At one time or another, we’ve all been faced with the common retort that the harassment we face in public spaces should be viewed as nothing more than complimentary. In this blog post, Dr Bianca Fileborn draws on her research in the field to outline exactly why this attempt at dismissing our frustrations and complaints simple doesn’t cut it.

 

“Hey, beautiful”

“Smile”

“Sexy lady”

“Looking good today”

 

These phrases will no doubt be familiar to the 87% of women who have experienced public sexual harassment in Australia. And, what’s the problem? They’re just a compliment, aren’t they? All too often we hear these routine intrusions into the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people dismissed as a ‘compliment’, as ‘friendly banter’, as just a ‘joke’. We should be flattered, right? Well, no, not exactly.

 

Of course, on the face of it, some of these verbal comments do sound like something we might say as a compliment to another person. For those who routinely encounter such remarks in public, it can be incredibly difficult to articulate exactly why they are not a compliment.

 

Here’s a handy list of 4 reasons why these catcalls are not compliments.

 

1)    Compliments are not abusive:

Let’s start with the most obvious point. While the comments mentioned above seem superficially complimentary (or, at least, ambiguous in their nature and intent), this is unequivocally not the case for a lot of public harassment. In my own research on street harassment in Melbourne, Australia, participants shared a wide range of experiences. While these included seemingly complimentary remarks, many participants recounted incidents that were outright offensive, abusive, and in some cases downright terrifying. This included verbal abuse that was overtly sexually explicit, sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic and transphobic. And, street harassment is not just verbal in nature. Some people recalled experiences of being followed, indecent exposure and public masturbation, and forms of violence that would likely meet legal thresholds for physical and sexual assault. Clearly, these actions are not compliments.

 

2)    (Relatedly) Compliments don’t escalate into abuse:

Another common theme in my research, and something I have seen mirrored in the posts of online activist accounts, is the rapid escalation of initially ‘complimentary’ comments into abuse and sometimes even violence. “You look nice today” quickly turns into “fuck you, bitch. You’re not that attractive anyway” if the “right” response isn’t provided. And, of course, in this situation, there is no “right” response. Public harassment can escalate if we ignore the perpetrator, if we smile and say, “thank you”, or basically just continue to exist in public space. This Jekyll and Hyde response from perpetrators (where “nice” suddenly becomes openly abusive) belies the notion that the original comments were ever intended as a compliment.

 

3)    Compliments don’t breach the “unspoken rules” of interaction in public space:

For me, this point really gets at the heart of why catcalls are not compliments. Sociologist Erving Goffman argued that our interactions with strangers in public spaces are typically marked by what he called “civil inattention”. Civil inattention forms part of the unspoken rules that govern how we act in public spaces. For example, in most urban places we typically treat strangers with a cool indifference, and most of us avoid eye contact and extended conversation with someone we don’t know.

 

Street harassment scholars such as Carol Gardner and Benjamin Bailey have argued that we can understand “complimentary” public remarks as harassment because they breach the norms of civil inattention in public space. Moreover, Bailey argues that phrases like “hey, beautiful” are “terms of endearment” that are usually reserved for people we are close with, like a friend or romantic/sexual partner. They are not things we typically say to strangers in a public place. As such, commenting on a stranger’s appearance or sexual attractiveness in public can be understood as highly transgressive behaviour.

 

Because of their transgressive nature, Benjamin Bailey argues that these “complimentary” remarks can also be understood as an expression of power over someone else. Who does the “complimenting” is not neutral. Rather, it is disproportionately those in a position of relative power who engage in this behaviour against those who are comparatively powerless in a given interaction. Street harassment is both a product of and actively reproduces, relations of power around gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and so forth.

 

4)    Compliments should never make you feel unsafe:

Street harassment has a profoundly negative impact on the way many of us live our day-to-day lives, including those forms dismissed as “complimentary”. Firstly, as we saw earlier, apparently “positive” interactions can swiftly shift to deeply unpleasant ones. The problem is, we have no way of predicting which men (and it is almost exclusively men engaging in this behaviour) are genuinely being nice, and which are about to verbally abuse us, follow us home, or worse.

 

These concerns can play out differently depending on our identity. For example, one transgender woman who took part in my research talked about how she often experienced sexist harassment now that she passed as a cisgender woman. However, these experiences were often accompanied by an underlying fear about how the harassment might escalate if the perpetrators’ realised she was trans.

 

As a result, we are constantly on guard and hypervigilant in public space. UK-based scholar Fiona Vera-Gray calls this having the “right amount of panic”. Women are often taught from a young age that they’re responsible for men’s violence, particularly if we haven’t undertaken the right amount of precautionary “safety work”. On the other hand, women are positioned as over-reacting and “hysterical” for doing so because, hey, men are just trying to be “nice”.

 

Women and LGBTQ+ people limit how they use public space, how they dress, how they present their gender identity, how they show affection to a partner and many other compromises to their daily freedom in order to try and avoid public harassment. For participants in my research, street harassment could generate fear, anger, embarrassment, self-blame. It contributed towards feelings of anxiety and depression and could be triggering for people with PTSD. Some people stopped catching public transport or only went out in public during the day. Street harassment made people feel like objects, as less-than-human and lacking the right to take up space in the world.

 

I don’t know about you, but when I pay someone a compliment it’s because I want them to feel good about themselves, not reduce their sense of humanity. Catcalling is clearly not a compliment – it’s well past time we put this myth to rest.

 

Dr Bianca Fileborn is a Lecturer in Criminology and DECRA ARC Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, University of Melbourne. Her current research looks at victim-centred justice responses to public harassment. Bianca is co-editor of #MeToo and the politics of social change, and author of Reclaiming the night-time economy: unwanted sexual attention in pubs and clubs.