Here Is How To Handle Street Harassment In Literally Every Situation
The Village Voice reported yesterday on a new chart released by the Brooklyn Movement Center, a Bed-Stuy-based community group, meticulously chronicling every possible type of street harassment (including all-too-familiar “sucking teeth/hissing”), every possible motivation behind it (“entitlement” being a common thread), and every possible response (like “walk mad” and “public shaming”). Maybe doesn’t sound like an exciting Friday afternoon read, but it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in a long, long while.
The full, interactive chart can be found on the Movement Center’s website (it’s still an early drafted version, but is comprehensive nonetheless), and rates things with an “intensity score” from one to ten. The whole thing is sort of brilliant in its simplicity, given a lot of its advice centers around basic, go-to responses (like “Can I help you?” or ducking into a store) as opposed to the elaborate burns about “sucking a bag of dicks” (just spitballing here) we’d all like to think we have at the ready, and can way too easily forget about when caught off guard by a creepy stranger. I mean, it’d be even better if there were no need for this chart to exist in the first place, but baby steps, I suppose. Use it wisely this weekend.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
