Without thinking, I responded in kind with a big, angry, I-will-slash-you hiss.

DESIST

He looked pretty taken aback.

I carried on my way and mused that I appear to speak feline like a mothertongue, but also I got to thinking: what the ever-loving crap?! Seriously, what on earth was he expecting from that encounter? What would a positive result have been? Surely that’s never worked for anyone, right?

Ah, street harassment. It’s been a few months. Usually my experience of you is relegated to when I’m wearing a summer dress (gender norms for the lose) but it sucks whenever it happens. It’s also antithetical to ever actually getting my interest because – no matter how many mad cat-lady vibes I’ve got going on – no one who thinks they can approach me like a pet is getting the time of day.

This particular encounter didn’t throw me much because I actually had a comeback – I walked away pleased with myself for thinking fast – but how you deflect it shouldn’t be the first point of call. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?

Far more often it’s crap shouted from cars – which I find rubbish twice over because they’ve gone before you can say or do anything in response. (Come back right now, dudebro. I have a LOT to say about what you just did.)

A friend of mine recently had some jerk shout “nice tits!” at her from a car. She was (understandably) angry and upset for the rest of the day, but the guy shouting it might have told himself it was a compliment – some interviews with street harassers have revealed what is either complete ignorance or willing ignorance of the effect it has on women. Many of the men, when asked why they do it, say it’s a compliment and it makes women feel nice.

Maybe it is a compliment for a very small percentage of people – I cannot claim to speak for everybody – but I am yet to meet or hear of one person who’s had a catcall, wolf-whistle or similar and felt good about it. The thing about street harassment is, it’s not flirting. Street harassment doesn’t make a person feel good because it isn’t about a person: it’s boiling them down to their physical attributes (‘nice tits’, ‘nice ass’) and funnily enough that doesn’t feel great.

“News of your interest in my ‘nice butt’ has not made my day in any way.”

The other thing is, it’s almost never a conversation: mostly ’cause the objects of the harassment aren’t interested and want to get on with their day, and also because often it’s at a remove – stuff shouted from cars, or (to use the cliché) from scaffolding. The people doing the shouting don’t actually expect a response. This isn’t a tool used to chat up women: it’s used to silence them. Under the guise of a compliment it’s a one-way street of objectification.

And Objectification Street is a crappy street. Seriously, I looked at a flat there once. There were rats all over the place and it smelled bad.

Of course, if people are physically closer to the harassers, it doesn’t exactly get better. The wonderful (and award-winning) Anti-Street Harassment UK campaign (ASH UK) was set up after its founder, Vicky, was harassed by a group of men who were initially shouting at her from a car, threatened to rape her, then got out of the car and followed her into a tube station where they assaulted her. The police (who did intervene) then blamed her for responding to them and said “boys will be boys.” SO. MUCH. FAIL.

Um… *cough* male readers – this is essentially Met officers saying your entire gender are all hopeless gropey asshats. Erm… *cough* I wouldn’t take that.

So, what can we do?

• Well, the first step is breaking down the idea that it’s either normal or OK. It’s neither, and we need to spread the word. Thou shalt not take shit, and (not that our readers should need telling) thou shalt not dish it out, either.
• Read up on it – from the likes of stopstreetharassment.org to this brilliant video on street harassment and women of colour:

• Check out Jezebel’s ongoing street harassment category, and call catcalling out for the asshattery it is.
• Those who want some background on why people are often hostile to approaches on the street would do very well to read this blog post ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’. (Heavy, but a thousand times worth it.)
• And in the meantime, don’t let that ‘compliment’ strawman argument derail you on your quest for gender justice.

On that note…

… since you’ve been such a good class of gender justice warriors today, I’m going to let you finish early with just one more video:

I absolutely love their line of questioning about “has that ever worked for you?” Also “sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchial dividend – it’s so over” should be on a t-shirt. I would buy that shirt.

And that’s a wrap. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to more important things – like buying cat food for my wonderful kitty – because some catcalls are nice. The ones that come from an actual cat.¹

• All images of unimpressed cats in high dudgeon from Morguefile, the free image bank!

1. Not Schrödinger’s cat. He is a meanie.

Picture this.

It’s Friday night.

I’m a young woman of 25.  I have several friends. I celebrate Christmas. These two facts have combined to create FESTIVE OPPORTUNITY! So I’m going to a house party in East London. I’ve dressed up a bit and everything.

