Spoiler: wrong.
Today as I walked to fetch my sister from school, a grand total of three drivers in the space of one road honked their horns voraciously as they drove past me, leaning out of the window and staring unabashedly rather than focusing on the road ahead. It's nothing out of the ordinary, and I'm used to it. I'm used to hastening my step and pulling my coat tighter. It's normal to cross the road or redirect my route if a group of burly men are up ahead. It's a reflex to walk past shouts and whistles without showing any sign of having heard a thing, tightening my facial muscles and gritting my teeth, pronouncing, irrespective of the truth, that I had a boyfriend and was on the way to meet him, when a random guy on the street approaches me and asks what my plans were for the evening, refusing to leave until the B word is spoken. All part of negotiating my everyday. But today those skin-jumping honks were three too many. I'm fed up of this discrimination being part of the patchwork construing my everyday; I'm fed up of them informing my imaginative geographies and the ways I perceive places; and I'm fed up of their existence being contingent upon the presence of a male, be this physically with me or imaginatively referenced.
"According to the dictionary, sexism means prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. But it's more than that. It's the feeling that you're not quite as good. The suggestion that you're weaker, sillier, secondary, other, lesser. The sense that public space isn't as much yours as it is a man's. The notion that you have to laugh along at a sexist joke or it's you who's branded uptight, or humourless, not the douchebag making it. The way that 'he' is the automatic default for a person. The fact that insults, from c*** to motherf***er to bastard to pussy, are all, at their root, derogatory towards women. The fact that only seven FTSE 100 companies have female bosses. That women only write one fifth of front page newspaper articles. That they're 50% of chemistry undergraduates but only 6% of professors. That 400,000 women are sexually assaulted in England and Wales every year, and 85,000 raped. The thing things and the big things." - Laura Bates
"Another idiot just honked his horn at me..." I type to a friend, "and I'm just walking along minding my own business wearing my athletics kit - can't a girl wear a pair of shorts??" It's this reaction and prompt of what I'm wearing that situates the sexist encounters in my own actions which is perhaps most telling. The fact that I subconsciously seek to reclaim control of the situation and my thwarted occupation of public space by victimising my choice of clothing, rather than calling out the encounters for the unwarranted, unprovoked, utterly sexist inequity that they are, highlights how normal my assumed secondary status is. Because, as James Brown sang in 1966, 'this is a man's world, this is a man's world'. I felt so comfortable walking the streets of London with my two friends at 3 in the afternoon that I was happy to admire archaic corners and dawdle down side streets to capture hidden gems like the building photographed above; but had my geography been different, had I been alone or had it been dark, I would have been rushing down the streets to my destination, holding my coat and bag tight to me, avoiding eye-contact obsessively. Heck, I probably wouldn't have been in London. Because space is male and place is favoured by the power structure of sexism. Because this is a man's world and my understandings and perceptions of geographies, personal and physical, are shaped by this unspoken fact.
A number of social experiments have sought to address this ownership of public space by exposing fathers, sons, brothers and boyfriends to footage of their daughters, mothers, sisters and girlfriends being catcalled on the street. One experiment went so far as to disguise mothers and have them walk past their sons who are then caught catcalling their mothers in their mistaken identity, highlighting how entrenched the problem is. The reaction is unanimously the same: disgust, anger, disbelief. "But that doesn't happen when I'm with you!" "How often does this happen?" "How dare he!" It doesn't happen when you're with her because as a male you qualify her for this masculine space and deter (the voicing of) other male attention. It happens all the time - daily, in fact. He dares because he feels entitled to and, quite simply, because he feels safe to. It's normal, after all.
Take Back The Night is a charitable foundation that describes its mission as one to 'create safe communities and respectful relationships through awareness events and initiatives' whilst seeking to 'end sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual abuse and all other forms of sexual violence'. It's perhaps best known for its night marches, decorated by signs of protest against sexism at its core. The marches, held on college campuses and communities worldwide, have often (though not exclusively) been women-only events, asking men to respectfully understand the need for a female space in response to the public space they protest: the idea that, as women are conditioned to understand from an early age, we should fear walking alone at night without a man's protection. This otherly occupation of public space, females walking alone in bold solidarity within a male owned, male dominated space, is such a powerful initiative in redressing conceptions of imaginative geographies in the same way that the aforementioned social experiments, on a smaller, more individual scale, do. And they're both so simple it seems a farce. Inserting women into a male space which dictates them as subjective to vulnerability - why should walking unaccompanied by a male be any different to walking with a male? Inserting an identified, related female into the body of the anonymous female you catcall in the street - why should catcalling a woman you don't know be any less disgusting than someone catcalling your sister, or catcalling your own mother?
It's all a question of who owns space, and at the moment, my physical and imaginative geographies are both owned by men. They're masculine spaces in my definitions of freedom, accessibility, safety, belonging, identity. I alone can't change the constitution of physical space as male, but I can address the constitution of my imaginative geography as male by changing the way I react to everyday expressions of it in the insolent vans that honk and men that whistle as they pass, and the way that I discuss these experiences with friends, both female and, vitally, male. Imaginative geographies are normative and as such, addressing them through social experiments, initiatives like Take Back The Night and the ways we react in our everyday lives is key to addressing the physical geographies they inform. Only once we cease to perceive space as being male, can it ever stop being male.
My rights as a female shouldn't, and don't, need a boyfriend to defend them, so please stop making the vocalisation of the B word a necessity to vindicate my respect in your eyes.
"I do not wish for women to have power over men; but over themselves."
- Mary Wollstonecraft
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