Tag: East Bay

• On Not Telling People Not to Tell Me to Smile

[This article contains mature subjects, at around a PG-14 level]

I am going to make a confession, a personal one, not meant to speak for any other woman: I don’t mind when men tell me to smile. By saying so, I risk denting my feminist credentials. I mention this because of a street art project–recently covered in news sources such as NPR, The Daily Beast, and the New York Times, that operates under the name “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” 4da6914b38a9a8cd82cc8712a3dc6b2d_large

This campaign, organized by an artist and activist, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, uses posters to confront the “street harassment” that women deal with regularly as we go about our daily lives. Street harassment may include catcalls and whistles, but this project focuses more on men’s inappropriate personal comments to women.

The posters sport crisp black-and-white portraits of women with sober, steadfast gazes, along with concise written messages: My name isn’t Baby. Critiques on my body are not welcome. Women do not owe you for their time or conversation. My outfit is not an invitation. The slogan “Stop telling women to smile” appears under a self-portrait of the artist with her head turned, casting a skeptical eye.

I am 100% behind almost all the messages–the ones pointing out that women are neither “outside for your entertainment” nor in need of validation from strange men. It’s the one about smiling, though, that has me churning, questioning my loyalties, reviewing my own experiences, asking myself where I stand. I have conflicting impulses, wanting to celebrate and at the same time to raise objections to Fazlalizadeh’s work, or at least decry its title (which admittedly makes a nice palindromic acronym: STWTS).

My first thought about the saying is that I don’t want to be that surly. Most of the time, when someone tells me to smile, it feels less like an imposition and more like a reminder. I usually do need to step away from some grim rumination, and it feels easy to me to yield up the requested grin. Also, the flower-child side of me prefers empathy-building “I” statements to outright commands like STOP!

Sometimes, “stop,” though, is what you have to holler. The artist is responding to a whole range of behaviors that are indeed disruptive to female lives. She makes a carefully considered choice to hone in on one that is seemingly harmless, just as a pinch on the behind, an office come-on, or an embarrassingly intense flirtation — “If I weren’t married, I would…” — were once perceived as OK. She argues that when a man prevails on a woman he does not know with personal comments of any kind, he is assuming that he has an innate right to her attention. His actions reinforce the idea that women somehow owe something to men.

Anyone who has come across the notion of men’s dates “putting out” in exchange for dinner, knows that many men do have a sense of entitlement when it comes to women. I briefly dated the poster boy for this attitude, who congratulated himself out loud for not forcing his attentions on me.

And so, as it was designed to do, STWTS got me thinking about the kinds of harassment I myself have suffered. From the time I was a teenager, working in the 1980s as a downtown foot-messenger, I have spent plenty of time on public transportation and on urban streets. This week I pulled together my own collection of unpleasant and even frightening interactions I’ve had with men. Any one of these various stalkings, flashings, and gropings could be shaken off, but together they make such an impression–such a discouraging and R-rated one–that I decided not to include my collection directly in this essay.

Experimentally, I wrote a list of Don’ts, less concise than Fazlalizadeh’s, aimed at my own harassers. For those of you who are comfortable reading about immature acts related to mature subjects, you can find my slogans here. I deployed enough euphemism and innuendo for them to qualify for a PG-14 rating. Perhaps my act of burying mine on a back-page web post will highlight Fazlalizadeh’s courage in putting hers out on walls.

I recognize that I have lived a charmed life, virtually free from physical violence, and that my own experiences with masculine aggression are worlds away from the worst that they could be. (Compare Josie Pickens’ painful reminiscences in Ebony, also sparked by STWTS, about the degree to which men’s remarks normalize physical forms of sexual aggression.)

And some instances of men presuming on my attention are ones that I wouldn’t change, for instance with Florio, 4′ 11″, who followed me through an amusement park trying in various languages to strike up a conversation. When I gave up and answered him, I wound up learning all about his career as a weightlifter in Romania. Then he thanked me for the chat and politely said goodbye.

