Chapter I: Literature Review on Street Harassment

This section provides an overview of existing scholarship on street harassment as it relates to:

• general scholarship
• theories of evolution vs. socialization
• history of street harassment
• the prevalence of street harassment
• why men harass
• impact of street harassment on women
• racism and street harassment
• sexuality and street harassment

General Scholarship: With a notable exception of Catharine MacKinnon’s work, very little scholarship existed on the topic of sexual harassment, a category under which street harassment is placed, until after the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Nomination hearings.  During the nomination process, Thomas’ former employee Anita Hill testified against his nomination, citing a history of his sexual harassment towards her.  While Hill was portrayed as a liar and ultimately Thomas became a justice, it was an important historical moment because for the first time sexual harassment was given a national, public forum, which led to more people around the country sharing their own stories of sexual harassment.  In the years directly following the Thomas hearing, there was an explosion of scholarship on the topic, though it primarily focused on sexual harassment in the workplace and schools, venues where there are legal repercussions for such behavior. 

Most of the scholarship on the sexual harassment of women in public, street harassment, started in the early 1990s.  The primary scholarly articles and books that focus on street harassment, in chronological order, include:

• Elizabeth Arveda Kissling’s article “Street Harassment: The Language of Sexual Terrorism” (1991)
  
• Marty Langelan’s book Back Off!: How to Confront and Stop Sexual Harassment and Harassers (1993)
  
• Cynthia Grant Bowman’s article “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women” (1993)
  
• Tiffanie Heben’s article “A Radical Reshaping of the Law: Interpreting and Remedying Street Harassment” (1994)
  
• Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment by Carol Brooks Gardner (1995)
  
• Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer’s article “’The Man in the Street’: Why He Harasses” (1996)
  
• Diedre Davis’s article “The Harm That Has No Name: Street Harassment, Embodiment, and African American Women” (1997)
  
• Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz and Sandy Welsh’s article “Experiencing the Streets: Harassment and Perceptions of Safety Among Women” (2000)
  
• Hawley Fogg-Davis’s article “A Black Feminist Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment” (2005)
  
• License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech by Laura Beth Nielsen (2006)

Evolution versus Socialization: Scholarship on sexual harassment seems to follow one of two theoretical models: (1) sexual harassment of women by men is a manifestation of evolution and men’s nature or (2) sexual harassment of women by men is a manifestation of socialized male power and dominance.  Feminists largely fall into the latter category and this project will likewise use the framework that sexual harassment, even on the streets, is a demonstration of gender power and privilege.  However, the following is a brief overview of the evolutionary/nature view point.  Scholars like Barbara Smuts, David Buss, and Felicia Pratto agree that men should not harass women but argue that to best understand how to combat the problem people must look at the issue as one resulting from evolution.  They see men’s effort to control female sexuality as a characteristic that has evolved over time to better ensure that men will reproduce, and so they see men’s desire to control women to ensure reproduction manifested in many ways, including through street harassment.¹  Smuts particularly notes that men use aggression to try to control women, and particularly their sexuality, not because men are inherently aggressive and women inherently submissive, but because men find aggression to be a useful political tool in their struggle to enhance their reproductive opportunities by force.²  Thus, these and other evolutionary perspective scholars believe that men cannot help that they innately want to control women and women’s attention by yelling at them, grabbing them, and stalking them on the street; it is in their nature to do so.  

Feminists do not see men’s harassment of women or desire to control them as an evolutionary aspect of male genes, but instead believe that men are socialized to be more dominant than women and women are socialized to be submissive or deferential to men.  Thus, when there is more gender equity in society, there will be less street harassment.  Scholars like Cynthia G. Bowman, Hawley Fogg-Davis, Elizabeth Grauerholz, Martha J. Langelan, and Catharine MacKinnon all discuss how cultural power differences between men and women can lead to different communication styles and socialization experiences, including the socialization of men to dominate others (both males and females).  In light of this, since sexual harassment is often an effective way for men to achieve dominance over women, some men take part in it.³ 
Bowman, Fogg-Davis, and Langelan specifically discuss why it is illogical to view men’s participation in the sexual harassment of women as a way to achieve reproduction.  They argue that street harassment is not flirtation or courtship because most men do not do it with the intent of dating, having sexual relations with or marrying the person they harass, particularly when the harassment includes threats, derogatory comments about the woman, or leads to actual violence.  Nor is street harassment usually a successful tactic if they want to try to woo a woman as it generally frightens or angers the women they target.  For example, Bowman writes in her article that in her own and other people’s studies questioning women’s experience with street harassment, most women did not like the attention and repeatedly cited a fear of rape and the intrusion upon their privacy as their main reasons why.⁴  Fogg-Davis writes that most girls first experience street harassment by males at or before puberty, and thus learn to see their womanly bodies as sources of sexual danger; their sexual vulnerability to boys and men becomes an inescapable and constant condition of being female.⁵ 

