On heckling, cat-calling, and the long stare

Tonight, walking home from my brother's birthday party, I interacted with two different sets of men.

I was walking through one of those brightly-lit tunnels they put up at construction sites. Coming the other way were two goofy-looking men in baggy hoodies and sneakers. One of them said, "Mmmm, girl, I been lookin' for you all night!" in a growly, enthusiastic voice. I laughed. It's been a while since I've gotten a line that cheesy, and I thought it was funny. I didn't take it seriously.

The two men walking right behind them were wearing nice button-down shirts. They looked like men who frequented expensive bars, and have conversations about politics and business. "You're smiling?" one muttered, disgusted, as he passed me. And just like that (uh-oh) I was ashamed.

What, why can't I smile or laugh? Do you think they're "disrespecting me", and it's wrong to smile? ...How should I react, then? Should I ignore them? But guys do this all the time, and ignoring doesn't work. It just makes me seem scared and submissive. Should I do it because I'm a Lady? ...Who says you get to tell me what being a Lady is?! ...Okay, okay Anna, turn the brain off. Who cares what he thinks? Who cares!

It was strange, but the subtle behavior-correction bothered me a lot more than the overt come-on.

Catcalls used to upset me when I first moved to New York. (I ignored them. This didn't help.) But then, after a while, I started laughing, joking, and heckling back. And now, it doesn't get under my skin at all. (NOTE: I'm talking about interactions in "safe" public spaces, e.g. a crowded street or train. If I'm alone, you can bet that I take the potential threat of assault seriously.)

If the guy is a banterer - "You look lovely today, miss!", or "How you doing tonight!" I'll just say, "Thank you!/Good!" and flash a big smile, and keep walking, spirits high. If he follows that up with, "Oh, can I take you out on a date?" I say, "Nope!" in a cheery voice and keep walking, spirits still high. And most of the time, they'll call out, smiling, "Okay! You have a lovely evening!"

Most guys who catcall are like this, in my experience. It's a kind of burlesque, a patter, a joke exchange. I can laugh at them and walk away, and they will smile, because secretly that's all they want - an audience. It's as silly, and harmless, as a dance number in a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. They seem almost relieved when I'm not offended. I think they might fall over in surprise if I actually flirted back.

...And then there are the creepers. Particularly the ones who say nothing, but stare. I'll be on a train, feel someone's eyes, and look up; and a fifty-something man with grey hair is boring holes into me with his expressionless face. They have good stamina, these starers. They don't look away. Their goal seems to be to intimidate; unlike the other guys, they're not looking for common ground. Most of the time, I think, these guys see themselves as dark and tragic figures, sort of like the Phantom of the Opera. Lots of self-pity. "Nobody likes me! My sexuality will overcome you! I am the Dark Lord of Love!"

In these situations, the best line of defense is to confuse them, or make the moment absurd and funny. I don't ignore them, I don't attack; I go gonzo. I might furrow my brows up like Bert from Sesame Street, or bare my teeth like a tiger and wiggle my fingers, or smile and wave in a really cheesy way. Once I stuck my tongue out at a middle-aged European tourist. This confuses the hell out of them. They look away, or blush.

You see, it all falls apart if I make a silly face, because that's not how I'm supposed to act! I'm supposed to be scared! I'm supposed to be offended, a "stuck-up bitch". I'm supposed to act like I'm "too good for them", and reinforce their belief that women are otherworldly, godlike, vapid, wicked creatures. I'm supposed to take it very seriously, because their desire is serious, it's big and powerful, more powerful than me! Don't I understand that?

(This last bit, I think the two buttoned-up gentlemen would agree with. Which is why I got mad.)

When dealing with a creeper, I don't give a good goddamn about acting like a lady. (I don't in general, but.) I don't mind grossing out a persistently creepy man so he'll be repelled or embarrassed and leave me alone. I'll spit on the sidewalk, make an ugly face at them, invent an obscene gesture, do a weird dance. I go wild, in a way that's more "Wild Kingdom" than "Girls Gone Wild". I enjoy seeing the look of shock on their faces. "Hey! No fair!" it seems to say. "You're not allowed to do that! You're not acting like a woman anymore!"