Then there was my encounter with a guy on the long transbay bus ride from Oakland to San Francisco. I could certainly have come up with some Don’ts for him. Don’t get drunk in the morning on an empty stomach and tell me the whole sad story of your life falling apart. Do not, under any circumstance, start calling me your ‘little support system.’ Do not follow me onto a second, desperately crowded bus, holding forth so loudly and repetitively than no one will sit in the empty seat on the other side of you, then promise you will get off the bus only if I kiss you on the cheek.

Not that I would want to to go through an experience like that again, but still it was worth it for the memory and for the story, and maybe for making my post-college life of house-sitting and unemployment seem relatively respectable and orderly. When I tell the tale, I sometimes leave out the fact that I did kiss the man. He was good as his word, disappearing from my life at the very next stop. I certainly don’t mention that he wasn’t even the only stranger ever I kissed to make go away. It weirds people out, and, in light of Fazlalizadeh’s activism, now feels a bit like a betrayal of feminist ideals.

But there it is. In those days, I was a sucker for strangers. Not once did it occur to me to scowl or tell someone to shove off.

Such incidents tapered off sometime after my 20s. The dew in my eyes evaporated. My appearance changed, and so did my stance. When I made my mid-career shift from writing and editing to teaching, I developed “the look,” a glare that can part crowds, knock a rider from a skateboard, or pacify a late-night shouter on Telegraph Avenue. (“Are you a schoolteacher?” one of them once straightened up and asked me.)

Even now, though, I depend on the intervention of strangers, such as the woman sitting next to me on a plane, who patted my back for fifteen minutes during the landing while I threw up into the airsick bag. Once, over-confident of my teacherly superpowers, I got into a shouting match on the UC Berkeley campus with a man who objected to my walking behind him–20 or 30 feet behind. In retrospect, it’s obvious that he was speaking from the throes of mental illness, but at the time it just didn’t sink in for me.

I was yelling at him that I would walk where I wanted to, when another woman (I have no recall of what she looked like) linked arms with me and led me in the opposite direction, out of this pointless altercation, saying, “Let’s just have a little stroll over this way.”

Like Farzalizadeh, I dream of a world where women can move freely, without fear, even without hassle. Beyond that, I dream of a world men and women can generally count on one another for some spirit of street solidarity. Conceivably, suggesting a smile could be a part of that. But for now, in the world we live in, I have to get behind a woman’s right to just say let me be.

• What’s under your bridge?

“Too much social interaction!” a young friend of mine is roaring, sitting on his heels in his swiveling desk chair. A proficient internet pilot, like many of his generation, he has been showing me a computer game based on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of several books we’ve read together. He also mentions an online version of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. I start telling him about the old days, when D&D players sat around a kitchen table rolling dice. I’m just getting to the part about my generation staying up late over cold pizza and flat soda. That’s when he breaks in, cutting off the reminiscence: “Too much interaction face to face!”

He’s kidding, I think. As a teacher, I can attest that most 6th-grade humor has the consistency of roasted chestnuts. This particular 11-year-old, though, constitutes an exception. He’s got a wit that’s hard and sparkly as diamonds. The first time I met with him, I asked him whether he knew what it meant to “infer.” He told me he’d encountered the word “inferences” before. “So I can infer what it means.”

Now he confirms for me the ironic tone of his protest, as he goes on playfully to describe a future world where young people will hunch over devices texting each other even when they’re together in the same room.

Much has been made, and for a good long time now, out of the isolating effects of time spent online. Sociological studies, widely publicized on the internet, blame that same internet for the decay of social networks in the phenomenon we so tellingly capitalize as Real Life. I pooh-pooh the fretting, because I love the new opportunities: keeping up with former students, tracking the growth of my niece and nephew. It pleases me to be able to determine where I’ve seen that actor on that show before, with just a few key taps, or to fact check (and verify) the assertion that Lupita Nyong’o looks gorgeous in every color she wears. I like having my reach extended, beaming messages to old friends who belong, in my personal cosmos, to the distant galaxy known as elementary school.

