Women on the Street

Indian newspapers and politicians have taken up the cause of women, with prohibitions against 'eve-teasing.' 'Eve-teasing' is harrassment of women by passing men. (Cat-calling, hooting, etc.) Eve-teasing has become a big issue almost entirely because of Indian women, groups of whom have written editorials and passed laws asserting that women should be free to walk through the streets without feeling threatened.

Women of my parents' generation have horrible stories about the teasing they endured, which ran the gamut from inappropriate to felonious. The perpetrators were never apprehended, and the law was never on a girl's side. Most of them felt ashamed at having been targeted.

In the years since, Indian women have launched a full-scale campaign against the practice. When I came to India I was afraid that I'd be teased and harassed, but nothing like that has happened. Although men stare at women in the road, it's nothing worse than what happens to women in the States. The other day my cousin and I ran some errands. I said that it was hot outside, and I wished I was wearing shorts. "People would stare like crazy," she said. "Yeah, but would they say anything?" I asked. We were walking by the construction site near her house, and I mentioned that in the States, construction workers are famous for shouting appreciative/obscene remarks at passing females.

"The guys here are terrified of doing that," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you get booked (arrested) like crazy for eve-teasing. It's a big deal. If a girl makes a complaint, the guy is gone."

I'm not suggesting that India is some paradise, but wouldn't it be great if things were like that in the States? I remember an online discussion I read through a while back. Several New York women were complaining because a group of construction workers, on their lunch break, had chalked the numbers 1-10 on a series of cardboard boxes. Every time a woman went by, they'd hold up one of the numbers to tell her how attractive they thought she was. This was a well-traveled block of Manhattan.

Afterwards, one of the women chronicled online that she'd tried to enlist the support of several local watchmen and guard types to get the men to stop. The watchmen and guards all brushed her off.

The post became a hit online, and hundreds of people wrote responses to her message. Many of the women thought the men's behavior was unacceptable, but all the men (and we're talking about intelligent, educated men, protected only by the anonymity of the Internet) thought the women were overreacting. "Suck it up and deal with it," they said, or "Feminism has killed men's natural instincts."

At the time I thought the story was kind of funny, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I would hate walking through a corridor like that on my way to the office. It doesn't bother me that the guys were talking about the women's attractiveness, what bothers me is that they felt the need to broadcast their opinions to the women.

But I accepted the harrassment as the cost of doing business.

Wouldn't it be great if we didn't live in a world where we accepted that harrassment is the cost of doing business? The women in India don't accept it, and they've managed to convince large portions of society not to accept it either. It would be great if police in the States arrested men for making women feel unsafe. "This is the developed world," our attitude seems to be. "Women wanted the right to work outside the home, so they should deal with it."

But why is that fair? Why should the two be intertwined?

Before I get too distracted, let me return to my central point: the Indian press carries a lot of stories about "eve-teasing," which at first might be alarming. But what's more alarming, I think, is that those stories don't appear in American press. Because 'eve-teasing' happens there, too.