It is snowing heavily. I’ve wrapped up warm, but it’s obvious I’m a bit dressed up; mini skirt, tights, thigh high socks over the tights, stompy boots (OK, I’m a bit of a goth). I feel good about the way I look.

BE CABWISE! Text this number, and find out where you can be overcharged for being out of the house! You hussy! (Image: Transport For London, 2010)

The party goes great. I leave at about midnight, and am juuust too late to make the last Tube home. On the way out, I catch sight of the new poster encouraging me to take a licensed minicab. It says, IF YOUR MINICAB’S NOT BOOKED, IT’S JUST A STRANGER’S CAR. It seems to have replaced the triggertastic, victim-blame-loaded images from a couple of years ago, which showed a woman’s screaming, tearslicked face and bore the headline “STOP, PLEASE, NO, PLEASE, STOP… taking unlicensed minicabs.” I was not a fan of that campaign, well-meaning though it was. It was a giant neon cultural signpost as far as I was concerned: ladies, rape is your problem, sort it.

The streets are covered in thick ice. I have to pick my way very slowly through it, even in my stompy-but-relatively-practical boots, to avoid falling.  A couple of guys outside a pub have things to say about the delectability of my arse as I do this. Their commentary isn’t particularly appreciated.

There are barely any nightbuses running. I realise, shivering and fumbling for my wallet, that I want a minicab. A licensed one.

The rest of my night is an expensive nightmare which opens my eyes to just how much quite a lot of people are happy to exploit my need to get home safely. And how many people out there think that if I want to be safe without paying through the nose, I shouldn’t be out at all.

Leytonstone’s not the life and soul of London on a Friday night, but there are quite a lot of people out, so there must be a few house parties going down. There are several women, at varying levels of party-dressed, in varying states of sobriety. It just so happens that tonight I’m sober. All of us are looking for a way home. A fair number of us are travelling alone.

There is one minicab office in the area I’m trying to navigate. It’s the only one I can see. I’ve used it before and it’s usually been fine. The office has several women milling about outside it. Encouraged, I go in.

The man behind the counter studies me with a faintly critical eye. I tell him I want to go to South London – a long journey, so I’m prepared for some outlay.

“Normally,” says Counter Dude, a little nervously, “that’d be £35.”

Okay.

There is some nudging and muttering going on behind the glass. I wonder if my skirt is rucked up or something. It all looks okay.

“Tonight is fare-and-a-half night.”

Ah. Fare-and-a-half-night. That famous British institution WAIT WHAT.

“It’ll be £53.”

What the shit.

“We’re charging extra,” says Counter Dude, “just for tonight.”

I look out the window at the snow, and the shivering lone women. Is it just the snow that’s suddenly made the petrol so expensive? Or is it more the crowd of women the snow has delivered into the arms of the minicab company that’s occasioned this spontaneous jolly price-hike? I look back at Counter Dude.

“Just tonight,” I say pointedly.

“Yeah.”

There’s an awkward silence.

“Unlucky,” he proffers, after a brief conversational abyss while he searches for a word with which to label my predicament. “You’re unlucky being out tonight.”

What follows is essentially a Paddington Bear-style stare-out, which I win. My prize? A “discount” taking my fare down by a fiver. Still £££ more than I’d usually be charged. You’re damn right I’m unlucky. I’m already drafting a My Fault I’m Female submission as we speak.

The previous safety poster, with bonus feminist stickering. Image via Flickr user jonanamary.

Here’s the deal, guys: I know it’s snowing this week, GUYS, EVERYBODY CAN SEE IT IS SNOWING THIS WEEK. I know that in all likelihood, you’re charging dudes the same amount.

But here it is, right, here’s the thing: hardly any dudes are in this cab office. More women are taking your cabs, because (cis, at least) men do not have the same sense of personal risk going home alone at night after a thing like a party. Most of my male friends rolled home. My boyfriend regularly rolls home when he’s had a few at a party! I’d love to be able to roll home in the same way! But often I don’t feel able to. Especially not since a female acquaintance of mine from the same area was sexually assaulted on public transport less than a year ago. I went past a yellow police SEXUAL ASSAULT poster for weeks after that knowing precisely who it related to.

