, stimulate me sexually, flatter me, or simply tease me? Should I be angry or feel sorry for him? And I ask, Why me, anyway?
The voices in my head immediately provide answers:
What do you expect when you dress like that? My mother responds rhetorically.
But it happens to me even when I’m wearing my down parka and my overalls, I explain in bewilderment, adding with some outrage, How dare he talk to me? He doesn’t even know me.
Let me at him, I’ll kill the bastard, growls my father.
Oh daddy, stop it, I reply, embarrassed by his passion.
My conscience asks, How come you hear the pussy noises from guys across the street? You don’t know them. Yet you notice what they say.
I don’t know, I mumble.
You know you love it, insists my own analyst.
Maybe, I admit grudgingly like a patient cornered on the couch.
You must have a pretty poor opinion of yourself if you get turned on by someone like that, comments an advice columnist.
I guess so, I say, feeling a little humiliated.
Well, you know, it makes sense that you hear it, it’s dangerous out there, says the indignant, rational feminist voice in no uncertain terms. One of out two women experiences rape or an attempt at it sometime in her life. You have to be alert.
Maybe, I think. Soothed and vindicated, I stand a little straighter.
I think your reaction is disgusting, says the politically correct line-ist in me. This man is but a product of his environment, his class, race, ethnicity, in short, of capitalism and the state. He is attacking not you but your petit bourgeois privilege.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I reply, filled with guilt.
Perhaps he’s compensating for his own feelings of badness, the psychoanalyst side of me counsels empathetically. He projects his self-hatred into you who, at the same time, remain the all-powerful, all comforting mother whom he now feels good enough to make verbal love to.
Yes, yes, okay, but, still...I argue in increasingly louder tones to these contradictory voices, Still, I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. Is the noise coming from a person like the noise of an ambulance siren? Do I have to hear it so I get out of the way and don’t get run over?
Don’t let it upset you, dear, my kind uncle says (the one who used to engineer intense, flirtatious discussions in his den, with the door closed, with one or another of my teenage girlfriends). Just ignore him; don’t give him the benefit of your attention; don’t dignify him by a response; it will just encourage him, says my uncle, trying to calm me down and smooth things over.
I pause for breath, then, frustrated almost to tears, nearly shout, My mind doesn’t work as rationally as yours. How can it? My brain hears, my desire is stirred, I lose control of my body. On the street my body is theirs. I am a body on the street. Two tits and no head and a big ass. I am a walking Rorschach. My body becomes a cunt and I am sore from this semiotic rape.
A woman walks down a city street. A man whom she does not know makes an obscene noise or gestures. She counters with a retort or ignores him and walks on.
This is a common enough sequence of events. It happens every day of the years. It is happening this year, just as it has happened each of the last twenty years, indeed, as it has happened every day of every year since human beings began to build cities. Superficially, this is a simple, ordinary encounter. A stranger rudely intrudes with sexual innuendo upon someone minding her own business who manages to ignore him and go on her way.
But beneath the surface is a complexity of feeling, thought, and intention that, despite two decades of feminist theorizing and two millennia of women writing about women, we have just begun to decode. Hidden in this complexity are the personal and political contradictions of women’s lives, making the experience of street hassling the quintessential moment of femininity in our culture.
What femininity gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Here’s the knot: One the one hand, a woman wants, simply, to be. On the other, she wants to be who she is--a woman. To be a woman, however, makes it extremely difficulty simply to be, that is, to be a human being, because women live in the heart of a contradiction. They are treated as unconscious, passive objects but are required to respond as sentient people who acknowledge and participate in a transformation into something that is other-than-human. They become negatives, not-men, and are therefore less than human, a condition that is linguistically, ideologically, and socially construed as masculine. Mankind encompasses all human beings; he is the abstract, genderless individual, the self. In this construction, “man” becomes Self, and “woman” Other, a self who does not belong to herself.
To be Other is to be the Subject-as-Object.