So instead of street harassment being evolutionary-evolved flirtation, these feminist authors argue that sexual harassment is about power, especially because behind the harasser’s behavior could be a real physical threat.⁶   Langelan makes the point that the difference between sincere courtship and harassment is the use of power; “when the recipient has no choice in the encounter, or has reason to fear the repercussions if she declines, the interaction has moved out of the realm of … courtship into the ugly arena of intimidation and aggression.  Labeling sexual harassment as an inept form of courtship is a convenient fabrication to mask the abuse of power involved, a way to cloud and obscure the real dynamics of harassment.”⁷          
Scholars like R.W. Connell, James W. Messerschmidt and Margaret Wetherell who discuss the concept of hegemonic masculinity, the configuration of gender which guarantees the dominant position of men and the subordination of women, similarly see men’s harassment of women as a learned behavior and as one they are most prone to exhibit when they are with other men in order to prove or demonstrate their manhood.⁸ 

History: Street harassment dates to a time when women were men’s property.  If a woman was in public without the accompaniment of a man, she ran the risk of being treated as “available” by the men around her.  In discussing the experience of women in public between 1750 and 1850 in the U.S., particularly while traveling, historian Patricia Cline Cohen wrote that, “men who saw women alone exhibiting freedom of manners, sociability, and splendid dress marked them as disreputable women and treated them accordingly.  A woman who wanted to appear reputable, therefore, had to constrain her actions, draw her cloak close, maintain reserve, and accept male escortage wherever possible.”⁹  This mindset continues to varying degrees in the public sphere today and some men view a woman alone in public, particularly if she is dressed attractively, as fair game for their comments.  However, even women who adhere to advice like staying in at night, only going in certain public spaces, and dressing conservatively are not free from men’s advances and comments.  The best way to prevent harassment, besides staying home, seems to be, as it was in the 1700 and 1800s, to go in public with a man.  When asked why he harassed women, one man interviewed in Maggie Hadleigh-West's documentary “War Zone” responded that he did so because if a woman was not visibly with a man, he presumed she was single and so available for his attentions.¹⁰ 

Prevalence: Various pieces of scholarship include some discussion of the prevalence of men’s street harassment of women.  Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh’s study, published in an article called “Experiencing the Streets: Harassment and Perceptions of Safety Among Women” (2000), found that over eighty percent of women experience stranger harassment and the harassment influences and detrimentally impacts women’s perceived safety in public.¹¹  Laura Beth Nielsen interviewed 100 individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area, 63 of whom were women, about their experiences with begging, sexually-suggestive and racial speech.  19% of the women respondents said they receive offensive or sexually suggestive remarks every day, 43% reported receiving them often and 28% said they received them sometimes.¹²  68% of women of color reporting they experienced every day or often compared to 55% of white women.¹³  Carol Gardner Brooks conducted 506 interviews in Indianapolis, IN, 293 of whom were women and were representative of the race, age, class, and sexual orientation of the general population in Indiana and the U.S.  Every single woman she interviewed could cite several examples of being harassed while every single man she interviewed admitted to at least one time when he was a harasser.¹⁴  Bowman found that street harassment “crosses the lines of geography, religion, race, age, and class.”¹⁵  Langelan wrote that men across all categories harass women across all categories.¹⁶

Why Men Harass: A few pieces of street harassment scholarship particularly looked at why men harass women.  In an interesting study discussed in “’The Man in the Street:’ Why He Harasses,” Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer report that they interviewed sixty men who harassed them as they were walking in the streets of four major cities around the world.  When asked why the harassed women, the men reported doing so out of boredom, for sport, for male camaraderie, and as an ill-constructed compliment. Only 15% said they did so to humiliate and anger the women.¹⁷  Of the 213 men that Gardner interviewed in Indiana, many said they would “harass women any time, anywhere, to anyone, except those accompanied by men.”¹⁸  Most men made it clear that they, “without shame,” felt it was their right to evaluate women.¹⁹  Some men said the public sphere was a good place for the sport of “girl-watching.”²⁰  Men also reported that they would shout compliments or touch women they did not find to be attractive out of pity and to make them feel better about themselves.²¹   Making evaluations and attempts at acquaintance were the reasons most frequently given by the men for their behavior.²²  In her research in Washington, D.C., Langelan found that some migrant workers, working class white men and some black and Hispanic harassers said they specifically target white upper- and middle-class women as a way of expressing hostility to the racial or class privilege the women represented.²³ 