And when I do that, I get to break out of the box labeled "girl object" for a little while. If I laugh, if I spit, if I make eye contact and a crazy face - I surprise them. I make them realize I wasn't what they thought. I'm bigger, stranger, braver, and funnier than they imagined. They are so shocked when this happens. I don't care about retaliation - I'm not trying to wound them or get back at them, or defend my honor. I don't need to bring out the big guns, because their leering is just not as scary or tragic as they think it is. I simply want them to know I am here and I am laughing.

But if I walk by tight-lipped and offended, and stare straight ahead, and pretend to ignore them... the heckling increases. The dirtiest things that have ever been said to me were delivered when I tried to ignore someone. A guy wants attention, I ignore him, he gets angry, sees me as a "stuck-up bitch", and amps it up - I ignore him, he becomes enraged, it gets more intense.

The worst thing about silence is that it's passive; it telegraphs fear. It turns me into a china doll, immobile and pinch-lipped and perfectly feminine. And they think I am afraid, and treat me as if I am. If I am silent, if I pretend to ignore someone that's bothering me, I give in to his reality. I submit to the assertion that I am whatever he thinks I am. With my silence, my refusal to engage, I confirm that I am mute, and his desire is voiced. And I become an object all over again.

So I don't ignore, but I don't attack, either. I refuse to play the game on his terms. I flip the dynamic between us into something absurd or funny or grotesque, and make him see the world through MY eyes. Maybe one of these days when I pull a funny face, one of those Dark Lords of Romance will crack up laughing, and not take themselves so seriously. Who knows.

So. Ahem. Harrumph, koff koff, etc, OBAMA

These articles on the Onion are funny because they're just kind of true, in a sad, blunt, slightly scary kind of way. It's the "hysterical laughter" brand of funny.

On last night's election:
Nation's Women Wake Up Relieved To Find Selves Still In 2012

After Hurricane Sandy, re: the growing awareness of climate change:
Nation Suddenly Realizes This Just Going To Be A Thing That Happens From Now On

In other news,
LAST NIGHT'S ELECTION! IT HAPPENED! IT IS REAL!

Y'all, I was filled with the spirit of voting. Filled with it! But after two hours in line, outside, I was too tired to do ambitious things like "stand up" or "talk". I walked to my friend's house, and we rang in the new election year eating cheesecake on the floor* and drinking whiskey. And then OH MA GAH...!

After the initial flailing, texting, and subdued whinnying, I started to realize how many progressive reforms had passed as well. Gay marriage? In multiple states? A lesbian senator? Pot, legal in two states? Had I been hit on the head and sent back to Oberlin, land of the hippies?

It's almost like... all of the stuff we've been caring about, so fiercely, is starting to become real. Eeeeep. Add that to the crazy Narnia snowstorm that's rapidly forming outside as we speak, and everything is seeming a bit magical and eerie. Watch out for freak storms, progressive reforms, or fauns with scarves and little nubby horns...

* We were lying on the floor, not eating cheesecake off of it. We had plates. Not forks so much, but. Plates.

"The thing is, it’s patriarchy that says men are stupid and monolithic and unchanging and incapable. It’s patriarchy that says men have animalistic instincts and just can’t stop themselves from harassing and assaulting. It’s patriarchy that says men can only be attracted by certain qualities, can only have particular kinds of responses, can only experience the world in narrow ways. Feminism holds that men are capable of more – are more than that. Feminism says that men are better than that, can change, are capable of learning, and have the capacity to be decent and wonderful people."

Chally, from the blog Zero at the Bone

"The Upside of Ugly", Jessica Valenti

Posted back in August, worth reposting if you haven't read it. The ever-lovin' Jessica Valenti, writing for The Nation.

“There may be a bit of head-shaking over young girls going to drastic measures to feel beautiful, but we never seem to question the idea that feeling beautiful is a worthy goal in the first place. We should tell girls the truth: “Beautiful” is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we’re second class citizens.

Girls don’t need more self-esteem or feel-good mantras about loving themselves—what they need is a serious dose of righteous anger. But instead of teaching young women to recognize and utilize their very justifiable rage, we tell them to smile and love themselves.

(...) As my friend writer Jaclyn Friedman once said to me, the problem isn’t that girls don’t know their worth—it’s that they absolutely do know their value in society. Young women know exactly how ugly the culture believes them to be. So when we teach girls to simply “love themselves”, we’re implicitly telling them to accept the world as it is. We’re saying that being beautiful is something worth having when we should be telling them a culture that demands as much is toxic.”

