I recently have begun talking with an old high school friend about sexual harassment on the street. She is a really innocent sort who felt quite traumatized by the way that older men hoot and stare at her. Talking with her has made me realize something: I am racist when it comes to conceiving of sexual harassment on the street because all I know is my own experience.
Let me explain. I am on Indian descent, and I used to wear the Islamic headscarf and it rendered me somewhat sexually invisible. Generally, I was harassed for being Muslim, especially post-911. I would be walking and people would roll down their windows and yell "Osama Bin Laden!" or "Go back home, Arab!" As a native-born American who had lost a cousin to the World Trade Center attacks, I understood their anger and frustration, and I let it go, although I did implement some personal security measures (wearing a hoodie with the hood up over my headscarf when walking alone at night is an example).
Fast forward to my latter college days, and I had lost my faith and shed my scarf. All of a sudden, walking across the street was a constant trial, as honking and such would ensue. Now, I hadn't all of a sudden started dressing skimpily; I simply had my scarf off. The behavior I encountered surprised me. Worst of all, every single man that harassed me was not white. The men who made kissy noises at me, honked, hollered, hooted, and just seemed to feel entitled to my body were all non-white. No matter how I dressed, walked, or acted, whether I was alone or with someone, I was subjected to packs of non-white men staring at me and harassing me like I was naked and oiled for their pleasure. Eventually, although I hated myself for it, whenever I noticed non-white men on my path, I would instantly change my walking route to completely avoid them. Even if I were walking with a partner, date, or friend, I would ask them to detour without telling them why. I stopped caring about how I dressed or acted and whether or not I was alone and what time of day it was because men would treat me like meat no matter what, but I developed a subconsciously racist attitude. The worst incidents occurred in London this winter, when Indian men would often not only leer at me, but actually grope me on the street as I walked by them, a rather rare occurence for me in the US. In my headscarf days, the people who had been racist towards me were white men, but now, due to who had harassed me, I was the racist, and it hurt me to think of it.
So, when I was talking to my friend about sexual harassment on the street, I automatically thought of non-white men as the perpetrators. I mentally slapped myself for having the thought, but my conjecture turned out to be unfortunately correct.
I guess I have a few questions for my fellow feminists who live in areas that aren't all white. Firstly, what has been your experience with non white men and their attitude towards women? Secondly, do you know of any studies about men's actions and attitudes towards women that have revealed correlations based on race and/or ethnicity, or a lack thereof? I would really love to be proven wrong about this.
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I'm white, and I get harassed about equally by men of all colors. But it depends on where you live--for my area, it's pretty proportional. But that's just the impression I've gotten--now that you've said this, I'll be paying closer attention. Thanks for paying attention to this.
I have commented here in the past on my own Theory of Invisibility.
When I am in all-Euro areas of the U.S., I escape harassment altogether and live in blissful peace, because I am of a phenotype/ethnicity that is sexually invisible to European-American men. I believe that even Euro-American men who know me either think of me in a totally asexual way or just "assume" that I'm not up for grabs with them. (Along the same lines, I've had a Druze Arab and a Christian South Indian friend who were actually told by their Euro-American male friends that "we never consider you because we feel like you're supposed to end up in an arranged match with someone from your culture, or that we'll run into trouble with your families if we date you. So we look past you." Hmmmmm.)
Anyway, in order to unravel this situation, I think you need to look at it from the harasser's perspective: European-American men have been trained to view as sexual and sexy a limited category of women. This training has been so rigid that, when Euro-American attraction to, say, African slave women, manifested, it was considered a sexual deviancy, a "nasty" and "dark" sort of sexual need. African slave women's sexuality became pathologized as such by association.
If you were to go to a street thoroughfare in which European-phenotype women walked down the street in front of groups of Euro men who are otherwise (educationally, socioeconomically, etc.) situated the same as the non-White men who bug you, you would observe that European-American men indeed *do* harass and whistle at and give grief to certain categories of women. I've seen it many times and been amused that as soon as a dark-skinned or natural-haired Black woman walks past, the hoots and hollers die down. Suddenly, sexual power is taken out of the equation: because they have no sexual interest in dominating her, there is no fun to be had in publically expressing that domination.
Men from non-European backgrounds have not experienced the same sexual socialization as Euro-American men. True, they may have grown up in the U.S. and watched the same Euro-geared sex flicks and read the same Playboys, but in their own families and lives, they saw sexuality play out with Hispanic, Black, Filipina, Arab, South Asian, etc, women. So, their targets for harassment include not only the European women dominating U.S. media, but a variety of "women of color" who may escape the radar of White men.