In her documentary “War Zone,” Hadleigh-West interviewed 1,053 men about why they harassed her while she walked down the streets of New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City.  Of the 53 incidents she includes in her 71 minute film, the men react with bravado, embarrassment, or anger in response to her question of why they are treating her, a complete stranger, the way that they are; very few apologize for their behavior or see anything wrong with yelling out sexual comments at a complete stranger.²⁴  During an interview with Time magazine she expressed surprised at the level of men’s aggression on the street, particularly when the interaction they initiated with an unknown woman did not go the way they planned. She said, “If it doesn't go the way the man wants to, suddenly you find yourself in this racist, or sexist or homophobic circumstance. Like a real woman would like this aggression, whereas a frigid lesbian bitch, or a bitch, would not. You might be a ‘white bitch,’ or a ‘nigger,’ or whatever racial slurs might come up. Or even ageism comes up. I've had men say, ‘You're cute, but you're old.’”²⁵

A writer for Salon.com wrote an extensive piece on street harassment in 1999, part of which included the responses of men she interviewed after they harassed her.  The following are two of the responses she received: "Aw! There y'all go, there y'all go! Always complainin' when you should be happy. We like you, get it?  We human men. We like your bodies. We like your ... your ... okay, I'll say it and it's your fault because I don't even talk like this -- we like your titties! We like titties. We men. We like women, ain't no fags round here."  Another one said, "It's a compliment, alright, jeez.  Why is it so wrong to tell you that you're pretty? How much time you spend getting dressed this morning?  How much makeup you got at home?  Huh?  It's for me, right?  For men."²⁶  Responses such as these show that many men seem to feel they are generously bestowing a compliment on women, that women are dressed for their pleasure, and that “complimenting” women proves their own manliness.  As scholars like R.W. Connell, James W. Messerschmidt and Margaret Wetherell discuss in their articles about hegemonic masculinity, the concept of hegemonic masculinity sets a hierarchy where white, heterosexual men are at the top, and the subordination of other forms of masculinity, such as homosexuality, is related to the subordination of women by men, and to achieve hierarchy within the masculine framework or prove their manhood to their peers, men can harass women.²⁷

According to Langelan, there are three main categories of male harassers of women.  Sexually predatory harassers are men who find the harassment of women itself to be sexually gratifying, such as those who flash women or masturbate in front of women. Dominance harassers are men who seek power over women through intimidation and fear.  Territorial harassers have an economic objective and want to exclude women to protect their own interests; this is more common at work-based sexual harassment.²⁸  The dominance form of harassment is usually the most frequent kind as “men assert their status and reassure themselves that their masculinity commands respect and female deference.”²⁹  This again reflects the concept of hegemonic masculinity and these men’s desire to prove their masculinity to themselves, their peers, and the women they harass.

Impact on Women: Several studies look thoroughly at the impact street harassment has on women, particularly the way most women cite some degree of fear of violence and rape in its context.  Through their research published in “The Threat of Rape: Its Psychological Impact on Nonvictimized Women” (1996), Gerd Bohner and Nobert Schwarz found that the social reality of rape in combination with cultural myths about rape contribute to gender inequality and create behavioral restrictions for women that limit their participation in public and social life.³⁰  Bowman found that when women discussed their feelings about street harassment, they usually cited their fear of rape and a feeling of an invasion of privacy.³¹   Fogg-Davis writes that “Sexual terrorism is an apt description of street harassment.  As a woman you know it will happen, but you never know for certain when or how it will happen...street harassment reminds women of their vulnerability to violent attack.”³²  In a statement about “War Zone,” its filmmaker Hadleigh-West writes that women “live in a climate of aggression. And the underbelly of that aggression is rape. Rape is what all women fear when they believe that their safety is being threatened.”³³  In an interview regarding her traveling exhibit about street harassment, Brooklyn’s Red Clay Arts curator Jenga Mwendo asked, "How are we supposed to know who’s a nice guy and who’s going to rape me?  These are complete strangers. There is a threat of violence that underlies these random street interactions."³⁴

A recurring theme in the three books focused on street harassment has also been women’s fear of street harassment.  In her book Back Off! Langelan writes that for women, an underlying tension is always wondering how far the harasser will go, will he become violent?³⁵  She found that fear is the number one reason women do not take action against the street harassment they encounter but rather choose to ignore it, walk away, or take preventative measures to avoid it in the first place.  Women fear violence, men’s retaliation, and conflict in a fight they feel they may not win if it was based solely on strength.³⁶  Every time a woman is faced with sexual harassment, she has to make a choice about how to react based on how severe the risk is if she does respond, how safe does she feel, what effect might her reaction have, and how much time she has to deal with the harassment.³⁷ 

