A friend and I were walking down the road in front of her house, when we noticed a group of young men standing nearby. As we walked past them, one of them uttered gibberish loud enough to be heard. Before I could work myself up to righteous anger, my friend had already turned around to shout back in a loud fierce voice, “Do you live around here?” Of the five men, one could easily tell which one had catcalled. The look of victory on his face faded at lightning speed – and was replaced with a cocktail of fear and surprise. “What are you doing here?” was the next thing she asked. “Nothing, what... why” was the only murmur he could manage.
One of the many acidic quotes in Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex addresses a distinct feature that interprets the ‘male ego’ thus:
This virility evidently becoming the source of violence needs to be publicly confronted. The reasons for not doing so, however, are fairly valid for women. Almost every woman I talked to touched upon the key aspect of precaution. It is pivotal to assess the surroundings in order to make sure the warring doesn’t get them into further trouble. Still, a minority of them engages in blunt confrontations with men on the streets.
These are the women who make it a point to let the perpetrator know exactly how they feel – either by staring back or by confrontational body language – until the perpetrator shifts his gaze.
Vaishnavi, a filmmaker from Chennai, India, does this too:
My female friends – who live in various countries across the world – have always voiced their exasperation of being ogled on the streets. However, race, caste and class seem to have played an important role of differentiation. The experiences of lower class women – or women of colour – are different from their privileged counterparts. Black/Latino women tend to face the brunt far worse than their white peers in the West, for instance – their confrontations aren’t taken as seriously, even by law.
Absence of a feminist upbringing is an active reason for women choosing to ignore verbal harassers. Most conservative families fed certain responses into the current young adult generation when they were growing up:
The shivering and sweating belongs to the first stage of stress-reaction under the renowned phenomenon of fight, flight, freeze. At the other end, the response of men after being called out also translates into a ‘freeze’ reaction – but for a different reason. In a “conventional set-up”, it is unexpected for women to react over “small issues” such as catcalling, gazing and even anonymous touching in public transport vehicles. A sudden and loud acknowledgement of harassment shakes an ego that has been years in the building – an ego that believes it is acceptable to commit such acts. When objection to this acceptance is registered by the woman, the ego breaks like a disturbed army of ants that either causes the man to flee, get offended or respond hastily as if he has been accused of murder.
But women alone aren’t supposed to cure this plague. Patriarchy was created by and for men; needless to say, that they are equally a victim. But they also have the power to mould it.
Much has been written on the damage but not on the effects of defying harassment. A review paper published in 1995 analysed the then collected data on coping strategies adopted by victims. While 44% of women asked the harassers to stop, it was discovered during the review that most women choose not to do anything about harassment as they believe it will be useless from a legal and social perspective.
But time and the worldwide feminist struggle have brought remarkable changes in the global perception of sexual harassment – and they appear to encourage women to adopt confrontational measures instead of denial.
It’s a victory for the confidence gap.
Sadaf also emphasised the advantage of more women responding to harassment for the sake of abolishing victim blaming arguments.
Smruthi, another psychologist said,
For women, talking about harassment falls under an unusual social stigma, irrespective of the inherent wrongness of the act. But confronting it, like the women above, demolishes that prejudice.
(Prateek is a student of psychology and a feminist-activist. He considers himself purposeless in comparison to the vastness of the cosmos, but also thinks that if we have the biological privilege to exist and understand things, why shouldn’t we live better?)
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