The Atlantic on women, from 1859 to now

Via the Hairpin.

The Atlantic Magazine gives an overview on its articles about women and men, from the 1800's to now. The first is all the way from 1859, and is admirably radical for being so pompous, sprinkled as it is with Classical references and snippets of Latin and French. (Spoiler: his answer is "Probably yes".)

"Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question lies. Concede this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world before she has done with it; it becomes merely a question of time. Resistance must be made here or nowhere. Obsta principiis. Woman must be a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground. What if the Chinese proverb should turn out to be, after all, the summit of wisdom,—"For men, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue"?

"Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1859

And from 1932, a wonderfully sarcastic essay by Helen Keller about the implications of labor-saving machines in the household. (Basically the domestic equivalent of the song "Now That We've Found Love [What Are We Gonna Do]".) This essay is a good one to curl up with, I think - warm laptop by a warm fire?

"Early that afternoon when Mrs. Jones came downstairs on her way to a meeting of her church club, she found her husband seated before the living room fireplace smoking a fragrant cigar and contentedly immersed in a book. He looked up guiltily as she entered.

‘Is something wrong, John?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t at all like you to be wasting time in this fashion. Surely you don’t sit in your office and read a book in the middle of the afternoon! Even when you have nothing to do, you at least try to appear busy.’

‘I won’t need to start dinner for another hour,’ Mr. Jones explained, ‘and everything else has been attended to.’

‘Have you finished the luncheon dishes? Yes, I suppose you have. It takes very little time with the new dishwasher. But, really, I don’t know how to suggest making efficient use of the time you save. I don’t know how to provide more raw material for a machine which transforms soiled dishes into clean ones. I hope you won’t be driven to the extremity of having to invent a dish-soiling machine so that the dishwasher may be kept operating at capacity.’

Mr. Jones’s cigar turned bitter in his mouth and he lost interest in his book, but his wife hurried out the door and went her way.

"Put Your Husband in the Kitchen"
Helen Keller, 1932

There are many more on the work force, abortion, college girls having sex (the horror!) but I'll finish with Anne-Marie Slaughter's excellent essay, published this year.

"Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed."

"Why Women Still Can't Have It All"

Anne-Marie Savage, 2012

The gist is that the professional work system in America is still designed for half of the population. The old distribution of labor relies on the implied assumption that the other half will raise the children and keep the house, but both genders are in that first category now. Long hours, little vacation (compared to Europe), little or no paternity leave.

The result is that everyone's working themselves into the ground, men and women, and it's doing nobody any good. Especially since women still put most of the expectation on themselves to "have it all" - run a house, raise kids, have a full-time career. This current system doesn't make sense at all - it's descended from an outmoded system in the past, and we need to see its dysfunction and change it.

Sort of like how the layout of streets in Boston is descended from the horse paths from the past, which is why Boston is a continual snarl of hopeless traffic. (I spent much of my youth in this traffic.)

Hurricane, mindsets, zombies... oh wait, not those

Before the storm hit, I bought several pounds of blackberries on sale. I've been baking with them since then: buckle and muffins. (When I'm stressed, I cook. One of my housemates cleaned. The other bought loads of beer. Our house is pretty awesome.) During the storm, we played Scrabble. We still have water, power, internet; we're not in the flood zone; the grocery store around the corner is open. We are very lucky.

However - the larger picture is a bit more grim. The subways are full of seawater, multiple neighborhoods are flooded, 80 houses burned up in Queens from a fire, the Con Ed building in Manhattan exploded, most of lower Manhattan is without power, and the parks are full of downed trees.

Everything has just... stopped. I know that can't be true, but it seems that way. It all feels strange and eerie - like when you almost get into a car accident. You're okay, but you're suddenly aware how easy it would be for things to go very wrong. You realize how vulnerable you actually are.

You start to do the side-eye thing when you go out. Zombies? Are you there? No? Good.

I think the one thing that all New Yorkers have in common - the lucky ones, I mean, who are complaining about things like spotty internet service - is that we experienced the storm together in the same way. We spent hours inside, waiting for the wind to get bad, getting bored and antsy, but for once we couldn't leave. Time stretched out and took on a new shape - we wasted hours and hours. There was nowhere we could go - no bar, no bodega. We all had to cook for ourselves, and not order takeout. (Not that I do anyway. I'm a egg-on-toast, frozen soup kind of girl.)

