[Crossposted on TADA, where anyone can comment. Comments on this post here on “Alas” are restricted to feminists and pro-feminists only.]
Click on the cartoon to see it larger.
[spoiler]Transcript:
(Each of the first nine panels shows a black-haired woman walking in a public place at different times and in different outfits. In each outfit, a different stranger on the street is making a comment to her. She looks very unhappy with the comments. Panel 1 starts showing her from fairly far away, but each panel gets closer up on her face until panel 9.)
Panel 1
Man in doorway: Damn, beautiful!
Panel 2 (woman is waiting at bus stop)
Guy sitting on stoop: You got a number?
Panel 3
Man grabbing woman’s arm: Suck my cock!
Panel 4
Grinning older man: Smile! You’re so pretty!
Panel 5 (Woman is carrying groceries)
Man in car: Hey! I’m talking to you! Fuck you then!
Panel 6 (Woman is riding bike)
Man: DAMN, sexy, you’ve got a fat ass.
Panel 7 (Close up on woman’s almost wincing face).
Off-panel voice: Just stop and talk. I just want to talk to you.
Panel 8 (Closer up on her face, which is turned away from the viewer.)
Off-panel voice: What’s your name? C’mon, tell me your
Panel 9 (Very far shot of woman, walking hunched over with her hands in her jacket pockets).
Off-panel voice: I’d fuck the SHIT out of that.
Panel 10 (Woman at home, in her bedroom. A cheerful man in the background, wearing pajamas and sitting on a bed, talks to her; she has her back to him and looks miserable.)
Man: If women on the street said I look nice, it’d make my day![/spoiler]
When I was researching this cartoon, I came across several different women reporting they get harassed more often when they’re on a bicycle. So I decided that in one panel the woman should be riding a bike. But it turned out I was lousy at drawing a bike, so I actually had to use photo reference, and redraw it several times. So I probably worked harder on that one panel than any other in the cartoon.
Then, when I finalized the cartoon’s layout, I ended up cropping 90% of the bike out of that panel. Oh well.
Perfect.
Wonderful.
Spot on…
Fantastic.
I wonder if they throw more comments at cyclists because they think that there’s more chance of them getting away with it unchallenged? Certainly the harassment I get on my bike is deliver when I am just past the harasser, at the point when it would be most awkward to swing round and confront them, but almost at the point of maximum audibility.
re: panel 2
pi
Thanks, everyone!
Nancy: I don’t understand what you’re saying. Pi?
It’s a really looooooong number….
Oh, and I love the cartoon. Fortunately, I have reached the stage of being older/invisible and don’t have to deal with that stuff any longer.
(slaps forehead) D’oh! Thanks, NM.
It may also be reaction time. By the time they’ve seen and assessed and engaged mouth to teeny brain (and that’s gotta be like finding a small vein with a large needle), you’re already past them.
Grace
The guy in the last panel kinda reminds me of men I’ve spoken to who say things like, “Oh, I’d love being treated like a sex object”. Which only goes to show that they don’t have the first clue what “sex object” actually means.
Nice cartoon, btw. :)
Wonderful. I think my favourite part of this cartoon is the way her eyes are constantly averted; that is what we do, it’s exactly what we do.
Yes to what Thene just said, and my *favorite* part is the last panel… the ignorant man at home who wonders what the hell is wrong with you for not being flattered.
Thanks for making this.
I really appreciate that you included a frame of the cat call that turns ugly. Even if most of my male acquaintances aren’t the guy in the last frame, they tend not to get that I feel *threatened*, not just uncomfortable, when I get harassed, because I never know if it’s just a guy who’s gonna mutter “bitch” under his breath, or if it’s a guy who goes from “Hey beautiful” to threats in the same breath and follows me home.
Thank you thank you thank you for providing the script for this cartoon! It had shown up in my reader earlier today on another site but my vision is severely impaired and there was no one around to read it for me. Your page showed up in my “recommended items” and I really appreciate that I got to hear it. I’ll definitely be back.
Perfect. And especially the last panel.
I heard that exact comment while out riding my bike a few weeks ago. I was on fricking Atlantic Avenue, otherwise known as the Autobahn of Brooklyn Except More Poorly Maintained, in mortal danger, and that comment threw me for such a loop and made me so angry that I spent several seconds concentrating on it instead of, y’know, the six-lane pothole-filled street I was biking on. ::sigh:: So yeah, this is spot-on, including the frustration and anger that the woman in the cartoon feels.
