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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

Microactivism with mantouching

I walked home with a good friend from class Thursday afternoon.

As we reached the corner of 10th and Union streets, the light turned red and we paused, waiting to cross. At that moment, a car pulled up next to us, and the two men inside immediately rolled down their windows and began to shout at me.

I don’t remember what the song lyrics were they were singing, but they had everything to do with the way the woman in question looked and danced.

For the better part of a minute, I stood on the corner, absorbing the obscenity they threw at me until the light turned green. When it finally did, one of them shouted, “God broke the mold when he made you, girl!”

I was seething then, and I’m seething now. Sure, I was angry with them for such explicit harassment, but I was also angry with myself, and therein lies the problem.

Why on earth, I kept asking myself, didn’t I shout back at them? Why didn’t I stand up for myself? As a student with an interest in gender-related issues and the violence that accompanies ignorance, I know exactly how to identify and handle unintended discrimination.

Yet in the face of this blatant aggression, I stood on the corner and let those boys yell offensive things at me.

Why? Because I was embarrassed, I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want to be that uptight, humorless harpy who couldn’t take a little teasing from some likely good-natured and harmless drunk dudes on the street. My friend was ignoring them, so I should too — it’s just ?easier that way, right?

There’s nothing easy about being the constant target of verbal harassment, oh-so-tricky to combat in its intangibility. My unwillingness to defend my personhood against those who wished to objectify me for entertainment stems from the prevalence of “mantouching,” a term coined by Nico Lang in her column on The Daily Dot.

“While it’s crucial that we address the issue of street harassment, we need to recognize that it’s bigger than the street by discussing the ways in which performative masculinity creates a culture where behavior like that of Travolta and Biden is ?normalized,” Lang wrote.

“It might feel good to laugh off such demonstrative behavior as vestiges of a fading masculinity, but the problem with mantouching ... is that it’s so common that some of the women who experience it might not think it’s a big deal.”

Each instance of wrongdoing is a missed opportunity to educate and mend what’s been neglected.

When John Travolta grabbed Idina Menzel’s face at the Oscars and Joe Biden squeezed Stephanie Carter’s shoulders, these women just smiled. I’d like to think that those men are inherently good and meant no harm, that they simply didn’t comprehend the subtle, inherent violence of their actions. Neither did the men in the car. And I didn’t correct them.

We have long acknowledged that those who are silent in the presence of injustice are therefore complicit in its consequences, and I would give anything to return to that moment to recast myself as an activist rather than a passive recipient and neutral ?perpetuator.

I do not in any way take ownership or responsibility for their actions, but I do take ownership of the moment between us before they sped away that rang with silence.

I chose to let Joe Biden, John Travolta and all the other men who believe they have a claim to my personhood use me as further validation of their misconceptions.

I stayed silent.

So catcallers be warned: it’s a mistake I won’t make twice.

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