My first day in Morocco, I was uncomfortable. After three days, I was angry. By the end of the week, I was more than ready to try out one of those female-only dystopian societies that science fiction writers find so captivating. True, I love my dad and left some good guy friends behind me at Princeton, but in the first violent throes of my indignation, these seemed reasonable sacrifices to make in exchange for the annihilation of all male catcallers everywhere.
I had prepared myself in advance for this critical cultural difference of my semester abroad program —namely, the widespread North African perception that a single woman, especially a foreigner, who appears in the street by herself is fair game for the sexual advances of every horny male she encounters. Reading articles about how to ignore catcalls, however, is a very different thing from walking through a swarm of teenagers screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs.
Halfway through my semester, all of the American students on my program convened for a discussion about gender norms in Morocco. I had heard most of it before: the frustration, the helplessness, the implicit indictment of Near Eastern society. I had not realized, however, that two program participants —girls from Chicago and Philly —considered the levels of harassment in Rabat to be on par with what they regularly experienced at home.
I was floored. I can reel off sexist aspects of American society as well as the next feminist: pay inequality, rape culture, media portrayals of female politicians, etc. But the experience I went through in Morocco had seemed so unique, so unbearably over the line, that I could not believe it had a comparable counterpart in the lives of my friends from home. After all, I personally had never experienced this kind of harassment in the States …
Except that I have. It doesn’t take the form of strangers shouting expletives at me from street corners or inviting me to sleep with them and their friends (yes, that is exactly what I wanted to do today —how did you know?), but it’s there. A wolf whistle, passing honk or comment about appearance is a familiar and accepted side effect of walking down the street for many American women. And when I say many, I mean pretty much all of the female students reading this column. We turn our heads, some of us smile, and we move on, more or less ignoring the men who felt the need to remind us that they see us first and foremost as aesthetically pleasing objects.
My first conscious experience of street harassment was in high school, walking to synagogue by myself down a suburban side street. A portly older gentleman relaxing on his porch called out, “You look very pretty today.” I was flattered —any 14-year-old girl would have been —but I was also old enough to feel uneasy. There was something a wee bit creepy in the way he was looking at me, so I said nothing and hurried on.
This was my first exposure to “friendly” catcalling, if there is such a thing. It’s the main kind of harassment in the United States, and it made up the bulk of my street encounters in Morocco, as well. In Rabat I realized that “bad” or unfriendly harassment —men shouting obscenities, inviting women to screw them, etc. —is the flip side of the same coin. Both come from a deeply ingrained gender-based sense of entitlement to public places and women’s bodies.
Whether or not women “like” positive comments on their appearances is beside the point. My guy friends are not stopped on the street by unknown women or men who tell them how handsome they look or how fine their ass is. This is not a function of how attractive they are, just as the number of wolf whistles any given woman attracts in her lifetime is not ultimately a comment about her face or body. Catcallers are stroking their own masculine egos by assuming that every woman cares what they think about her clothes and body shape. They are asserting that they, and all men, have the right to pass verbal, public judgment on her. Many also believe that the privilege of their unsolicited attention should be acknowledged by a smile or hey, even a phone number. This is chauvinism.
Back in America, the harassment is so comparatively mild I barely notice it. But it’s there, and its ubiquitous presence is a constant reminder that whether I’m in Rabat, Morocco, or Princeton, New Jersey, I can always count on running into a strange man who believes that his gender legitimizes his invasion of my personal space. Don’t be that guy.
Tehila Wenger is a politics major fromColumbus, Ohio. She can be reached at twenger@princeton.edu.Read More
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