Thank you everyone for the compliments. I was really worried about this one — obviously, this was based on second-hand experiences, not on anything first-hand — so I’m really exceptionally pleased and relieved that the reaction has been positive.
I particularly like that in the last panel, the protagonist is reacting to her SO’s comment with the same reaction she had to some of the street harassers.
omg i love this. it captures how i feel so perfectly–the whole tone of it does. i love the design, and the colors, the body-language of the people–spot on. i love how it breaks down the “it’s a compliment!” myth. having been in these situations, it’s not a compliment to be made to suddenly feel uncomfortable, scared, and threatened.
another thing i love about this cartoon is that the woman is in various outfits, engaging in various public activities, which really captures that it happens in any circumstance. women can’t even exist in public without this sort of thing happening, and the cluelessness that some men have regarding it is just as frustrating as the harassment.
Thank you for doing this, :)
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This was excellent. The only thing that could improve on it is the addition of some panels featuring the woman at younger ages…entering puberty and in her teens. I first heard the comments from panels 3, 5 and 6 when I was in grade school (tho’ I didn’t hear panel 9 ’till junior high). None of those comments were from boys my age; all were from grown men (and no, I didn’t look old for my age—I looked younger….just with boobs, instead).
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Oh, I wish I had thought of doing that!
I loved this cartoon. Especially unnerving to me was panel 6.
The first time I can remember this sort of thing happening to me, I was 12 and it was from a grown man, who said exactly that phrase to me. (I had no f**ing clue about sexy at that age.)
I’m 40 now and when I think about that incident I still remember how embarassed and horrified I felt. You captured it perfectly. I spent the next two decades of my life averting my eyes from men on the street because of that first a**hat.
Well done.
You know what’s crazy is I’ve internalized this image of myself as not experiencing this stuff–and I think I get a lot less of it than other people for good reasons: I don’t go out in public alone that often; I almost always go out with my husband so I look “owned.” So when I think of the category “times I’ve been harassed on the street,” my mind turns back an almost empty set. But when I go through and read what people talk about having had said to them… memories come back… and it’s like, oh yeah, that and that and that and that, and last week, and when Mike went to the bathroom while we were at the movies, and that other time…
I had a much longer comment typed, but my browser ate it. Short version:
spot on, and a lot of guys need to see something like this to really get that comments like panel 4 are NOT just compliments, but actually harassment. On paper (/screen) it’s too easy for a guy to read “Smile! You’re so pretty!” and mentally translate it to “attractive girl telling me ‘Smile! You’re so handsome!'” and suddenly it’s ok.
Yes. So successful, it’s actually upsetting! And I haven’t even been harassed in ages.
I most often got screaming from cars going by, though, myself.
Yeh, I started getting harassed at age 11. It’s pretty much stopped, probably because a) I’m over 40, b) I chopped my hair short, and c) I moved to a smaller town. I don’t remember ever getting harassed on my bike. I always figured I was out of there too fast for any comments coming my way to actually reach my ears. Indeed, there were train stops in the big city that I would ride my bike to at night because that’s how I got to/away from the deserted station fast enough to feel safe.
As with other commenters, all these examples are very familiar to me. I’m interested, though, in a couple choices you made – in each frame, the woman seems to be alone with her harasser, and all the characters seem to be the same ethnicity. Were those choices intentional? I find some of the most annoying catcalls are whispered to me in crowded streets and subways, and I find racial interactions play a large part in the different varieties of catcalls I get.
Hi, Emily.
A combination of the coloring scheme and my inadequate drawing makes it seem like all the characters are the same ethnicity, but that wasn’t my intention (in hindsight, I should have included clear racial cues on a couple of characters). In my mind as I was drawing this, not all of the harassers were the same race, and the protagonist is Latina.
I hadn’t thought of doing a panel set in a crowd, and now that I’ve read your comment, if I did this over, I’d set one or two of the panels in a crowd. (But not more than that, because crowds are a lot of work to draw. :-P )
Thanks for your prompt, thoughtful reply! I may be laboring the point unduly, but I just want to be really clear that I was not criticizing the comic, merely asking questions I thought the comic itself raised well. Thank you very much.
Understood. :-) Thanks.
Instant classic. Thank you. (La Lubu, always great, makes a fine point about how women get steeped in street harassment starting around puberty. But different ages for the protagonist might lessen the punch–here we know for sure it’s the same person.)