And, despite joking about it, we all started to imagine things together. When you're buying emergency water and batteries, you have to imagine what it would be like to need them. We all read about the storm together - saw the worst, the fires and floods, and realized it could have happened to us. We had to spend days on end with our housemates or loved ones, and really share our space and time. (If things at home had been tense before, they were sure as hell a lot more tense now.) For New Yorkers who don't mind sharing their homes with near-strangers, this storm made some incompatibilities difficult to ignore.

And now, even though the storm is over, life isn't going to be back to normal for a while. Many buildings are destroyed - businesses, homes. People are waiting in long lines to charge their phones in the outlets at all-night ATMs. My friend Josh walked 20+ blocks north, in Manhattan, to find places with electricity. My brother is sleeping on someone's couch on the Upper East Side, and is fighting gridlock to take an old black car to work. There are downed trees everywhere. I saw pictures of my friends Josh and Jesse, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the lights were out all over Manhattan. Everyone had to be out by the time the sun went down, and it got too dark to see.

I think that the storm gave us each a lot of time to think about our lives, our living situations, our choices, and ourselves. When the lights went out in the city, I think a very primal sort of evaluation took place for many people. If you can't count on civilization to function flawlessly, what can you count on? What do you have? What people can you count on to be there? If there are no people, what do you have left? (Spoiler alert - the answer is not "nothing".)

This is the kind of thinking that people did a lot more often back in the olden days, I bet. Nowadays, we push back our fear of the unknown with electric lights and order. Nobody wants to think about how, in the end, we have little control over forces like weather, disasters, sickness, the feelings of others. In the dark, we are very small. And when we're afraid, we're more likely to start thinking we're helpless.

But! Luckily! This is not actually true.

...At least until we turn into zombies. But until then, everybody has a center of resolve and grit inside themselves that, when tapped into, can take the place of that helplessness. We all decide how to approach life, and the world. You can either approach it from a place of reactiveness, fear, helplessness, self-pity - or from a place of discipline, action, compassion, and optimism.

A healthy helping of cheerful graveyard humor helps, too.

Sometimes you have to be a bit Polar Bear Club about it, I think - just jump right into that icy water, yelling and laughing. Now is a good time to read Kurt Vonnegut.

My secret beef with "When Harry Met Sally"

"I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ephron and Rob Reiner originally planned an ending where Harry and Sally remained friends, which they felt was the “true ending”; only later did they bow to the expectations of genre."

Why 'When Harry Met Sally' Is Bad for Ladies

In this life, there are things you love, and things you dislike, and things you must dislike secretly. This is not out of shame, but practicality and grace. Everyone else loves these things, and they will want you to explain why you don't, but you should not try.

(Or you could try, but then you will wind up in a fruitless Bermuda Triangle of a conversation about why you don't like the Beatles, with someone who loves the Beatles, and you will feel like a jerk.)

Anyway. One of my secret "dislikes" is the movie "When Harry Met Sally". Now, everyone I've met who's seen this movie has loved it. I don't blame them! It's got love, New York, banter, sandwiches, a happy ending. Which is great! I love these things! I am a huge fan of dorky happy things. I say "Yes!" out loud when characters do something I agree with, in order to encourage them. I should like this movie.

But. In between the heartwarming funny bits, it creeped me out a little. Watching it always made me feel a little weird. But I could never put my finger on why, until this recent essay in Splitsider came out, and I went "Yes! Yes!" at my screen, to cheer on the writer.

This scene, with its excess of romance that doesn’t fit the previous storyline and its dialogue that doesn’t match the emotional meaning, is the scene in which the tension between the film’s two goals is most felt. Intellectual examination of friendship between men and women has to this point played out realistically; here intellectual examination gets too cocky, listens to music while walking in the dark, and gets mugged and stabbed to death by happily-ever-after romance. Though — is it happily ever after? If love meant having to be trapped in a talking head with a man who subtly ridiculed my careful planning of our wedding cake, I would probably end up divorced.

It's not that I think the movie's MISOGYNIST, DUM DUM DUMMM (trumpets, flaming sword, etc), so much as I find it to be... blind. What creeped me out was the discord between how the movie portrayed the relationship (charming! perfect! meant to be!) and how the relationship actually seemed to me (controlling! flawed! manipulative!)

