One of the most frustrating things about living in a big city is the feeling that I can’t walk outside without being harassed on the street at least once a day. When I first started experiencing this I found it annoying, but as the years pass I become increasingly furious. Not a day goes by that I don’t experience one or more of the following: cat-calling, whistling, kissing noises, intensely seductive stares, or pointed glances up and down my body. Contrary to what many men think, this attention is not appreciated and not flattering, and I’m sure most women agree with me. This kind of attention is not like being given a complement …it’s not like being told, “you are beautiful.” It actually feels horrible; it makes me feel degraded and violated, but most of all, it makes me feel utterly powerless. I feel as if my body doesn’t belong to me, and this infuriates me more than anything I’ve ever experienced.

I have tried a variety of things to deal with this situation: I’ve tried saying things like, “what are you looking at?”, I’ve tried using my worst glares, evil eyes, and disgusted faces, I’ve tried looking through men to make them feel invisible, and I’ve tried ignoring them and staring straight ahead. When I talk back to men in a nasty tone of voice, they either pretend that they weren’t cat calling me (as if I was making it up and I should be so lucky to get their attention), or they get equally mad back at me. Glaring, staring through them, and ignoring them doesn’t prevent the harassment either, and it doesn’t make me feel better. No matter what I do, I never feel in control of the situation. I feel imprisoned—I am overly self-conscious about what I wear, and I dread the hot days when I have no choice but to wear semi-revealing clothing.

Harassment is not as much about sex as it is about power. It would be ridiculous to say that men act this way to pick up women, because I think by now they would realize that it doesn’t work. Men act this way in order to feel confident and dominant by putting women in a position of powerlessness. For whatever reason, the men that whistle and stare at women on the street need an extra infusion of self-confidence through sexual power. Perhaps many of them had parents that made them feel powerless and didn’t teach them to respect women, or maybe they witnessed their fathers treat women the same way. Or maybe it’s a bigger societal problem…a woman’s role in society has changed a lot since the early 1900’s, but a man’s role hasn’t changed much. They are still held to high standards of being successful and powerful, and maybe the men who fall short in the eyes of society resort to sexual harassment as a way to reassert their masculinity and to put women in an antiquated place of submission and inferiority.

What would men feel like if they were objectified against their will on a daily basis? I don’t think they’d be able to handle it. I’m pretty sure this is a big reason why the military is so against having gay men join—because many straight men are afraid to be around gay men, for fear that they will be made into objects of sexual desire without their consent. Men cannot bear the thought of being put into this position of powerlessness by gay men because it would threaten the very core of their manhood. Whereas women are “supposed” to handle being made to feel powerless, and have suffered centuries of this being socially acceptable, men are not used to being made into sexual objects against their will.

To deal with street harassment, I need to find a better way to deal with my feelings in a healthy, safe way, because I cannot take control of the situation by trying to make those men feel ashamed or insulted. I am powerless to making those men feel a certain way, and powerless to controlling the external environment. The way to regain my sense of power is to work on my internal feelings by dealing with my anger appropriately and reconnecting with my sense of self-worth. I also need to change my perspective on the experience of being harassed. I need to hold it in my mind in a different way, because right now I am programmed to feel intense anger and powerlessness every time it happens. Instead of walking around like a pressure cooker, just waiting for the incidents to occur, I have to change my attitude. Maybe the next time I experience harassment, I should start thinking about all the things I love about myself and try to see the man bothering me as the extremely insecure, sad creature that he is. Because the reality is, any man that needs to make women feel powerless is an incredibly powerless person himself.