Carla Revisits Sexual Harassment
I got up from my table at a Harlem lounge on Saturday night to thank an unknown guy who stepped out of the shadows to pay my tab. In return, he smacked the side of my right thigh and said, “No problem, sweetheart,” or some such. How did I react?
I didn’t say anything. I was too busy looking at the burn mark that landed an inch below my boyfriend zone. High school dances popped into my head, where the guy wants to cop a feel but doesn’t want trouble so he rests his hand just above your rump but below the small of your back. High thigh was this guy’s compromise.
“Oh, that don’t mean nothing,” Unknown Tab Payer said. I was still looking at my thigh as though it belonged to another chick–specifically, the pole-humping one in the music videos. Did this dude just smack me on my thigh? Really, really close to my a$$?
I mumbled something about him having overpaid (he put $40 on a $13 tab) and while he was telling me to get another drink, I walked back to my table with my head still in 40 seconds ago, replaying the smack. It was a rare moment where I was too shocked to catch an attitude. And, here’s the other unexpected part: I’m actually grateful.
Twenty years of riding New York City subways and stomping these concrete streets as a young, black female is enough to dry husk the Pollyanna out of any woman-child. It feels good to be surprised by boorish behavior. Like, maybe, even after all of this:
I was 12 when I started riding the train to school alone and when random men began to press against me on the overcrowded 6 train in the mornings. Strangers have shown me their free willy’s on subway platforms. Grown men have hissed at me while, as a young girl, I walked with my mother. One young man wished AIDS upon me after I rebuffed him for pulling at me. Others have cussed me out. “I hate black women!” a few have yelled. Cars have trailed me at a snail’s pace both in broad daylight and at night. And of course, there are the near misses and “what if” situations that I owe to luck and the guardian angels…
the city still can’t beat me down. So long as I can still be shocked–a sign that my standards are intact–I’m happy.
This post is more personal than any I’ve written in this space. Sexual harassment feels normal because it’s what I grew up around, but–and I have to remind myself of this–it isn’t. Speaking up counters the most dominant message that this city taught me about what it means to be a young, black girl/woman: “You are prey.”
I took a picture of this sign on the C train earlier in the semester. I’d planned to do a story but class deadlines took priority.
They didn’t have these signs when I was a kid. Got me wondering, What if the city undertook a massive (and clever) public service campaign to deter street harassment? What would be its impact on men and women in this city? What kind of conversation would such a campaign provoke?