I agree with the ethnicity and age comments, but overall I think this was excellent. Thank you for creating it.
I think I have heard each one of these comments, in particular when I was younger and less surly overall. At one point, I got so scared that I began training in Muy Thai.
One thing that always got me was people telling me to smile (ok,in the context of hearing this on the street, it’s always men. Women do it in a different way — “smile, honey, you look so pretty when you smile” and in a more private context). Why do I need to smile for you? And why does it bother/discombobulate me so?
Thanks for this. I wish we could teach young women and girls that this is harrasment and could be physically dangerous not to mention the mental and emotional abuse they absorb. I was followed home when I was pregnant and I had to move I was so scared.
But different ages for the protagonist might lessen the punch–here we know for sure it’s the same person.)
Point taken; it does add clarity when it’s the same person. But I think the impact of when the sexual harrassment starts is worth a mention, because it’s precisely what most men don’t get. They don’t get that many of us (if not most of us) start hearing really vile, scary comments as children, and that not only is this condoned, but there are cutesy statements about it (“old enough to bleed, old enough to breed”). What made those comments scary to me as a kid wasn’t just the comments themselves, and the patently visible hostility and predation of the commenters…..it was also the reaction from observers, and the reaction to my reaction from observers (meaning: if I got freaked enough to start cursing in an attempt to get the offender to leave me alone, I was regarded as the societal problem for being young, female, and cursing—not the guy wanting to know “do I want a good fucking?” Even at age eleven.). It was damn scary to know that I would receive no assistance if attacked. It was painful to realize that if I had complained to my parents about what happened to me on the way back-and-forth from school (or a friends’ place, park, playground, whatever), the reaction would have been to restrict my freedom. In other words, to give me the punishment, for being the target of sexual harrassment.
The message young girls receive is “shut up and put up with it.” It’s your fate. It’s what you deserve. It’s part of being a woman. Deal. Or even, (as in the other thread on “pretty”) “be glad about it; you’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
re the “smile” comment — just read through the site and realized it’s been covered quite in depth.
I wish I could cite this better, but I have heard of a psychological experiment where they asked a group of females to draw a basic picture of a bicycle then a group of males. A large % of the females (more than half I think) drew the bicycle incorrectly, and more than half the males drew it correctly. And by “correct,” it is meant that the bicycle has all the basic parts and is representative of the true mechanical functioning of a real bicycle. So I found it interesting that you had a such a hard time with the bicycle, especially considering that you’re such an awesome artist (I couldn’t draw any of those cartoons as well as you did).
It would have been interesting to show an interaction wherein the harasser doesn’t say anything overtly offensive, just makes a point of invading the woman’s personal space and flirting with her, making her extremely uncomfortable. I think that one’s pretty common. Or maybe I just think that because it happens to me all the time. When I try to call people on it, their defense is usually that they didn’t say anything offensive, so it makes me look like a jerk because I’m not responding positively to their unwanted attentions. A lot of harassers have learned how to get away with sexual harassment by using so-called “charm” so they can defend themselves later when their victims choose to lash back with criticism.
Kaspersky @40, did you really just post to say ‘gee, Ampersand, men are better at drawing mechanically correct images of bicycles than women are so I’m surprised you had trouble’? Really?
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As the cartoon illustrates, men have tendencies – such as telling women riding bicycles that they want to fuck them. And women have tendencies – such as, according to some surveys, not being able to draw bicycles well. So when the female artist said she had a hard time drawing the bicycle, I was like hey, yeah, I’ve heard that can be the case. Just like females are commenting hey, yeah, asshole men harass me on the street too. I’m just commenting on what the artist’s comments are, just like everyone else.
Kaspersky – what makes you think Ampersand is female? This comment?
Once I got out of high school I didn’t encounter street harassment. I thought htis meant Seattle adults were too nice to do this stuff.
Then I started taking the bus to work … and realized that no, I’d just “escaped” it by avoiding being on the streets much due to my car-centric commute.
Amp is a dude.
—Myca
Well done, Amp.
My least favourite bicycle harassment is when a guy steps towards your FASTLY MOVING BICYCLE and sticks out his thumb. With a puckish “Aren’t I cute?” look on his face. Happened three times in one hour-long ride once.
I swear, next time it happens I won’t swerve out of the way but will plough right into the pigfucker.
Folks — there’s nothing wrong with someone getting someone’s sex wrong on the interwebs. It happens all the time.
