Crossing the Street

In the process of taking yet another undeserved break from writing my senior thesis, I got into an argument with a male friend of mine. "You," he said, "are incredibly rude." Regular readers of this column may or may not disagree with that assessment, but this time it wasn't what I said that got me in trouble, it was what I didn't say. I had chosen to walk by a stranger on the street without acknowledging his--admittedly innocuous--compliment.

Relating the conversation to a group of female friends a few days later, I wondered aloud what being "polite" entailed in such contexts. It seemed fairly obvious to the women in the room that one couldn't possibly be expected to engage every comment made in passing. All of us had learned at young ages to expect everything from the mildly amusing to the graphically sexual when walking through our own neighborhoods. Furthermore, we had come to expect it with such frequency that the comments became a kind of background noise--one in which "Good morning, gorgeous," and "Hey ma, let me hold one of those [insert body part here]" became indistinct, and equally unlikely to receive acknowledgement.

I have had conversations about this phenomenon with a number of male friends who express frustration. These "Frustrated Male Persons" want to consider themselves feminists, want to demonstrate that they have great respect for females, and quite adamantly state that they do not want to add to the patriarchy, sexism, and harassment that females face on a regular basis. They also want to date some of them. For many, this creates a dilemma. One FMP asks: "How do I let someone know I'm interested without pissing her off, or having her just walk by?" Or, as another put it more bluntly, "As a male feminist, how do I show my appreciation for a fine ass on a woman?" According to FMPs, the fact that different women can interpret the same comment in completely different ways is evidence of women's concerted effort to be confusing.

Well, somebody call the girl police because it turns out women aren't all thinking and acting alike. In fact, there's no such thing as "a woman" or "a girl on the street," because despite whatever MTV and BET keep trying to tell us, there's no generic brand female. It seems obvious enough, and yet I have heard people justify actions that even they feel are a bit ridiculous by exclaiming in frustration, "but that's what women want from us." As is often the case, the generic female prototype wins out over women who are actually present. Dating is about what She wants; the art of picking someone up becomes a matter of what appeals most to Her. And so we arrive at questions like "How do I talk to a woman on the street without offending her?"

The answer is that you don't. You talk to a particular individual on the street at a particular moment in her life, and take the risk that she may still be offended or uninterested or simply preoccupied by something more important to her than your ego. You realize you have no idea who she is, or what's happened to her so far that day, or so far this lifetime. You have no idea whether she finds you at all attractive, or whether she finds men attractive at all, or whether she's looking for any kind of relationship at the moment. You don't know where she's going, or how soon she needs to be there, or what inner dialogue your comment might be interrupting. You don't know what her interests are, or whether the two of you could hold a conversation, or whether she feels like talking to anybody today. You don't know what the guy on the last block who thought she was beautiful, too, might have already said to her, nor do you know how much actual time or mental energy it took her to respond to that.

Thinking about women as individuals would thus alleviate quite a bit of the frustration and might improve the quality of streetcorner dialogue. What it doesn't necessarily do is alleviate the frustration experienced by women who find even the most well-intentioned comments from strangers disturbing.

The reason for this dawned on me one summer when a New Yorker and I were lamenting being stuck in North Carolina. "Do you know what I miss the most?" he asked. "In New York City, you can be totally anonymous. You can walk around the city all day without anyone saying a word to you, or even noticing you exist." I looked at him as if he'd described life on another planet, and was suddenly struck by the reason for our difference in perception. "Not if you're female," I replied. He paused for a moment and nodded. "Yeah, that's true: not if you're female."

So there it is: no anonymity for females. Save possibly the privacy of her own room, there is no place on this planet where the female body is not on display. Even the most complimentary comment is an often unwelcome reminder that one's body is being appraised, that one's worth is constantly being measured by strangers who believe they have the right to do so, a right that implicitly confirms gender hierarchies and asserts a straight male privilege that confines everyone involved to a world where we are all so often uncomfortable in our own bodies and lives.

Danielle Evans is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology. (Re)-Education runs on alternate Tuesdays.