To all the guys who have catcalled me throughout my life: hello again. You thought you'd never hear from me again, didn't you? You thought that my stunned silence and tensed fists would be my only response to your street harassment, to your objectification of my body. Well, you thought wrong.
And I am also addressing all the guys who have every catcalled any woman or person ever. This is for you too.
I'll start with the obvious: stop. For the love of all that is good, stop. You may think your words and your actions are flattering us, but they're not. We don't feel flattered at the whistles and whoops, we feel degraded. We feel like pieces of meat.
And, throughout each stage of growing up, it affects how we view our bodies and ourselves. I'm a confident woman who is comfortable and proud in my body, but when I think about my self image, it's hard not to remember the impressionable sixteen-year-old version of myself -- the girl who had her butt pinched by a street vendor in Rome, the girl who walked in silence for a block before telling her grandmother and aunt what had just happened. And the thing is, my response is still the same; I walk on with a straight face, uncomfortable and scared. So many women do. It's almost as if we've been trained to think nothing of it, to be numb to the ridiculousness of it all. And then there's also fear. I think that many women share my ideal response to catcalling: the hurling of obscene words and both middle fingers right in those men's faces. But I don't do that. Ever. I'm scared to. Because I know that words are not all they can throw at me.
So we're stuck. Feeling unsafe and being able to do nothing about it. And, quite frankly, I'm sick of it. But here I can say what I never feel safe enough to say on the street.
Ending on a positive note, I'd like to thank all of the men in the world who are decent human beings and do not catcall women. So many men in my life would go to great lengths to protect me from these catcallers and from any threat. And when I'm with them, they do. After all, who wants to catcall a woman who is walking hand-in-hand with her athletic 6'3" boyfriend? The answer: practically no one. So thank you to the many decent men of the world.
But my point here, in closing, is that I shouldn't need to walk around with a man by my side to feel safe from other men. It's not right.
(And in case any of you catcallers missed my message, I'm flipping you off right now. Through the screen. And there's nothing you can do about it). How does it feel?
