Hokay, I’m gonna get semi-personal for a minute.
I am a young woman living in an urban area. As such, I have special considerations that men, or women living in more rural or more gentrified areas, may not. To put it succinctly, I can’t walk to the train without someone catcalling me, smacking their lips at me, or blowing their car horn at me.
Even when there’s no auditory cues, there are sometimes visual ones. I’m still sometimes aware in my periphery of people leering at me as I pass by. This background din is annoying; I deal with it by wearing headphones so I can’t hear it, and sunglasses so that I feel safe from unwanted eye contact.
You could say this happens because I’m a good looking young woman, and I should “take it as a compliment.” It’s not a compliment, and it has little to do with how I look, as it happens to a lot of girls I know.
I resent that I have to take different routes home than the direct ones, to avoid the blocks where I know there are a lot of workers or neighborhood guys hanging out on the sidewalk as if the girls walking by were some kind of show for their entertainment. I resent that I can’t wear a cute dress without it being perceived as an invitation for comments from strangers. I’m just trying to go jogging outdoors and people are saying things as I pass them that make me horrendously body-conscious when I just want to work out. I’ve sometimes chosen my clothes based on where I’m going and the sort of areas I plan to walk through on my way. That sucks.
At best, it’s a little bit irritating, part and parcel of living in a big city. At worst, it makes me unsafe. I don’t walk alone at night in residential areas, ever. I’ve had cars follow me. A comment or solicitation that’s just gross and annoying yelled out of a car window on a busy street by day becomes frightening and sinister on an empty block at night. It really sucks.
Anyway, the point of all that is as a preface to something that does, in fact, have to do with gaming.
My friend Erin Robinson, who recently released the wonderful Puzzle Bots with Wadjet Eye Games (on a happy note, check it out, it’s adorable!) recently visited me here in Brooklyn, and she was fairly astonished by the culture of street harassment that is so commonplace here. While we were walking to the train, she seemed surprised that I easily ignored or blocked out so many muttered comments, car horns and “hey ladies” that were aimed at us on our way; she was surprised that this was common enough to be something one just gets used to.
Actually, we’d been talking about games, of course — she’s a designer, and so she’d asked me what kind of game I would make if by some miracle I developed an interest in development. I jokingly said I’d probably come up with some kind of revenge simulator that let you shoot scumbag catcallers.
It’s crude and it’s terrible — the person who sent it to me called it “more of a game experience and conversation catalyst than a game.” But boy, does it look like my neighborhood, right down to the water towers on the rooftops and the ice cream truck jingle that’s so ubiquitous around here in the summer (the season when you feel like you’re making yourself vulnerable just by wearing warm-weather clothes). The things they say are pretty realistic — and appear on the tombstones that pop up once you kill a strolling aggressor.
I think you all will find it disturbing to play. The sad thing is how I fear many guys out there will respond.
I just know that there are plenty of you reading this thinking that these male neighbors of mine are “just going about it the wrong way,” and that there’s a “nice way” to bother a woman walking alone or out shopping.
Plenty of people do do it “the nice way” — they patiently and politely insist on just talking to me for a minute, or they just want to step into my path to tell me my eyes are nice. And can’t I take a compliment?
To that, I say, why don’t I have the right to go to my corner store and home again without feeling obligated to be friendly to strangers on the sidewalk just because the strangers are physically attracted to me? Do I owe them something? Yes, it’s rather nice that the workers in my bodega all want to shake my hand and ask me all about how I’m doing and what I’m up to every time I go in in the morning, it’s so good that they’re friendly, but maybe I just want to buy a damn pack of cigarettes without having to explain what I’m all dressed up for.
Maybe I don’t like that I have to walk several blocks to a faraway store for feminine products or other personal things because I don’t feel comfortable asking my “friends” to get them for me from where they’re kept behind the counter.
The worst is so many guys on the street are jerks that I often feel like I have to force a smile and a polite attitude for people who are “just paying me a compliment” or are being nice about it. Over time, little incidents like that — when I indulge conversation with men because they’re “just trying to be nice” even though I don’t feel like talking, or when I smile when I don’t really want to smile — start to make me feel as personally violated as the harsher transgressions that are easier to ignore.
No, wait, here’s the worst. The worst is that there are entire demographics of people out there who would dismiss my complaints — oh, poor you, you get attention because people think you’re pretty, they say. Again, I don’t think this has anything to do with how I look (although I had a friend tell me recently she fantasizes about disfiguring herself so that she never has to worry about this happening), because it’s not like I’m a model or something.
It’s latent misogyny that happens in big cities; it takes my power away. It makes me an object in front of people I don’t even know, and that’s not okay whether they’re nice about it or not. It is nothing less than a slow-burning chronic trauma.
My favorite catcall in the ‘Hey Baby Game’? “Smile for me, baby.” It fills me with rage that a stranger on the street feels at liberty to demand that I smile. I smile when I feel like it, and I sure as shit don’t want to do it for you, buddy.
So someone’s made a game that’s an outlet for that rage, that wants us to discuss that rage. Discuss. And be civil — do not make me close the comments, please.
(Yeah, I didn’t even want to really go here, but a couple of commenters on RPS need a little bit of education on what sexism is.)
[UPDATE: From Gillen. Excerpt: “If you’re a man, and you’ve acted like this, the woman you do it to, beneath the polite smile she has to offer, has probably fantasised about you dying.” Thank you very much.]