Nielsen found in her study of street harassment that concern for safety also greatly informed women’s perception of their experiences with street harassment.  She writes, “Ultimately, the woman must make a calculation about the level of danger in the situation.  In addition to maintaining their safety, the ‘walking away’ strategy fosters silence.  When it is unsafe to retort, women have no capacity for counterspeech.”³⁸  Due to their fear, the most common response to harassment was no resistance at all, but usually ignoring the harasser or just walking or running away from him/them.³⁹

Similarly, Gardner found that women felt that when they do stand up against the street harassment, they are often risking their safety because challenging the men can provoke the men to turn violent.⁴⁰  She wrote in the conclusion to her book Passing By that “it is impossible to state too strongly how constant the theme of fear was” in the nearly three hundred interviews she conducted with women from every social class, race, age, sexual preference, occupational group, and whether or not they were disabled or abled-bodied.⁴¹ 

Racism: A few pieces of literature addressed issues of race and street harassment.  Langelan writes in Back Off! that women of color “often experience a combination of sexual and racial harassment, sometimes within a single incident, and they have played both a historical and a contemporary role in creating strategies for resistance.”⁴²  Fogg-Davis and Bowman both specifically discuss the experiences of African American women with street harassment.⁴³  When white men are the harassers, the harassment can be particularly humiliating to black women because it evokes a long history of disrespect and degradation by white men, particularly during the slave era when black female slaves could be treated as the sexual slaves of their white masters.  When black men are the harassers, the authors viewed the men as participating in a “raced patriarchy” that gives them the space and power to intimidate, shame, and humiliate black women.⁴⁴  Fogg-Davis and Bowman also discuss how men might use racial slurs and racial stereotypes in combination with sexual harassment to further intimidate and humiliate women of color or women not perceived as “white.” 

In examining case law regarding street harassment from the twentieth century, Bowman found disturbingly racist outcomes.  For example, in a case in North Carolina, the Supreme Court upheld the assault conviction of a black man who harassed a white teenage girl on the street saying his indecent language “as a matter of common knowledge, would create apprehension and fear” in a white girl.  However, courts in general have been likely to conclude that a white man is honestly and innocently mistaken if he believes a black woman on the street is a prostitute and therefore she should not be offended or alarmed by his proposal.⁴⁵  From these kinds of cases, Bowman concluded that women must overcome both sexism and racism in the legal system before being able to employ it effectively to combat the harassment of women on the streets.⁴⁶ 

During Nielsen’s study of street harassment, she found that harassment in public is complicated by multiple hierarchies where an individual may be privileged or disadvantaged by identity of gender, race, sexual orientation, ability, or socioeconomic status.  A poor man harassing a wealthy woman transcends her socioeconomic privilege over him to enact his gender privilege.  Similarly, a man of color can transcend a white woman’s race status by enacting his gender privilege over her.  In light of these intersectionalities, a woman of color, particularly one who is poor and/or homosexual, will be the most disadvantaged and the most susceptible to all levels of street harassment.⁴⁷  Nielsen concludes during her study that “racist and sexist speech are linked to broader hierarchies of race and sex, and that such comments do serious harm to individual targets and vulnerable groups in society.”⁴⁸

Sexuality: A few scholars also discuss issues of sexuality in their scholarship.  Bowman notes that lesbians are subjected to a uniquely offensive experience because they are both “punished” for being women and assumed to be heterosexual when they are not, yet if it is obvious that they are lesbian, men may harass them for that status as well.⁴⁹  Fogg-Davis discusses both of those points and focuses her article around the murder of a young black woman by a male street harasser when she identified herself as a lesbian to deter him from bothering her and her friends.  In response, he stabbed and killed her.  In examining the intersectionalities of race, sexuality, and gender, Fogg-Davis states, “street harassment indicates a sexual imbalance connected to broader systems of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia.”⁵⁰  A self-identified lesbian woman interviewed by Gardner during her study of public harassment in Indiana said she only feels “normal” if she is in public with a man because “public places are for straights, and straight couples at that.  If that’s not what you are, you have to prove yourself.”⁵¹

Conclusion: The findings of the authors in the literature review on topics like the prevalence of street harassment, its impact on women, and the possible unique harassment experiences of women of color and non-heterosexual women guided me as I determined how to collect my own data.  Compared to other studies conducted on street harassment, my data samples were mostly women who already viewed street harassment as negative and many were already feminist activists.  Thus, my findings cannot be applied to the whole population.  Given limited time and funding, I only focused on women’s experiences with street harassment as the target and did not study the experiences of men as the harassers.  Since men are ultimately the ones who must stop street harassment by not engaging in it themselves, not studying them limits the ability of this thesis to fully suggest ways to combat street harassment, but as far as women are able to work to stop it, this thesis is useful in exploring methods women already use and suggest using.