emilyc

“Come here for a minute” said the man in the white van, “I just want to talk to you for a minute”. And then, when this was obviously getting him nowhere: “Haven’t you got a mobile number?”

We may have been on a highway in Damascus but these were the exact same lines I’d heard over and over in Birmingham and Hackney and pretty much everywhere else I’ve lived since leaving childhood; the standard mantra of the international effort to make girls who dare to go outside feel like sluts.

“Thanks, I’m waiting for someone” I said, not moving from my position propped up against the wall with a book. And then, “That’s enough, uncle, that’s enough” (which doesn’t sound quite so ridiculous in arabic). When I was about 17 I wrote an article about cat-calling for my friends, concluding that it was perhaps better to respond with politeness than rage in the hope that an “it’s alright thanks mate” might serve as proof of your human-ness, and melt the edges of his objectification of you. It didn’t, though, and the white van man proceeded to curb-crawl me in reverse as I marched off down the pavement away from him. I hid behind a bus-stop and he waited in his van, amitting a low, wolf-like growl (or so I imagined). There was a woman sitting at the bus-stop with her kids and I was embarrassed. I marched back the way  I’d come and again the van man followed me, still repeating the international mantra. It wasn’t until I walked off up a hill away from the main road that he finally gave up and drove away.

I was fuming. I was angry with him and I was angry with men and I was angry with myself, angry with my long hair and my stupid eyeshadow and my inability to stand up for myself when I knew I was right. An American language teacher I’d met the other day, a vivacious woman in her fifties, had told me how “cathartic” spitting was in this kind of situation. Why couldn’t I spit? But these were the wrong questions. By questioning my own behaviour I was accepting partial responsibility for being harassed. The white van men were winning.

Me with Sweet Sarah

I remember one of the first conversations I had with my Californian friend Sarah, drinking Arak on her roof in balmy October. We were talking about the ‘right way’ to respond to this kind of harassment, and she’d said “but why is the onus on us to ‘behave properly’ when they’re obviously the ones in the wrong?” Sarah thought it was OK to respond however you felt like at the time – by doing nothing, by lashing out, by being civil; whatever fit emotionally at that particular moment. Why should we have to have a well thought-out and consistent response strategy? It’s not our problem, it’s theirs.

Is there an inherent contradiction in ‘wanting to look nice’ and not wanting to be stared at? I used to think so. As a shaven-headed, black-booted 17-year-old, I resented male attention for ‘making me vain’ – I felt that the world was telling me that as a woman my worth was essentially in my looks, and that my subconscious was responding accordingly (by reaching for the mascara wand).

And it is true that nice-looking girls make you want to stare. I don’t think we should be too embarrassed about saying that. Shiny things make you want to stare. And girls, in general, tend to be somewhat shinier than boys (especially here in Syria, the surprise world capital of the sequin). But I also think it’s important to recognise that you wanting to look at a girl doesn’t put her at fault. This is partly because she is not making you look at her. As evolved, civilised beings, we are capable of controlling the primal urge to stare, because we know, in our rational, non-monkey minds, that the pair of bright yellow viscose breasts are attached to a fellow human being, who, like us, possesses an intellect, and a heart. As Sarah once put it (in response to the argument that men who hassled women were just ‘doing what came naturally’), “we don’t shit in the park”.

So it’s this that I am trying to make the moral of the tale, back at home but still raging, fighting the urge to cut off all my hair again and resenting my boyfriend calling me pretty because of what a strange man who knew nothing about me has made that mean. I will wear what I want, regardless of the white van men. I will refuse to feel guilty because of their misbehaviour – after all, the’re the ones still pooing in the woods. So this is a call to ladies the world over, to come out of your houses in all your most glittery finery and take up the new international mantra: That’s enough, uncles, that’s enough.