If you are a female, or if you ever present/identify as a woman, you’ve probably been catcalled. Maybe if you’re a dude too, I don’t know: it’s a wild, wild world out there.
I identify as a woman and look like a woman (most of the time), and thus have had my fair share of catcalling experiences. Everything from “Hey, you look like you need an umbrella!” (Like, yes, it’s raining, I guess I do…?) to “Hey girl, you look empowered!” (Yeah I do fucking look empowered, thanks for noticing).
Usually these experiences leave me feeling sad/weird/slightly violated/mad at men. Usually I go home, lie in my bed and wonder, “Does he have a mom? What would she think of all this?” Usually, I do not, as the man in the car with the tinted windows suggested, look or feel empowered.
But last week I had a catcalling experience that changed everything.
Let’s set the scene: Saturday. 9:37PM. Dark, cool. I was just coming off a Netflix binge, so I rolled out of bed in my yoga pants, and pulled on my jacket and a pair of white Vans (okay, so, they’re actually Airwalk brand: Vans’s cool, Payless counterpart. They’re cool guys, I swear). I closely resembled a gremlin. I grabbed my keys and hit Thayer Street, put my headphones in, and began my power-walk up to CVS. I know, CVS is a very ~sexy~ destination.
I stopped at the corner of Thayer and Waterman and waited to cross the street.
This car rolls past me, and it’s full of maybe four or five guys. All of the windows are open. As they drive by, they commence the catcall. This one is pretty vulgar in that I’m not sure I could identify what, if anything, they said. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of barking, a lot of shit involving wagging tongues that I’m not sure I can do justice to with a textual description. It was gross, okay?
For a moment all I could do was stand stunned and watch them drive by in all of their disgusting, masculine excess. As they passed me and I stepped into the street, I raised my right hand high and valiantly extended my middle finger, making a face that I hope said, “Seriously?” and “What the fuck?” and “Ew” and “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I stood there in the middle of the street and flipped those fuckers off with everything I had.
And they were so shocked! They burst out in a surprised and appalled “OHHHHHH!” followed by a single, clear “Fuck you!” to which I thought, In your fuckin’ dreams, bruh. The looks on their faces were priceless: somewhere between just-witnessed-a-great-sports-game-upset and got-email-indicating-snow-day-tomorrow. I’m not really sure what they expected the result of this interaction to be. Did they expect me to be appreciative that they’d found it in their hearts to woof at me as I was just trying to get to CVS? One thing’s for sure: they definitely were not expecting to be flipped off.
I finished crossing the street, passing a girl who had witnessed the whole shebang. She smiled quietly to herself and we made brief eye contact as if to say, “The looks on their faces. Man, I wish I had a framed picture of the looks on their faces.”
I’m not saying that you should all flip off your catcallers. Sometimes catcalling can be threatening, violent, and dangerous, and flipping off your catcaller could be harmful to your own personal safety.
But I found flipping off my catcallers to be surprisingly satisfying, and even empowering. For me, flipping off my catcallers shifted the power in the interaction away from them and to me. My middle finger shouted, “Yeah! That’s fucking right! Don’t fuck with me!” I rolled victoriously up Thayer feeling like a champ, and made it CVS where I successfully picked up razor blades and toothpaste.