That’s an interesting study. I think I could have drawn a bike with all the basic parts and the basic mechanics included, so I guess I’m a typical male that way. (I have no problem believing that boys in our culture are more likely than girls to know that stuff; I think it has to do with how we’re raised. This is a vast generalization, and there are many exceptions, but I think boys are probably more often raised with an expectation that they’ll be able to do basic bike repairs if needed than girls are.)
For me, the drawing difficulty is making it all look intuitively correct — the angle at which a person sits while on a bike, the right-looking distance between the handlebars and the front wheel, that sort of thing. Getting that sort of thing done right is why I had to look at photos of people riding bikes.
I should say, I’m generally bad at drawing mechanical things. I envy cartoonists who spent ridiculous hours as kids drawing cars and motorcycles and spaceships and the like, because as adults they can now draw these things easily, and for me it’s always a struggle. (Hereville is probably one of the only comics taking place in the modern world to never, ever show a car, not even in the background.) And it is true that most of the cartoonists who drew a zillion cars as a kid are male.
That said, there are certainly female cartoonists who draw great cars. I especially admire the way Donna Barr used to draw WW2 planes and cars, for instance — in her work, you can really tell the difference between a German Jeep and an US Jeep. That’s awesome, because it’s a difference that of course would be readily apparent to her characters, and she communicates that.
Kristin MH, I one time put my hand on my hip with the elbow sticking out juuuuuust as a guy on a skateboard came buzzing past thiiiiiiis close to me. Ya know, once he picked himself off the ground, he yelled at me for hurting him? What an entitled idiot. My way of thinking was that if he hadn’t been trying to buzz me he wouldn’t have hit the elbow and I would have looked like the fool instead.
Amp, there’s nothing wrong with guessing gender wrong on the internet; my beef, and I’m guessing others’, is Kaspersky’s random comment that because your bike was not “mechanically correct” this somehow ties to gender. Which is not only random, but bizarre. I mean, the woman’s nose isn’t anatomically correct either and I don’t see anybody saying that chicks can’t draw faces.
Awesome cartoon Amp! I already copied it to my blog (with attribution of course, I hope this is OK) before I saw the discussion here and I pretty much agree with all the excellent points that have been brought up.
Also, having a bike panel in it made me love it twice as much, if that’s even possible.
Thank you.
Something that is rarely commented on is the fact that these comments are often magnified if women are in groups or pairs.
When I (female-bodied, not conventionally attractive) am out alone, I don’t get many comments unless I’m on my bike in a mini-skirt. When my wife (female-bodied, very attractive, and exotic looking to boot!) and I are out together, the comments are directed to both of us. When we are with a group of several women, if more than half the group falls in the “conventionally attractive” role as defined by our “viewer”, everyone is addressed.
The idea of safety in numbers really doesn’t work with this kind of interaction, in my experience. That bothers me. A lot.
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Agreeing with LaLubu here – the only thing I’d add would be a couple of panels where in one she’s a kid (for me this stuff started at age 9, as in literally “I’d fuck the shit out of that” comments when I was in the fifth grade) and she complains to an older relative and is told that it’s a compliment and she’ll miss it when she’s older, and another in which as an old lady she walks down the street blissfully harrassment free and not missing it at all.
At least I’m hoping that’s what eventually happens. Because I just turned 37, and it still hasn’t stopped.
Also I love the fact that she’s just trying to keep her head down and get away in all of the panels. Because in reality that’s mostly what we do, because, as La Lubu points out, we learn early that if we fight back no one will back us up.
“Then, when I finalized the cartoon’s layout, I ended up cropping 90% of the bike out of that panel.”
I’m oh so familiar with that feeling.
It was so awesome to see this today since I just had to deal with a couple instances of harassing comments this week–once it was two dudes walking up to me while I was waiting at a crosswalk to ask “heeeeeeeey, how you doing?” and another when some dude decided to become bizarrely fascinated in whether I was cold or not. Neither of which sounds bad, but the in the first instance I was by myself and the guys were strangers who probably weighed 2.5-3 times what I did each. In the second instance the guy gave off waves of creepy and wouldn’t just accept that no, I was not cold. Anyway, it’s nice to see work like this which reinforces that harassment is not okay, not a compliment, et cetera.
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Is true … sometimes u get so many ‘compliments’ in the streets that after a while u can’t tell which ones are from a good man or a d…..bag
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Great cartoon, I re-posted it in my post about similar issues in Belize: https://johnpascoe.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/battle-of-the-belizean-sexes/
The Severity Behind Every Street Holla
I stumbled across this comic a couple of weeks ago and all I could say was “Amen!” This illustrator really and truly gets it.
