Pretty

"Just in case anyone is still confused about why it’s “such a bad thing” to just say hello or pay someone a compliment . . . A whole lot of women have had exactly that experience of being called “pretty” and then told we look “mean” — or bitchy, or cunty, or slutty, or whorish or, in fact, ugly — ten seconds later if we don’t give the dude the attention he wants. I daresay most of us who live in cities have had it happen more times than we can count. Ergo, we have learned not to trust people who approach us that way."

-- Kate Harding

I took a break from writing about street harassment because I was getting sort of hysterical about the whole subject. After reading things like "cunt can't even take a compliment" in response to my posts, I started to have an even harder time coping with these incidents. Sometimes it feels overwhelming, and most of my friends don't understand because they are men, or they don't live in the city. So they don't understand why "compliments" feel creepy and threatening. But recently there has been a lot of discussion on this topic at Shapely Prose (starting here), and I can see that a lot of women really do relate to my experience.

Two weeks ago, I was coming home by myself on the train. It was late and dark and I was alone, and a man approached me. Nobody else was around, and I was scared. He told me I was very pretty, and he would like to take me somewhere.

A panhandler near my campus has started to harass me whenever he sees me. It started like this: When I walked past him, he would yell "You are gorgeous" or "Hello beautiful" and then "God bless you -- you're very beautiful." I never gave him money, but he kept yelling at me. Eventually I started to respond very coldly: Saying "hello" very tersely, or ignoring him altogether and scowling a bit -- communicating that his attention is unwelcome, and that I'm annoyed. So, he has started to yell things like "Hello beautiful, look at you beautiful... you are still very beautiful..." in an aggressive, taunting tone.

And, like Kate, I have experienced, "Hello beautiful" followed by "Hey fuck you" when I don't respond, countless times.

So my experience is that strangers who call me "pretty" do not respect me or my boundaries. Some of them are scary and threatening -- others are just assholes who feel entitled to attention from women-- others are clearly enjoying the fact that they are making me uncomfortable.

And maybe one of these strangers is a truly nice guy who genuinely wants to date me. He doesn't mean to push my buttons. He doesn't know what it's like to be a young woman in the city. But I still have a right to decline to talk to him, because for all I know he is just like most men who have called me pretty out of nowhere.