It takes a village to silence street harassment

If I had a nickel for every time a dude tells me to smile while I’m walking down street to the store, train, work, school…Lord, I could fund a Super PAC called “stop telling women to smile because you don’t have any clue on how to engage them,” then launch a successful messaging campaign and lobby to stop uber conservatives from curtailing reproductive rights of American women.

If only I had saved all those nickels.

Street harassment is an everyday reality for damn near all women. It doesn’t let up when you get older. You just get more creative and confident in defending yourself against it. You know this already. You have your own clever tools to disarm folks so that things don’t escalate, or manage aggression from those men who feel slighted. Men who feel Men have trained men to do this. This is essentialized as a definition of manhood in our culture. In communities of color, it feels more pronounced. Some BS machismo: you’re a man defined by the numbers of honeys you holler at, you’re wanted, valued, desired.

And let’s be honest, men know it’s annoying. They know. We’ve told them so. When we’re exasperated by the umpteenth time some clever dude says, “Smile. It ain’t so bad.” The presumption that, when we’re keeping company with our own thoughts, you dude walking bad should suggest (often bark/command) me to “smile” and somehow I feel better. There is a lesson passed generationally that this is how one should approach a woman. The coaching perhaps includes the idea that you’ll get told no, you’ll get no response, but there’s always that one. Again, a numbers game, the thrill of the chase. In communities of color (and beyond), there are countless tales of street harassment–from a whistle, a holler, to a follow, to worse.

It’s why I deeply appreciate two very recent voices dissenting against the everyday misogyny of this seemingly benign command in the street harassment lexicon. I’m tired of having to choose moments when it’s safe enough to tell men why it’s annoying, wrong, threatening, or uncomfortable.

But let me amplify this point yet again: Women do not like it when men tell them to smile:

It’s just that, when presuming that nothing could possibly be that bad in an attractive woman’s life that she dare not smile, you are dehumanizing them. It’s a “nice” form of dehumanization, but it’s still dehumanization nonetheless. It’s also transparent. You don’t see men running up to homeless women and the elderly and asking them to smile. The request is usually made when the requester thinks the requestee is attractive. It’s not about a legitimate need for women to be happy as much as it’s that smiling/pleasant-looking women are easier on the eyes and more inviting to approach. It’s really not about the woman at all.

If you really are that hard-pressed for a woman to smile, tell a joke, slip on a banana peel, pay her phone bill; basically, instead of asking a stranger to fake an expression for you, do something that might legitimately brighten her day. Who knows, she might even smile. And, she might not. You have no control over that, and that’s kinda the point.