Street harassment, in my experiences, occurs differently than it’s most often portrayed; it begins with simple friendly conversation, and because my belief is in kindness and openness in spite of all the vitriol that exists, I usually go along with it. Next, the guy says something to the effect of “Don’t feel insecure- I think you’re beautiful” which isn’t at all provoked by anything said or done by me, and although everyone I tell about these instances thinks that it’s charming that strangers are preaching body positivity at me, what they realize is that these strangers assume I’m insecure about my appearance, which I’m not, and furthermore, that assumption that I’m insecure perpetuates the belief that even if they call me beautiful or whatever, they still think there’s something I ought to be insecure about. That upsets me the most because they think it’s somehow a favor to a fat girl that some stranger called her beautiful, because of course she mustn’t believe she is, and so of course she’ll be forever in debt to whoever is charitable enough to call her what she doesn’t believe she’s worthy of being. The most obnoxious instance was that someone had the audacity to say, “I bet you’ve never been called beautiful by a man before, and I’m glad to be the first” Then, in the cycle of harassment I’ve experienced, it usually mutates into questions of whether I have a boyfriend or not- they don’t even think to ask whether I have a girlfriend, or use gender neutral phrasing. A few times I’ve lied and said I’m a lesbian. Since I am queer, I used to think that would be a better claim than the fake boyfriend, since a good portion of music is about “stealing your girl” and so having a boyfriend (real or fake) doesn’t seem be a sure fire way to stop their pursuit. But in those instances of calling myself a lesbian, I’ve gotten either a slew of homophobia or propositions for three-ways with him and another girl. Also I’m sure that’s problematic since it perpetuates the thought process, “She refused my attraction- she must be a lesbian” which it seems a multitude of guys have. From there, I usually flee as soon as I can, or ignore him if fleeing isn’t an option. I’ve gotten better in terms of blatantly telling people to go away, but the issue with that is the obvious fact that they don’t listen, and worse yet, I’ve gotten a multitude of harassers tell me “I love when girls have an attitude”. Something that is more offensive to me than the street harassment I’ve experienced is the reactions of people I trust if/when I tell them. The most often comments I get are things to the effect of, “You don’t understand since you’re not conventionally attractive, if you were, though, that sort of thing would happen all the time” and the worst of the worst, on the school bus in eighth grade: “You’d be lucky to be raped, since that’s the only way you’d ever find a guy willing to have sex with you”. Because of comments like that I figure there’s no wonder why bus-stop creeps think they can pray on my perceived insecurity.
For a while I held the idea that only “pretty” people get harassed until I was harassed for the first time alone. I’d been cat-called in the past with adults present and their reaction was to find it cute in a “my little girl is becoming a young lady” right of passage sort of way, which has terrifying implications. As for my first time being harassed/cat-called alone, I was shocked and traumatized for weeks after since I was insecure and thought my “ugliness” made me immune to stuff like this. Just the weekend before, a group of other girls and I were harassed at the state fair, and my dad said not to worry since they weren’t talking to me, just my more conventionally attractive friends, I figured, since I was alone this time, he’d help me, and he did, by taking me to the police station, but insisted I tell them what dress I was wearing and how I was walking alone as the sun went down. He also felt like I was exaggerating since the behavior I reported was extremely similar to the previous incident in which he claimed was not aimed at me. Subsequently, since my own father was skeptical of the incident, the police just shrugged it off and said, “You’re bound to find people like that downtown- this is nothing new, don’t worry.” Of course that solved nothing in terms of my own difficulty with coping with this man’s actions that seemed so entirely incomprehensible for someone who held the belief that guys would never go after girls like me. I wound up writing a strongly worded rebuttal to a song called ‘Thank God I’m Pretty’ that sarcastically portrays a girl’s gratitude for being pursued by predators, since I felt “pretty” in the context of the song must mean conventionally attractive, which I was/am not, whereas I realize now that pretty can be replaced with “female” in the song, and the message of feeling unsafe for simply existing stays the same. I worry that other women who don’t feel attractive, though, might gather from that song and other representation of harassment that only the prettiest women are cat-called and harassed, hence women who don’t see themselves as pretty might not be thought of as a target, even though, sadly, often times existing is all it takes for someone to see you as their prey.