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY THAT when you notice a predominantly female bunch of customers need cabs, and rack up your prices in kneejerk response, on a night when it’s particularly difficult to do anything but take a minicab, and not doing so may result in Judgement and Scrutiny if something goes wrong…  well, guys, what you are doing there is helping create a LONE LADIES: STAY HOME kinda vibe.

I’m not saying that women are more likely to be attacked than men; this would not be true. But there is an atmosphere, a culture that we live in, that frequently suggests that women walking alone at night, especially if they are dressed for a party, are at least partly asking to be attacked and that if they do not take appropriate measures, it is their fault if such a thing should occur. That is the difference. And minicab companies, it seems, who provide Said Measures, rather like to capitalise on that.

As I wait for my cab – which presumably runs on petrol of molten gold! – I’m curbcrawled, basically, by unlicensed cabs, twice. They offer me a cheap way home. £20! £15! No dice.

But the majestic fee for my licensed cab is coming right out of my Christmas overdraft. I wonder how many women are tempted by the riskier option.

Probably quite a few.

In the cab, which is not, ALAS, plated with gold and drawn by a unicorn, my driver’s so annoyed I’ve argued the fare down further to a “really very reasonable” £42, he spends our journey informing me that I should be “grateful” his boss “felt like being nice” to me. Eventually I just slip my headphones into my ears and overlay his voice with a nice Christmassy choir. Much better.

What I really want to do here is offer some positive advice at the end of this post – it’s one of BadRep’s policies to try and go beyond ranting as far as we can, and recommend what you can do with your voice, your money and your time to change things.

I’m a bit stumped here, though.  Maybe there’s a Minicabs Ombudsman Person, or a Price Regulating Committee I can give a shout? I dunno. I’ll have to try to find out.

But don’t hesitate to argue your corner if the little voice in your head reckons you’re being supremely bloody fleeced.

Have a safe Christmas.

Arriving at Studio La Danza on Holloway Road, walking up the stairs past brightly coloured adverts for poledancing and LGBT ballroom dancing classes, in the mirror-walled second floor studio I met our smiling instructors, Sian and Lydia, two students from Goldsmiths College.

We moved chairs into a circle for a quick discussion about the class, and what feminist self-defence actually is, while Sian handed round flyers such as ‘Your Voice Is A Weapon: How To Use It,’ and a cartoon diagram mercilessly depicting the weak, soft, vulnerable parts on any attacker.

Lydia and Sian had learned the techniques they were going to teach us when their student feminist society arranged for an instructor from Sweden to stage a practical demonstration at Goldsmiths. Feminist self-defence is an idea that has especially taken off in Sweden, the home of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the VPK feminist socialist political party, who are calling for feminist self-defence to be taught to girls in schools.

Sian watches while Lydia holds a boxing pad for class participant, Suzie.

Feminist self-defence, we were told, is a DIY grassroots movement of gender activists teaching simple self-defence techniques, “specifically tailored towards experiences of violence against women, trans and queer people.” We weren’t going to find competition-winning martial arts or ‘complicated Houdini style escapes’ here; this was about simplicity and practicality, using your natural reflexes to quickly get away, and maybe giving your attacker an injury or two to remember you by.

The most important part of this movement, and why I’d come along to the class, was that there would be no victim-blaming here. The Ladyfest programme asked ‘Are you sick of being told not to walk on your own at night? Tired of hearing that it’s our fault if we get attacked if we’re alone and it’s dark?’ Having had several self-defence instructors who repeated the same tired old bullshit of “Well, I shouldn’t say this really but it’s their own fault if they get attacked out on their own, I know you girls like to look pretty, but…” and having also been sexually harassed at classes, this class was a refreshingly new experience for me.

For once, there was the acknowledgement that the burden should not be on women to protect themselves from rape, that this is not how things should be. One student remembered the time she’d been heartened to see in her inbox, instead of that cheery chain e-mail of the type we often receive, ‘Women: how to protect yourself from rape! (Forward this to all your girlfriends!)’, the variation ‘Rape Prevention Tips for Men’.

We started the practical part of the class by talking about personal space. How close does someone have to get for us to feel uncomfortable? “We’re so polite in this country,” said Lydia. “We don’t complain.” We discussed how the size of our personal space decreases when we’re in a crowded area, on the train or at a gig, but what was emphasised was that although its size can change, we’re still entitled to our own space, and entitled to tell people to get out of it. Lydia and Sian pretended to be confident commuters bumping into us, while we walked around looking shy, and then we switched roles. Less of a ‘This Is How You Must Act In Order Not To Be Attacked’ than a lesson in where our personal boundaries lay, and a funny icebreaker for the class when we were allowed to ‘get revenge’ and barge into our instructors.

