Breaking the Lease.

We're breaking our lease because of street harassment.

When we took this apartment in Crown Heights, we knew the area was depressed and the subway was a little far, but it was what we could afford at the time and we figured we would just make do for the time being. We were moved in by February, and our least was a year and a half long.

It's an important point that we moved in the dead of winter: it means that people generally weren't out on the street. Now, I'm no stranger to men shouting at me on the street. It's happened to me every day since I was thirteen years old. I grew up a bit of a latchkey child, and there wasn't always someone around to check the clothes I was wearing before I left for school. I had no idea, of course. I was a child. I didn't know that if I wore my sister's white tank top without a bra, men could see right through it to my tiny breasts, just beginning to grow. And I certainly didn't think that men would be interested in any of that, but I suppose we all grow up some time, don't we?

I was shouted at from cars when I walked to school, and followed on buses. Grown men would start conversations with me, a kid who still played with Tamigotchis. I've never felt so ashamed, or suffocated. I couldn't choose the clothes I wore: I barely had enough to make it through the week without stealing my sister's or brother's. But I was shouted at no matter what I wore, whether it was my brother's pants dragging around my waist or my sister's lacy tops. I felt like I'd brought it on myself, that it was my fault. I didn't know how to stop it, and it scared me. It made me feel unsafe and vulnerable, like any of these men could do whatever they wanted, at any time. But that's the point, of course.

It's an insistence that your appearance is what's important about you, the only thing that's important about you. We get it all the time, from every source imaginable: from history to advertisements to TV programs to movies. We get it so much that some women have internalized it to a point where they can't actually even see that yelling something at someone in the street is not a great idea and actually kind of an arrogant, violently insistent thing to do, no matter what the actual words are that are coming out of your mouth. We need to be more aware of our circumstances, and stop eating up this garbage about our appearance.

Anyone who's convinced themselves that street harassment has anything to do with sex is just sadly misguided. These men know as well as you or I do that nothing is going to come of yelling at a perfect stranger in the street. Anybody can see that, and in fact it's just a sad joke to say otherwise. Instead, what it is is an assertion of an authority that they're not quite sure they have. It's a false bravado, pathetically insisting that they have a right to intrude on your day, your body, your personal space. They puff themselves up to seem important enough that their opinion, their judgement might actually mean something. Some of them might even believe that they're so vitally important: and why not? They've been taught it their whole lives. Men are somebodies with important stories and women are the supporting characters, the color, the scenery.

At the time I moved into our current apartment, I was in a play with a man who was violently sexual in a stunted, impotent way. I'd been in a play with him once before with the same director, and he would stand in his underwear backstage, just staring at women. Then one day I caught him touching himself, onstage, during a scene where he was lying hidden behind a couch. I told the director, who shrugged it off and didn't want to address it. When I started avoiding the actor, he pushed me violently onstage and hurt my shoulder in an "accident". I felt vulnerable and uncomfortable, but like most people, I naturally stopped fighting about it when someone treated my problem like it was a non-issue.

I assumed, stupidly, that in the next show with this theatre group, they wouldn't dare hire someone who was so openly creepy. So I joined the cast, and the first day I saw this guy waltz his stupid fat head into rehearsal. This time around he upped the ante: he set a chair outside of the women's dressing room and peeped his head in every time the door opened. He would pace back and forth in front of the door, visibly lurking. When I finally slammed the door shut in the middle of a performance in a passive aggressive attempt to get him to stop, he just started getting more and more ballsy until one of the girls screamed at him to "get out, you fucking pervert!"

Then he took to Facebook, calling us "cunts". When we joked openly about it the next day, he tripped me onto the stage right before an entrance, and tore at another girl's arm onstage. He was quietly raging, and nearly unable to control himself. He took to Facebook later to threaten to cut our hands off. Cut our hands off, guys.

When one of the lead actresses vented about him at the cast party to which he surprisingly did not show up (I guess because we'd all have our clothes on) someone leaned over to me and said "Not the right time" in a judgey fucking tone. But here's the fucking thing: It's never the right goddamn time. This girl was angry, and completely rightfully so. She was venting out of earshot of the cast member who was victimizing us, to exactly the right people who could make a decision to not cast him again in that theatre. The right time to do something was before he was cast again, was in the last show when he should have been spoken to by someone--anyone with authority. Instead, I was brushed off. The other girls who were disturbed by his behavior were brushed off. We are always brushed off. Our rightful and justified anger is dismissed, constantly.