Much has been made of the way the internet brings out the worst in us, for instance through flame wars, cyber-bullying, and derogatory “bashtags.” Here, I share the concerns. So often, I see posts and articles whose gist is “I have no sympathy for so-and-so.” Much of the time I see reason for withholding fellow feeling, whether from well-heeled individuals raising tantrums over the fraying of their privileges or from vicious killer on death row. Still I find myself reflecting on the suspension of sympathy and its role in the actions of the wrongdoers just mentioned.

troll

Flinging put-downs on the internet is a seductive business. We get the excitement of confronting others’ behavior without all the consequences and risks. Particularly aggravating for me is the anti-immigrant screed. Such messages often appear in the second person, accusing some unidentified “you” of parasitical laziness.

These postings, I admit, spark the urge for reciprocal bad behavior on my part. Are you saying that our immigrant elders (mine and others’)–whose language learning suffered because they washed for, cooked for, cleaned up after, scolded, and cared for entire extended families, serving as one-man or one-woman safety nets–who worked multiple jobs to bankroll the education of a highly skilled and often seamlessly bilingual new generation–now need to “Press 2 to hang up and learn English”?

Come over and say that to me here.

If anything, though, my internet anger raises my awareness of my own fundamental trolldom. Like many others, I suspect, I tend toward an ingrained defensiveness that I’ve nurtured for a long time–probably since my first-hand experiences of how young people do also say terrible things to each other on a face-to-face level. Some days, no provocation is too small to stir the troll in me.

Yesterday I was standing at a corner where a tiny side street meets bustling San Pablo. The walk sign there takes forever to come on. As I was waiting, a woman strode up and forcefully jabbed three or four times at the button, when I had ALREADY PRESSED IT! Look at her folding her arms smugly, as if in expectation of instant success. Does she think she knows some better way than I do of pressing a walk button? Another 45 seconds of DON’T WALK will wipe that self-satisfied smile from her face.

Forty-five seconds did go by, with her aplomb undiminished. Then we crossed the street and started walking up the same steep hill. “That’s a cute dog,” she said to me, pointing to a fluffy white pooch walking by on a leash. Then she said the same thing to the tall woman walking the dog and gave the animal a friendly pat. Geez, what’s wrong with you, I asked my troll, getting so worked up about a perfectly pleasant stranger? My inner troll just shrugged at me and headed back under my inner bridge.

Hostility, says the troll. It’s what I do.

That’s just one example of an unseen flare-up in me of old feelings. On the other hand, here’s something new. Once every few days, usually peering at budding trees outside a window, over the shoulder of a student writer, during silent moments when the student needs to skirmish with the structure of a hard-to-structure sentence, I experience a shiver of unaccountable joy. I feel that I’m where I am supposed to be, that everything is right. And it’s true. I am doing what I dreamed of doing when I was in my 20s, a mix of teaching, writing, and art making–and actually the art making is more than I had even dared to dream. So the feeling’s not surprising, but its piercing sweetness is.

The euphoria has to do simply with being present, in a way that cannot be synthesized, even as our electronic devices deliver streams of positive and negative reinforcement that are, I do believe, rewiring our brains. Spelling, for instance, is in genuine peril, mark my words. Many students right-click two or three times a sentence to turn anylisis into analysis or–if they’re not careful–into analities. They’re not memorizing the words, but they’re going to have to cut down on the clicking, or they won’t be able to make deadlines. It’ll be like getting stuck at the endless DON’T WALK sign every day of their lives.

Still, I’m holding out hope for books and for swivel chairs, as well as for late nights and cold pizza, with the electronic universe as a powerful complement to–but not a substitute for–our breathing lives.