And by “it,” I mean what it’s like to be a victim of street harassment. For most of us by the time we’ve hit puberty, (if not before), we’ve been subjected to the cat calls, the tactless pick up lines, the comments on our boobs and backsides more times than we’d like to remember.
I’ll never forget being in the mall with my mother one weekend. Wearing a pair of colorful denim shorts, I had to have been about eleven or twelve. We were near a jewelry kiosk when a man on a cell phone interrupted his conversation to state to no one in particular, “Whew, look at that A$$.” The A$$ he was referring to was mine.
That was the first time a grown man had ever made public mention of my body. As a girl I used to daydream about what it would be like to gain the attention of the male kind. I just knew it would be flattering, intimate, and welcomed. Suggestive, yet respectful.
The complete opposite of that mall interaction.
As women, I don’t have to tell you that such attention is annoying, threatening and worst of all degrading. I wish I could say that the foolishness stopped there; but that would be a lie, it only got worse. Today, every time I leave my apartment, I put on what I call my “don’t Fawk with me” face and hit the streets of New York. As much as I loathe the winter, I can’t help but be grateful that my puffy, mid-calf length coat curbs some of the harassment. But not all of it.
Last winter, I stepped out around 6:30 p.m. on what had to have been the coldest night of the year. Ever conscious of my grandmother’s pneumonia warnings, I was bundled up like no other. Literally, the only things visible were my eyes. And still, a man getting off the bus, couldn’t restrain himself. “Aye.” And then louder, when I ignored him, “AYE!”
All I could think of was let me get as far away from this fool as fast as possible. Later, when my fear subsided, I realized these men must not understand how threatening their hollas, their “compliments” can actually be. In reality, I’d guess that most street hollerers aren’t dangerous. They’re just horny men who’ve had luck with that approach a time or two and therefore continue to use it on any and every woman who catches their eye. And that’s the problem.
Didn’t this man getting off the bus that night realize that I was a woman alone on the street, in the dark? Why would he feel that situation was the time to try to approach me, a complete stranger? How many rape scenes resemble that scenario?
I fear that the street “hollerers” aren’t the only men who don’t get it. As the comic illustrated, when you tell a “regular dude” about the happenings of your day, don’t be surprised if he responds in complete ignorance. This has happened to me personally. He literally said, “I would love for women to hit on me in the street.”
Sure, men don’t receive compliments on their physical appearance like women do and they think that sucks. But they don’t know how good they have it. It’s not complimentary, it’s threatening. What wouldn’t I give to walk the streets in peace? The point is, many men lack a general awareness of how exhausting it can be to just have a vagina in public.
I know I don’t speak for just myself when I say that as women, we spend a lot of our time out on high alert.
As sad as it may seem, there’s always this sickening cognizance and fear of what could happen if you’re not as aware as you should be, if you take a wrong turn, if you walk past the wrong person at the wrong time, hell, if you’re with the wrong person at the wrong time.
As great as it is being a woman, it’s scary too. If more men knew this, I like to think they’d be less inclined to assault us on the street.
Read more at http://madamenoire.com/138409/the-severity-behind-every-street-holla/#ooUZxMzjwIrLeGoq.99
It’s seldom that I like one of Ampersand’s cartoon without any reservations, but this is one of the truly great ones. It’s perfect in every sense of the word. I shows the problem, makes you think about it, and makes you feel like a boob without making you defensive.
And it is true that some of us are too dim to understand the problem without an explanation. I had it explained to me by my not-then-wife, because she heard on the cellphone that I was being hollered at. I must have sounded very pleased with myself, so she explained that when she gets accosted on the street, she always feels threatened, even if it is broad daylight.
It’s all about power. It has happened exactly three times to me – every time from a car with multiple women, while I was walking, and I felt in no way threatened – it’s a free confidence booster to a man.
But until the day that no woman has a reason to fear for her safety, the experiences are in no way similar, and the decent thing to do is offer comfort and express indignation when street calls are brought up. And of course, only compliment people who know you, and who you think are going to welcome it.
This is really great. I often get harassed when riding my bike too, and I’m a guy. Wonder what it is about bikes that threaten people so.
This just in, courtesy of The Onion:
Woman Flattered Complete Stranger Would Say Something So Nice About Her Tits
Grace