By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 11 years ago

Cool street art alert: “Women do not owe you their time or conversation”

We’ve mentioned this street art before when it popped up in Philly, although I didn’t know then who was behind it. According to NPR, these anti-street harassment posters are the work of artist Tatayana Fazlalizadeh who’s been dodging cops in the cover of darkness to put them up in her neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Tatayana Fazlalizadeh street harassment posters

Fazlalizadeh says the frequent cat calls she receives inspired her. “It happens almost daily to me,” she says, “so I wanted to express myself and speak up for myself.”

Update: Check out Fazlalizadeh’s Stop Telling Women to Smile Tumblr.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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