Even during the show I had other women scoff at me: 'Are you really being victimized?' As if I have to justify my feelings to anyone. Yes, I feel victimized. A man is lurking in a zone that is supposed to be private. I have a right to want my body to be private. I find that these sorts of people have one view of the world, and that's their own. They feel that because they're not personally affected by an issue, that means it doesn't exist. If you aren't personally bothered by sexual harassment or don't personally consider this or that sexual harassment, that means that no one should be affected, and men should have a right to do whatever they like to or at someone because they can find one singular woman who said once that she didn't mind it or found it to be a compliment. To take the concept to its absurd extreme, if I can find one woman who says that rape is the responsibility of the victim, that means that rape doesn't exist and all these silly women should just shut their mouths about it and take the compliment of someone wanting to have sex with you so badly that they'd force it.

Let's get another thing straight: Harassment isn't a compliment, and even if you want to categorize it as a compliment, I've got news for you. Compliments from strangers suck, they are the fucking worst. Compliments are the sole responsibility of the person doing the complimenting. For instance, if you say something to someone that you don't know very well, and they don't take it as a compliment, that's on you. You decided your opinion was important enough to share with this person, and it's your responsibility to know that the person will take your compliment well. If they don't, it's your fault. If someone wants to cry me a river over how that means no one is going to say your hair looks really good today, I say grow a backbone and have enough confidence in yourself that you don't need that sort of outside validation. Because the people who already know you well will always tell you that you did an awesome job on that presentation, or that your new project is super fucking interesting, or that you have the raddest collection of crazy bike helmets on the planet. Furthermore, when you purposefully put your work or yourself out there for judgement, say at a concert or an exhibition, people will know when and how to compliment you properly and will totally do it. But if some random stranger came up to you apropos of nothing and told you that your face was shaped nicely, that's fucking weird. Who is this stranger? Why do they care about the shape of my face enough to speak words about it? Why is my face shape important? What is their general idea of face shapes, and do they align with what I think my face shape should be? It's nonsense. It's just nonsense.

So during the run of the aforementioned play, the weather gets warmer in my neighborhood, and all the creeps slime out of their hibernation to hang out in front of the grocery stores all fucking day, because who would have anything to do in the middle of the god-damn day, in the middle of the motherfucking workweek? And it's worse at night, because it gives them the cover of darkness to try and corner me, or chase me for a bit just to make sure that I know they're in charge. So I'm basically getting at it from all sides, all the time, with no safe zone except my apartment where I hide all day if I have nothing dire to get done.

And so I start yelling. First, it's just a few 'fuck you's here and there. Some girls I know tell me to say "I'm married!" to them. I just... I just have to laugh at that though. Guys, they don't give a shit if I'm married, and saying so just looks like I'm playing along, and get this: I'm not fucking playing along, no sir. So I start off with this little thing: I say, "excuse me?" and... if you know me, you know I'm capable of a really withering stare when I want to have one. And it's just, perfect. I know that not every girl is so good at being a bitch as I am, but it feels so good. I scolded some little twelve year old brat in the street (the same age I was when I started getting harassed). Like, as if I'm taking shit from some punkass little shithead. Come on. I even got the guys who stand with their legs apart, sideways on the sidewalk to watch you as you go past. They watch you coming, then as you pass behind them they turn their heads to watch you as you go. I do a little thing where I stop immediately behind them for just long enough to get them startled that I didn't emerge from the other side, and I'm just creeping behind their backs. Once I even stood there with wide creep eyes, but you can't do that to everyone. Who has the time?

But I'm thwarted, and I'll tell you by what: by the guys in suits. The guys in suits on the subway, who walk up to me while I have my headphones in, gesture for me to take them out (which I do, like a fucking idiot, thinking they need directions or something. But why would they ask a woman for those...?) and then tell me that they just needed to express how stylish my outfit is. And I'm speechless. I'm so angry that this asshole made me pull out my headphones, interrupted a thought pattern I had going, to interject his motherfucking opinion into my stream of consciousness as if I should give any of the shits. And he's operating under the guise of being polite, so if I yell at him I just look like a crazy person. The best I've ever done with this demon is stare at him blankly while slowly putting my earbuds back in.

But my perspective is not the only perspective. Just because I've decided to have fun with this shit doesn't mean everyone can do that... and it doesn't mean that it hasn't disturbed me enough to break our lease and eat the financial loss. I've woken up to a man wandering around the fire escape outside of my bedroom window, and been afraid to sleep with the window cracked on hot nights. I have an issue with stomach pains, and sometimes when men shout at me on the street the stress actually causes a searing pain when I lose my concentration. I can feel the stress in an immediate way that other women can't... they just feel the cumulative effect and they attribute it to a myriad of things. But I know the kind of pain sexual harassment causes.

It's like getting sprayed with a mysterious fluid out of a spray bottle held by a stranger while you walk down the street. This time, it might just be a harmless liquid like water that annoys you and ruins your day. Or it could be deadly dangerous. You never know, and women shouldn't have to take those risks every day. Whether you're personally bothered by it or not, street harassment is a devastation to our equality and autonomy as women. Kay, the end.

Also check out my bunny blog THAANNKKSSS: No Fears Rabbit Ears