If I de-center myself and imagine the situation above from Sara’s perspective, here is what I see. In any given week, women receive a lot of unwanted attention and uncomfortable encroachment from men. For all I know, I may not have been the first man that day to make Sara feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Looking back, I shudder when I think about how often Sara — a young woman of colour growing up in New York City — may have been subjected to what Pumla Dineo Gqola brilliantly describes as the “female fear factory” that patriarchy creates.
Two years ago, my girlfriend Asana moved to an apartment a short distance from her office. She was excited about getting to walk more in traffic-laden Johannesburg. But after a few tries, she could no longer stomach it. The catcalls were incessant. They grew from annoying to unbearable and she no longer felt safe to walk to work in the clear light of morning, on busy city streets.
What would it look like for each of these catcallers to think, just for an empathic moment, about how these shouts and whistles are received by the woman. To recognize that their crude mating call isn’t cheeky; it sustains and maintains a violent and pernicious culture that degrades and disempowers — that leaves women, quite literally, in tears.