by Mia Kondogiannis This is an excerpt from a rhetoric assignment that Mia worked on last year, and has decided to share with our readers. We hope you enjoy it. Amidst the disturbing and sinister wake of the #MeToo movement - following especially the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault allegations - Viola Davis, a prolific American actress, wrote in a statement to Variety, “The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame. Our bodies are not ‘spoils of war’... a trophy to be collected to fuel your ego.” This chilling message seems to have gone unnoticed and overlooked by not only several icons of the red carpet who have been similarly accused of sexual misconduct in the past year, but also the multitudes of apparently typical, mundane people out on city streets every day. It is in this setting that a pervasive form of sexual harassment, dubbed ‘catcalling’, takes place. Defined by Merriam-Webster as “a loud, sexually suggestive call or comment directed at someone publicly (as on a street)”, catcalling is the most tolerated form of harassment, despite the fact that over 77% of women in all of the United States have experienced verbal sexual harassment and consider it to be objectifying, degrading, and simply terrifying. It is with no doubt that the world should unyieldingly condemn the vile practice of catcalling. Based on the grounds that it is supported by disrespectful, unwelcome behavior, that it entertains deep-seated roots of violent sexism and misogyny, and because it may encourage growing trends of child sexualization, catcalling must be brought out from the darkness of nighttime alleyways and be looked upon in the light with the intent to end it.
With a patronizing, holier-than-thou attitude, the misogynists of the world will wonder with ignorance and hostility why it is suddenly a crime to comment on a woman’s appearance in public. The uninvited and unwanted nature of catcalling is disregarded by these cruel critics, who possess a certain type of privilege to overlook two crucial factors behind the practice: the fact that women are expected to take it as a compliment, and the ugly intent behind the delivery of said ‘compliment’. The Oxford Dictionary specifies a ‘compliment’ to be a “polite expression of praise or admiration”, or “an act or circumstance that implies praise or respect”, and therefore a catcall does not fulfill the basic criteria as provided by the definition. A staggering number of catcalls employ appalling and crude vocabulary, sometimes even directed at women with children, and may become increasingly abusive if the victim does not respond to the aggressive attention being displayed. If such an act does not denote politeness, admiration, or respect in a workplace or home, what allows it the lenience and benefit of the doubt we give it when it occurs on the street? When the intent of the harasser is examined, though, the reality of the insidious behaviour behind catcalling deepens. This is menacingly demonstrated by the video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman, created in 2014 by the initiative Hollaback! in an effort to raise awareness about street harassment, but instead the video - which follows an actress filmed by a hidden camera as she walks around New York City, and condenses over a hundred instances of harassment into two minutes - has since been a startling centre of controversy and antagonism. Although some of the instances of catcalling and harassment in the video are clearly derogatory and have an unsettling effect on the viewer as well as the actress, who at times appears visibly uncomfortable, there are other examples that aren’t as obviously malevolent. Many commenters on the YouTube page are quick to notice that several men have outwardly innocent intentions and ask her to smile or how her day has been, but are slow to realize that the real intention behind these seemingly virtuous remarks is quite the opposite. In such a situation, the average woman who finds herself being talked to by a strange man in the street does not genuinely believe that he cares about her well-being. No, of course the phrasing is not offensive or threatening; to believe that women find the phrase “have a good day” to be harassment is an absurd mockery of women and what harassment actually is. The conclusion that must be reached, then, is that the stranger wants something badly enough to comment aloud in public. It is this idea that is truly terrifying.
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