He’s self-absorbed — rather than participating in a conversational give-and-take with Sally, he speaks in long monologues better suited to stand-up. His logorrhea minimizes the space given to Sally’s character development and takes up any time that could have been used to show us Sally’s other men friends (thereby proving Harry’s point about their absence!).

The film really, really likes Harry. It thinks he's funny and smart and pretty much awesome. But I always thought Harry was kind of an arrogant, self-absorbed jerk. And I thought Sally was a bit of a pushover for putting up with him the whole time. But the movie kept playing their interactions out like it was the perfect love story.

The climatic New Year’s Eve scene is super problematic. On one hand, hello. It’s romantic. It’s witty. It’s a legendary scene that spawned a clichéd horde of copycats. On the other hand, it is Harry listing Sally’s faults, which are now acceptable only because they are man-approved. It is Sally’s final loss of agency, where her completely justified protestations of “I hate you, Harry. I really hate you,” must actually mean “I love you,” because the man who has caused her so much emotional anguish has impulsively decided that he’s romantically in love with her.

It's like the first time you meet a new couple, and they obviously love each other, but something's a bit off. They're joking with you, and you're joking with them, but the guy keeps stepping on his girlfriend's words, or making sarcastic remarks about her judgment or clothes or taste, and she laughs like it's normal. With every remark, you keep waiting for her to pull back, to get mad, but it never happens. Your friends say, "Aren't they such a great couple?" and you realize you're the only one that thinks the scales are unbalanced.

Perhaps most importantly, Harry is absolutely horrible to Sally. He is the worst. He more or less tells Sally that he only had sex with her because she was so pathetic. Throughout the film he doesn’t listen to Sally and is dismissive of her, and when he goes too far he apologizes but doesn’t actually change. When Sally tries to break this cycle, he aggressively invades her space with “cute” phone messages. Even when Sally directly tells him to stop, that she is not his consolation prize, he won’t leave her alone. In a determination bordering on harassment, Harry tracks Sally down on New Years Eve to express the basic sentiment that his feelings are more legitimate than hers.

And sorry, this is supposed to be a love story?

But really, the problem I have isn't that "Harry is a jerk", the problem is "Harry is a jerk but gets to be a hero, Sally is a woman but has to be a prop." It's like she's not an actual person, but an embodiment of Woman Who Needs Love, and Who Will Put Up With Shit. I remember watching this when I was much younger, horrified, secretly thinking, "This is love? This is what love is going to be like? He makes fun of me, he sleeps with me, he leaves me, and when he decides he wants me, I'm complete all of a sudden?"

Though she is a journalist who writes for New York magazine, she is only referred to once as a writer and she never speaks about her articles. Meanwhile, Jess, who writes for the same magazine, constantly mentions his job and talks about his pieces. In fact, it’s a source of great humor (“I’m a writer, I know dialogue, and that was particularly harsh”) and attraction (Marie quoting his line). While Jess is defined by his successful career, Sally is only allowed to be defined by her unsuccessful relationships. Her lack of agency in the film as a whole is mirrored by Harry’s dismissive description of her career choice: “writing about things that happen to other people.”

Eeeesh. I guess it reminds me of experiences I've had with some guys who have a similar movie reel playing in their heads. A few times in my life, a guy has thought that he and I are in a romantic movie, even though we're not seriously involved, or involved at all, just because we banter and joke. To these guys, we've hit all the hallmarks of a rom-com, and therefore romance must be in the offing. These guys get a bit wounded and belligerent when I gently turn them down, but they don't want to listen. They want to be listened to. They tend to talk over me, rather than listening to me. They don't ask how I feel about things. And if things go far enough, the guy can become entitled and aggressive.

And the scariest thing isn't the guy himself - usually they're sweet at heart. But I have a scary, sinking feeling that if I just went along with it, if I played along with the romantic reel, if I didn't push back, if I didn't call them on their BS (the way I expect to be called on mine), if I didn't speak up about what I wanted, if I seemed not to want anything much - they would never notice. They would think everything was fine. And so, they would never really know me at all.

ANYWAY! I don't HATE the movie. But it does get on my nerves a bit. There's actually a really nice paragraph at the end of the article about its redeeming qualities.