| By sekai.no.kakumei - May 31st, 2007 at 2:48 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Blank Noise is a group that works in India, where women experience eve teasing almost everyday. According to their blogsite, eve teasing includes:
- leching (their spelling)
- touching
- staring
- groping
- passing remarks
- pinching
- stalking
- looking
Their focus is to stop the sexual harassment on the street. Comparatively, for an American woman, it’s like walking past a construction site and getting cat calls (a stereotype). Or in Japan, it’s similar to getting groping on the train (something that happens in many countries). It’s never fun: I’ve had creepy old men trying to flirt with me on public transportation in Hartford. However, this is a larger problem in India, which is garnering a large amount of media attention.
One event that Blank Noise has done that caught my attention was We Never Asked For It. They collected articles of clothing that women had been wearing while they were sexually violated or eve teased. The clothing stood as testimonials to the incident, and Blank Noise was going to display them in the streets. Just because a woman is wearing a certain piece of clothing does not mean she was asking for that response.
(From Blank Noise’s “I Wish. I Want. I Believe.”)
“To be treated with respect,
To be considered an equal,
To have men look at me as a real person, not an "ownable" object,
To not have men undress with me their eyes,
To let go of the anger and fear I harbor toward street harassers,
To walk freely without anxiously second guessing who is following me, teasing me, or about to grab me,
To enjoy the sidewalk once again.
For men to actually look me in the eyes and not ogle my breasts, legs, butt,
For men to grow balls and develop some decency (for the love of humanity!),
For women to own their bodies and their physical space,
For women to protect and cherish their rights” –Laura Neuhas
~世界の革命
!
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Or the poem, for instance. I think some aspects of it are quite wrongheaded, and beyond that dangerous in how it links all of the behaviors described on a single continuum.
For instance, I think that in some situations it's perfectly *okay* to objectify women -- just as it can be okay for women to objectify men, or men to objectify each other, or women to objectify women, or people to objectify animals. Context is key.
But by putting that very different conversation in the same context as sexual assault, picking at those aspects of the poem reads as a minimization of sexual assault - and I'm sure nobody here would hope to minimize that.
In other words, you've done your diary a disservice by conflating the higher-order issues of violence, intimidation, and coercion with the debate over when/how people can be objectified, etc.
Also, while I might not always feel like being checked out in the street, I won't necessarily feel offended. There have been times however when men have said really inappropriate things to me in teh street that I did find offensive and while I wouldn't place it on the same level as being physically assaulted, I would consider harrassment but a lot of people rationalize that since they're not physically touching the person, it's somehow okay and I think that's the attitude to move away from.
Also, if a woman isn't physically assaulted but a man (or woman although I've never seen or heard of a woman doing this) says something totally out of line, it could make the woman afraid of being physically assaulted. I think the point is to stress that certain behaviors are unacceptable and unnecessarily make little things, like walking down the street, harder for women and it's something women have to live with daily.