CAT-CALLING 2023/07/04
When living on Lycabettus (the hill opposite the Acropolis, in Athens, Greece), in 1963, on most days, in the afternoon, I would take Fiona and Zoe for a walk. Our favorite one was to the Royal Gardens, an arboretum in the middle of Athens, which had a large playground, and where I would sometimes talk with other mothers.
To get there, walking from our tiny apartment, took about 15 minutes. I had my 2 toddlers with me, on a tricycle, with Fiona using the pedals and Zoe sitting on the back, whilst I steered it with a rod attached to it, all very safe.
The problem wasn’t my girls. It was the continual cascade of cat-calls, whistles, comments from men in cars. The first few times I walked the easiest way, going with the traffic. The cars would slow down or even stop by me as we walked, with the men hooting at me, yelling, asking me for a date, asking me to come sleep with them. I thought that walking against the traffic would cut down on the harassment, but no. One time, this guy crossed the street in his car and began to drive against the traffic, causing no end of trouble, all to talk with me and ask me for sex. I pretended I didn’t speak Greek. A lie. I knew exactly what he was asking.
Being whistled at was no new experience. It started when I was in my mid-teens, whilst living in Cobham, the small village my father moved us too, where, on the way to the railway station, to go to school, or when grocery shopping in Cobham High Street, I had to walk past the fire station. When not in school uniform I would wear one of the dresses I made, with a full skirt going down past my knees, a shallow scoop neck and cap sleeves, well covered up, I thought, but that didn’t stop the whistling or the comments. It was a small village. These men knew me, knew my father, my brothers, my family, and they still whistled, commented, tried to flirt with me.
It happened when I was living in London, going for walks in the parks. On the Tube 1, I would stand in the corner, next to the doors, protecting myself from two sides, hoping to prevent the wandering hands going all over my butt and in the front of me I had no clue what to do about it other than to get a big bag and hold it in front of me. I felt ashamed, immobilized, but continued to take the Tube to and from work. For some reason, it helped that I was a head taller than most of the other passengers, including the men.
Later, after I moved to Saint Paul, when talking with Mary Hayes Grieco, who came from New York, she said that when that happened to her, she grabbed the hand and held it up, yelling “Whose Hand is This?” I laughed and thought I’d never dared to do something like that.
Then there was the truck driver who picked me up from outside of London when I hiked all the way to North Wales, to Cennen 2, but at least he asked me if I wanted to have sex. I said no, and he accepted that. When he dropped me off just outside of Aberystwyth and wished me good luck, it was late evening and I was thinking I should go down to the town and find a place to stay when another family picked me up, saying they were concerned because, there I was, a young woman, standing on the edge of the road and it was getting dark—it must have been around 10 pm. They took me to the farmhouse where Anthony, my boy-friend at the time, and his mother, Ceridwyn, were staying. It took me less than a day to hitchhike from London to North Wales.
There was one time when, going home on the Tube, on the last train, at about 11 in the evening, when the carriage was almost empty, a man exposed himself to me. I was embarrassed, took my eyes away from him, and wished it wasn’t happening. And there were plenty of times, when walking across London after going to a late night movie at the South Bank theater, or staying late at OvalHouse in Lambeth 3, crossing the river on the Hungerford Bridge 4, that men would ask to walk with me. I would agree, and we would walk together through Camden to Tufnell Park, and then say goodbye.
That is the extent of any overt sexual harassment in my life, but there was some covert stuff, from my father treating me as being sexually active from the moment I moved in with him at age 11. He didn’t do anything, like touch me, just thought his thoughts, and believed them.
But the bane of my life was cat-calling. It went on, and on, and on, and didn’t stop until I was about 50 or so when my hair began to get grey. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Advice on how to manage the cat-calling varied; avoid men—don’t make eye contact; avoid construction sites; ignore the whistlers; thank them for the compliment; smile and walk on; say politely I didn’t like it; engage with them—that made things worse, opening myself up to further, and more explicit insults.
But I never actually managed to be okay with it. Never. Never. Never.
1 The London Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground.
2 Cennen in Wales. The link goes to Carreg Cennen Castle, which I didn’t go see, but the farmhouse was nearby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carreg_Cennen_Castle.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovalhouse
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_Jubilee_Bridges
The photo is by Ken Day - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, of Cennen Castle. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72840138.