Posts tagged with women
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![Fighting Street Harassment Online
Dhruv Arora lives in Delhi, India, and he’s had enough. Enough of rape, enough of harassment and enough of the belief that what women wear has something to do with it.
“I am tired of people getting harassed on the street. I am tired of victim bashing. I am tired of people saying it happened because she was ‘inappropriately dressed,’” says the 24-year-old engineering student.
And so, in January of last year, Arora and a friend — outraged by the story of a 22-year-old woman raped by a cab driver, then blamed for it in the press — decided to do something about it. They created a Tumblr with a simple request: send in photos of what you were wearing when you were harassed on the street, along with your story. Consider it a personal form of protest.
[[MORE]]“The idea was to provide people an outlet to share their experiences and disprove the link between attire and harassment,” says Arora, who calls the blog “Got Stared At.”
Within three months, the site had received thousands of submissions from all over the world — everything from the traditional, flowy salwar to more Western-style T-shirts. It was picked up by the national press. Even the folks at the UN noticed.
In the past, if people wanted to speak out against harassment, they’d pen a letter to newspapers, newsletters, or zines. To empower women, activists hosted self-defense classes, and women passed along safety tips to their daughters, younger sisters, and friends. Maybe they’d hold a march or organize a speak-out. A few documentaries were made.
But it was always hard to gain wider support for a problem that experts say remains largely invisible to the mainstream. Whether it’s India, where harassment is almost fondly referred to as “Eve-teasing,” or the UK, where women apparently really love “complinsults,” street harassment can take on many forms (a whistle, a hoot, a sneaky grope), and yet is scarcely illegal — in part because the actions, while threatening, don’t quite rise to the level of physical assault. If the existence of an Anti-Flirt Club all the way back in the 1920s tells us anything (the group was formed protest the unwanted attention of motorists), it’s that street harassment and the culture that tolerates it have long gone hand in hand.
And yet, not much has changed in almost 100 years. Even as the international community expresses outrage over the recent gang rapes in India. and men join women in vigilante movements in Egypt and around the world, experts estimate that more than 80 percent of women and LGBTQ folks will face street harassment at some point in their lives. A 2008 survey, by the US-based Stop Street Harassment, determined that 80 percent of victims say they constantly assess their surroundings (or avoid being alone), while more than a quarter described actually moving neighborhoods or changing jobs because of harassers. Their theme for this year’s International Women’s Day (this Friday) is “Time to end violence against women.”
Activists know the key to ending street harassment is giving the victims a voice: only by speaking out, they believe, will women garner global attention. In which case, many are learning quite quickly: Online platforms may be the best way forward — reaching an instant mass audience to share stories, dispel myths and create a community of like-minded people.
“At the root of all street harassment, from wolf whistles to outright assault, is the notion that women’s bodies are fair game in public spaces,” says Lauren Bates, the 26-year-old founder of the UK-based Everyday Sexism Project, which invites women to share stories of sexism via email or Twitter. (It’s up for a Shorty Award this year.) “Social media plays a very important part in challenging and changing these attitudes because they spread and reach so many people.”
Frustrated with the way women are portrayed in the media, Bates launched the international project in April; since then, she’s received more than 20,000 entries and 3,500 responses to a #shoutingback hashtag she pronounced on Twitter to raise awareness of street harassment.
Elsewhere, groups like the US-based Stop Street Harassment have used the web to find volunteers; while others, like the creator of Street Harassment-NYC, use their blog as a sort of diary — to time- and date-stamp every instance of abuse. Hollaback!, the anti-harassment group with online presences in more than 60 countries (they ask victims to share and map photos of their harassers on their website), meanwhile, has even experimented with anti-harassment memes: creating Feminist Ryan Gosling-style celebrity flashcards to proclaim things like, “It really put a spring in my step when a carload of men asked to see my breasts … said no one ever.” (Hollaback! Edinburgh’s blog is called, aptly, Said No One Ever.)
“A Tumblr can’t eradicate street harassment,” says Holly Kearl, of Stop Street Harassment. “But it can help bring attention to the issue.”
Back in Dehli, Got Stared At has grown from a single Tumblr blog to an real-life army, where Arora has recruited volunteers, teamed up with an Indian NGO and held meetings in Delhi so locals can share their experiences. “[It’s] a sign.” says Arora, “that spaces like this are required, and young people are actively seeking them out.”
No, a Tumblr can’t end harassment — but it can help women be heard in a world seemingly deaf to their frustrations.
— Aly NeelPhoto courtesy Meet Us on the Street.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/0f17dace4d304c25cf68f410603ae4e0/tumblr_mj5htb6cff1rrpm57o1_r4_1280.jpg)
Fighting Street Harassment Online
Dhruv Arora lives in Delhi, India, and he’s had enough. Enough of rape, enough of harassment and enough of the belief that what women wear has something to do with it.