That's how I would look at it: it's not that non-Euro men harass women more than European men, it's that the former have a broader range of women to harass, and you're experiencing it now as a member of that broader range.
Also, there may be a connection to educational and social status. Street harassment is often perpetrated by those with less social status, perhaps as a compensation of sorts for their general lack of social power. I find it highly doubtful that the men who harass you are Wall Street bigwigs or run their own pediatrics clinic. Because White poverty is often hidden in this country and the image of "success" painted with a European face, you may not have mentally associated European-ancestry men with street harassment (which some consider to be a phenomenon of the less formally educated) in the way you do non-European men.
The dynamic in Britain is bound to be different, though, seeing as how the desi community there is much more socioeconomically (and ethnically) diverse than ours here in the U.S.
very well written. i was going to comment along the same lines...
i think men harass women when they think they can get away with it, also they harass women that they can or want to control. for men of color, it is women of color. women of color are many times invisible to white men (except for the cases of being exoticized). i've lived in very non-diverse areas as a WOC and i don't get any attention at all, good or bad. when i'm in my country though, i get the lewd stares.
i'm sure white women get plenty of catcalls from white men.
Good points, but I don't know about this: "Because White poverty is often hidden in this country and the image of "success" painted with a European face, you may not have mentally associated European-ancestry men with street harassment (which some consider to be a phenomenon of the less formally educated) in the way you do non-European men."
My mental associations, as I said, had to do with personal experience, and I've never had white men catcall and holler at me.
I don't know that personal experiences are necesarily indicative of broader trends. My "theory of invisibility" is based only on my experiences and those of my friends and family of various phenotypes and ethnicities, but the latter points about street harassment and education/social status/income level are based on research others have published. Way back in undergrad in a small social anthro seminar, we were assigned some articles on the subject and had a class discussion devoted to it. The larger point--that, in the West, poverty and educaiton levels have their own distinct "culture" that often cross ethnic boundaries--has been made many times in much education and social science literature.
However, if you'd like an anecdote, anyway, I grew up around low-income European-Americans and there was a high level of street harassment being meted out. By contrast, I've never personally witnessed a university-educated, middle class, or upper middle class European-American man catacall, whistle, or otherwise street harass women.
I am a brunette, medium colored white skinned young female. I get them from both white men and men of color. But the forms they take are different.
-Men of color tend to leer at me, for a long period of time and tend to say stuff, whistle, make me feel uncomfortable in general.
-White men tend to do the lingering, objectifying stare and will occasionally say hi or whatever else.
This also depends on where I am at. At my college, all men do the objectifying, lingering stare but tend to not say anything inappropriate.
Walking around town, going to the mall etc. causes all men to say stuff, catcall etc.
Either way though, men of color almost always make me feel much more uncomfortable because they are much more aggressive, say more inappropriate things and whistle and say things about my body. This is the first time I said it out loud and it sounds extremely racist but that is my experience.
I suspect there is a strong correlation between class and race in the case of the non-European men who aggressively harass you.
There is some research on this subject (see above), though your personal experience appears to illustrate it (the men from your college, irrespective of ethnicity, do not, according to you, display the most aggressive/offensive behavior).
We cannot know the education and social status of the men who so aggressively harass you, but it is improbable that Puerto Rican pathologists, Moroccan electric engineers, and Black American investment bankers are hooting and hollering at you in the mall or on the street.
That makes plenty of sense.
One thing I have also noticed to further illustrate your argument, is that in my neighborhood (lower to lower-middle class mostly black and hispanic) if I come across a white guy, he acts exactly as previously mentioned men of color on the street. This white-men-being-aggressive-and-sexist doesn't happen elsewhere, only my block.
For example, I was waiting for the city bus to arrive, and these two young white men were waiting too. They wouldn't stop trying to talk to me, get my number, degradingly looking me up and down and being inappropriate.
I am a brunette, medium colored white skinned young female. I get them from both white men and men of color. But the forms they take are different.
-Men of color tend to leer at me, for a long period of time and tend to say stuff, whistle, make me feel uncomfortable in general.
-White men tend to do the lingering, objectifying stare and will occasionally say hi or whatever else.
This also depends on where I am at. At my college, all men do the objectifying, lingering stare but tend to not say anything inappropriate.
Walking around town, going to the mall etc. causes all men to say stuff, catcall etc.
Either way though, men of color almost always make me feel much more uncomfortable because they are much more aggressive, say more inappropriate things and whistle and say things about my body. This is the first time I said it out loud and it sounds extremely racist but that is my experience.