Something that especially impressed me was that our instructors acknowledged how practising for assault can be upsetting – that people might have traumatically experienced the situations that were being described. Participation in the physical aspect of the class was not compulsory, they told us – if we felt upset we could go away and come back again and no-one would judge us, and every part of the class was explained to us before we took part.

The instructors were even respectful of each other’s boundaries, and yet the atmosphere in the class was much more lighthearted and pleasant than many self-defence classes that I have attended – “May I strangle you, Lydia?” “Yes you may, Sian,” they laughed. There were horrible people and horrible situations out there, but we had the power to do something about it, and learning these techniques was going to be fun, too.

We practised shouting – useful for throwing an attacker off balance, alerting others who might help, and also something that can make your strikes stronger and help you to focus, in the manner of the Japanese Kiai. Here, Lydia did a pretty scary impression of her Swedish instructor shouting “Nej!!” – I’m surprised no-one came upstairs to see what was happening! – but we used the English, “No!” and practised hitting boxing pads. Our instructors again emphasised how polite we are as women or minorities in this culture, how we’re afraid of causing a fuss, and how getting past that fear can be one of the best things we can ‘unlearn’ to keep ourselves safe.

We were afraid to shout at first, but as our inhibitions dropped we became louder and louder. We shouted not once, but twice, and when we struck, we struck twice, because we were told, if possible, “do it twice,” as that way there’s more chance of getting a result. If shouting for help, Sian advised us not just to ask but to ask specific people – “Hey, you in the red bobble hat, this man won’t take his hand off my leg, please alert the bus driver!” works because picking on individuals is better than asking a crowd, where everyone might assume that someone else will help you.

As an attacker is likely to be physically stronger than their victim (unless the attacker is feeling a tad suicidal), we were told not to wrestle, not to use ‘might against might,’ but to find weak spots. We looked at the diagrams we’d been shown and practised using the strong parts of our bodies, the heels of our hands, our fists, our feet, against the vulnerable parts of an attacker’s, their shins, their solar plexus, their throat. This wasn’t karate, this wasn’t the Marquess of Queensbury rules, this was fighting dirty, and fighting for your right to go about your life unharmed.

Sian and Lydia explained that we weren’t just practising for that shadowy figure that jumps out of the bushes, we were also practising close-quarters techniques, where you might not have the space to deliver that awesome roundhouse kick you saw on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because sexual assault is much more likely to come from people we know (friends, acquaintances, dates) than from strangers, and can happen just as easily in your house, on your sofa, as in a dark alley somewhere. This is where a lot of the anti-rape advice given by many self-defence instructors falls down! It’s no good saying ‘don’t walk alone at night’ when it could be your date who attacks you.

My one criticism of this class would be that they could have explained a little more about the specific experiences of queer and transgender people, as these were mentioned on the programme, but as a one-hour starter class it was full of great, general advice for people from all walks of life on how to avoid sexual or violent assault from a stronger attacker.

The class overran, there had been so much to say, but as we all quickly cleared out of the studio to get to the next Ladyfest event we left our email addresses with Lydia. The nature of feminist self-defence, as a DIY movement, is that one takes what one has learned and passes it on. Lydia and Sian’s instructor had done so, and now the two of them were passing it on as well. They told us that they wanted to prepare another class in London, and would contact us with details. I handed round flyers for BadRep, having already mentioned I’d be writing about the class, and it was decided that our readers should contact Lydia and Sian if they were interested in another London-based class, or if interested in resources for starting their own classes elsewhere in the country. You can e-mail us at [email protected] if you’re interested, and we’ll put you in touch.

Meanwhile, here’s a little further reading…

• The F Word showcases a free, downloadable pamphlet by Isy, aimed at women and girls, which features some practical self-defence tips and diagrams.
• Pervocracy breaks down some typical ‘anti-rape’ tips – The Best Friend Test (note: this blog, if not this particular post, may well be NSFW for you).
• A report from the Metropolitan Police on rape statistics in London, including stranger rape vs. aquiantance rape, in PDF format.

RJ at RiotNrrd comics lays into a particularly awful self-defence instructor. Used with permission - www.riotnrrdcomics.com.