“I am tired of people getting harassed on the street. I am tired of victim bashing. I am tired of people saying it happened because she was ‘inappropriately dressed,’” says the 24-year-old engineering student.
And so, in January of last year, Arora and a friend — outraged by the story of a 22-year-old woman raped by a cab driver, then blamed for it in the press — decided to do something about it. They created a Tumblr with a simple request: send in photos of what you were wearing when you were harassed on the street, along with your story. Consider it a personal form of protest.
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The Reconstructionists: Celebrating Badass Women
What do Buddhist artist Agnes Martin, Hollywood inventor Hedy Lamarr, and French-Cuban author Anaïs Nin have in common? Their names may not conjure popular recognition, and yet, for Lisa Congdon and Maria Popova, these women represent a particular breed of cultural trailblazer: female, under-appreciated, badass. They are “Reconstructionists,” as the writer-illustrator duo call them — and for the next year, they’ll be celebrated on a blog of the same name. Every Monday for 12 months, The Reconstructionists will debut a hand-painted illustration and short essay highlighting a woman from fields such as art, science, and literature. The subject needn’t be famous, but she will, as Popova, the creator of Brain Pickings, puts it, “have changed the way we define ourselves as a culture.” We spoke with Popova, and illustrator Congdon, about the inspiration behind their project.
How’d you come up with the name ‘Reconstructionist’?
Maria Popova: It’s very challenging to celebrate women without pigeonholing the project into some stereotypical and alienating feminist corner, the most dangerous part of which is the preaching-to-the-choir quality that many such projects tend to have. So when it was time to come up with a title for the project, it couldn’t be something too literal or too obvious. After sifting through hundreds of letters, diaries, autobiographies, and other writing, I suddenly remembered something Anaïs Nin had written in a 1944 diary entry — about “woman’s role in the reconstruction of the world.” It was perfect. It was the only common denominator between those women – they aren’t all artists, or all writers, or all to be expected in the pages of a tenth-grade history book. They are simply all reconstructionists.
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Infographic #2: Chromatic party breakdown in the House and Senate.
Disclaimer: I lost Oregon Democratic Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (special election, 2012). She’ll be up by Tuesday, probably in red.
Another beautiful layout from Emily Nemens’ “Women of the 112th.” check out Tumblr’s interview with her here.
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Jill Greenberg on Capturing the Horse as Supermodel
One might say there are two Jill Greenbergs. First, there is Jill Greenberg the commercial photographer: She’s done work for corporations like Disney and Coke; her editorial photos have appeared on the covers of Time, Fortune, New York, and others. But it’s Jill Greenberg the artist who gets people talking. From sinister shots of John McCain under the text “WARMONGER” to closeup portraits of children crying (after being offered candy and then having it snatched away), her images have been called “repulsive,” “grotesque,” and have elicited death threats. Her latest project, a book called Horse, is more, shall we say, tame.
You were harshly criticized for the McCain photos you took during the last election, under a strobe light, which made him look almost devil-like. It was an Atlantic assignment, but you doctored the outtakes as an art piece. Was it hard to find editorial work after that?
That incident’s backlash really surprised me, considering I delivered their cover image exactly to their specifications. I don’t really know, but I think the Atlantic was afraid that McCain might be elected and needed to cover themselves. Photographers own all their images when shooting for magazines. The contract actually said you will use all means within your reach to publicize the images and shoot, including your own website, which is where I posted my agit-prop political cartoons. The incident got them an unbelievable amount of traffic, right before they relaunched the magazine with a redesign.
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Painting the Women of the 112th, Powersuit by Powersuit
It didn’t start out as a political statement, exactly. Emily Nemens, a writer and illustrator in New York, simply wanted to take on a new creative project, preferably in watercolor. For four years already — between jobs at the Met, and later, at the American Institute of Architects — she’d done a series of watercolor mouth paintings: beautiful, complex images of plump rosy lips, some with objects clenched between them. She’d also illustrated comic books, and published a collection of short stories.
But she’d always been fascinated by political portraiture and the way it could convey the personality of a subject. She’d also noticed how much of that portraiture (save for a few French revolution portraits, and some queens of England) lacked women. And so, in early 2011, right around the time Michelle Bachmann hit the national stage, Nemens set out to paint the female members of Congress — all 94 of them. “I want to honor the breadth and diversity of women in power, as well as bring attention to certain disconcerting characteristics about them,” Nemens says. “The rainbow of power suits, the big hair, the gaudy jewelry and toothy smiles … and, of course, the fact that they collectively are only 17 percent of Congress.”
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