I know exactly what you mean! I feel terrible for voicing those thoughts but it's my experience and I don't know what to do with it.
Speaking as a male, and as a construction worker (an occupation that has a well deserved reputation for perpetrating street harassment) - and as an African American, I'd like to put my two cents in.
Upper class men (of all races) typically work in offices where they are surrounded by lower status women - women who's jobs to some degree depend on keeping those men happy.
Also, the clothes those women office workers wear are typically very sexualized and revealing (low cut tops, sleeveless tops, short skirts, sheer blouses ect)
So, those men have lots of women to objectify right there in the privacy and comfort of their own office - women who are very unlikely to do anything about their harassment.
Lower status male office workers (who would get fired for harassing their female co-workers) and blue collar workers like me (who work in almost entirely all male environments - my occupation, carpenter, is 98.3 percent male) who wish to validate their sense of male privilege have to wait until lunchtime, when they can sit outside the building they're working in, and stare at/make comments about or otherwise harass female passersby.
There's another subvariant of that type of harassment - binocular-aided peeping tomism.
In places like Manhattan, where there are lots of tall buildings, some male workers will actually come to work early with binoculars, for the express purpose of staring through the windows of nearby apartments in hopes of seeing naked or partially dressed women.
With unemployed/underemployed/underclass men, who both have a lot more time on their hands and much more fragile egos that need far more validation, harassment of women passersby can be a full time occupation.
As you go down the status food chain, the vulgarity of the comments tends to increase, as does the boldness of the harassment.
Basically, there's a direct ratio between the amount of privilege a man has in real life and his need to throw that privilege in people's faces.
The investment banker who makes $ 400,000 a year, gets a $ 200,000 bonus, has a wife, and a mistress, and is a regular customer at high end strip clubs, and who regularly harasses his secretary and the college interns in his office, frankly does not have the need - or even the free time, to harass random women on the street.
But the carpenter who only works part time, makes $ 40,000 a year, is married to a woman who works full time and makes $ 60,000, and who is surrounded by men all day (some of whom, his foreman, his boss, the general contractor, are much higher status than he is, and can literally fire him on the spot if they want to) has to go to much greater lengths to 'prove his manhood' in public.
And the part time building porter, who only makes $ 7.25 for the 4 hours a day and 3 days a week he works, and who still lives in a spare room in his mother's apartment, has an even greater need to ostentatiously display his masculine power (because that's literally the only power he has).
Add race to the mix, and the psychological need a powerless man would feel to make a public display of aggressive masculinity gets even greater.
Now, just to be very very clear, I am NOT justifying any of this behavior - and I can perfectly understand why women are offended (and in many cases flat out terrified) by these displays.
I'm just trying to give some insight into WHY different types of men engage in those behaviors.
Interesting points, Gregory!
I'm a black woman and in the US I am most harassed by either other black fellas or Latinos. I'd say the times I was harassed by white guys when I was younger was actually not sexual harassment but racial abuse.
Outside the US things get flipped on their head. In Europe there seems to be a lot more white guys with no problems leering and stalking a black woman (both of which have happened to me). And even here it's a culture thing too: for example the Italians tend to be pretty bold but Germans on the other hand usually act shy and just stare...Again this is all based on personal anecdote :)
The black guys I happen across here (cause I'm in a country where there aren't that many black folks) are either business types or recent immigrants and I haven't had a lot of experience with any of these guys...but they are much less aggressive than black guys in the US...I'll say that for sure.
Hm I can 2nd the German part which is true according to my wife and sister.
And btw according to expats staring (and geting too close as well as being a bit unpolite) seems to be a general German thing as well.
The clishe (if it is one) of the Italians is alive here as well.
I'm white and get harrassed only by black guys on the street. White males rarely even make eye-contact (Minnesota thing?). As a waitress-server, or out on the town I get equally harrassed by all races. I think it is partially to do with economics and place.
This is different than what I have seen in the US. I haven’t seen to much harassment of women here in the southwest. My sister did get harassed off and on, when she was younger but not constantly, plus we were living in a bad aria. While living there, I was harassed by women as well. They would lear, stick their toungs out, even yell. A woman working in a deli where I went for a turkey sandwich off and on one day just asked me to my face if I wanted a turkey sandwich with some red hair on it (she had red hair) I did not know this woman, and felt pretty sick to my stomach. Needless to say I picked another deli.
I think a lot of the problem with harassment is the aria you live in. Once I moved out of that town I never had those kinds of problems again and my sister has seldom encountered them either.
nothing is so bothering