Apparently, there is no age limit on street harassment

I remember the very first time I experienced street harassment.[1] I was 12 years old and attempting to do cartwheels on the front lawn of my grandmother’s house. With abandon and a lack of self-consciousness, I focused on getting my legs high in the air. A man in a passing truck whistled loudly and yelled at me. I did not understand the words he yelled, but understood that he had seen me in a way that I did not see myself.

                Here it is more than 50 years later and I just experienced street harassment.  This morning I left my car at a body shop a couple of blocks from my house and at 4:50, I was walking briskly to make it to the shop before they closed at 5 pm. A man driving by yelled at me, “Grandma!”  -amazing how much contempt his tone conveyed in shouting that one word.

                Although I have experienced street harassment over the years, what struck me today was the similarity with my first experience over 50 years ago. In both cases, I was fully and unself-consciously in my body, taking up my space with a clear purpose in mind. In both cases, I was acting without consideration for another’s gaze or judgment.  Although I imagine that neither harasser could articulate his motivation for yelling at a stranger, I think that the glimpse of a girl/woman fully claiming her body without consideration of how she was seen by others rattled their gender binary cages.

               

               

                 

---

[1] Stop Street Harassment defines such harassment as “any action or comment between strangers in public places that is disrespectful, unwelcome, threatening and/or harassing and is motivated by gender or sexual orientation or gender expression.  Street harassment is a human rights issue because it limits women’s ability to be in public as often or as comfortably as most men.”  For more, check out http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/

Is Madonna old enough to be your mother?

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl or the halftime show, but woke up this morning to a Tampa Bay, Florida radio show where a female and male co-host traded comments about Madonna being too old to be gyrating and writhing on stage. The female co-host declared, “She’s old enough to be my mother.”

Not as public, but only three nights before at a dinner in St. Petersburg with five other people one of my colleagues turned to me and proclaimed, “My mother is younger than you.” Although I’m a social scientist, I’m not good at quickly running even simple numbers in my head. So I was stumped for a moment as I tried to figure out from an earlier story she had told about being in second grade when JFK was shot, if I was old enough to be her mother. By the time I had figured that since I had been a junior in high school when Kennedy was assassinated, I was not old enough to be her mother, the conversation—like the radio banter—had moved on.

Might Madonna, like me, reflect on what to make of another adult woman saying she is old enough to be her mother? Is the woman trying to
• elevate her relative youthfulness?
• sort others into simplistic social categories to help her navigate socially?
• suggest that the other woman is stepping on (or dancing over) gendered and racialized age norms?
• consider that her own mother has more daring, vitality, and sensuality than she had imagined?

No matter their motives, the radio hosts and my colleague added their voices to a dominant culture that divides, ranks, and differentially values its members.

I’m as slow at thinking of what to say in these moments as I am at doing calculations in my head, but better late than never:

If you make observations about others’ age, gender, race, sexuality and/or disability, consider the relevance of your comments to the conversation. Can you tell your story or make your point without these comments? Reflect on what you and others gain from your making such comments. Consider who is harmed by these kinds of comments.

For targets or witnesses to such comments, speak up. For instance, I could have said something like: “whoa, I am feeling like I’m in a box labeled ‘older than your mother’. I need to be seen as more multi-faceted than that. Can you think of other ways to make your point without commenting on my age relative to your mother or anyone else?”

Maybe it will open up a dialogue or change someone’s behavior. Even if it doesn’t, by speaking up we take a stand against careless comments that isolate and diminish others.

I’ve now seen Madonna’s halftime show and know that even this megastar had a couple of missteps during her show, but she rocked on. We’ll all have our own missteps as we try to speak up for ourselves and others but we, too, will rock on.