Paranoia Walking the Streets

ANY WOMAN who has grown up in New York City is supposed to be accustomed to handling street hassles. If she hasn't been kidnapped at infancy from a baby carriage parked in front of the A and P, she will still have a good chance of being accosted by a drunken sailor (probably a fag, besides), robbed, heckled, smoked out of a Midson Avenue bus by a pyromaniac lighting matches on the back seat, and altogether pinched so often and in so many strange places that if the IRT subway line could be held responsible and sued it would go bankrupt faster than the Pennsylvania Central. And finally, if she gets really lucky, like the five-year-old daughter of a minister I once knew, she may get dragged up to the rooftop of some apartment building and raped.

But of course, no one really expects anything better from New York City. Hostility, violence, and histrionic acts of aggression are part of its mystique. The Kitty Genovesses and the Galahads of this world and the next are essential for the enhancement of its reputation. For New York, as Mayor Lindsay once so epigrammatically pointed out, is Fun City. Fun for whom, he neglected to mention. Certainly, sexists and masochists should be deliciously happy there.

I used to think I'd be a little safer around Harvard Square. Not because its mystique was any less dramatic than New York's, but simply because bicyclists and strolling lovers were reputed to preempt the mad sailors and pyromaniacs.

The first week of my freshman year at Radcliffe, our dorm residents held an introductory meeting to announce that five girls had been raped on Garden Street and we should please never walk through the Common at night without an escort. This warning was met with nervous laughter and pseudo-sophisticated scorn. Everyone continued to walk defiantly through the Common, whether attended or not, no one got raped without at least first giving her consent, and when, that spring, a man wandered off the street into Jordan J and stabbed a girl with an ice-pick, only a few of the more misanthropic girls I knew began locking their doors before they went to sleep at night.

The summer after that ominous beginning, I worked with a bunch of pretty healthy young Canadian kids, went to California, and returned, my feelings about mankind altogether revived. Within one week of my arrival back in Cambridge, I went innocently to take a midnight bath in the third floor bathroom of Barnard Hall. There before me I found an absolutely unknown naked man masturbating in the tub. Go ahead and laugh, if you like. Of course there's something a bit comical about the scenario, shades of Portnoy or of Bruce Jay Friedman. Even more comical to remember that some girl in the dorm, a transfer student with more than the ordinary romantic-absurdist delusions about Harvard men, had seen the naked stranger wandering around the dorm all evening, but figured that he was only someone's boyfriend having himself a good time.

PERHAPS the encounter with the naked masturbator reveals more than the obvious elements of black humor. Certainly, it was a little frightening; officially so frightening, in fact, that the cops had to be called in, a fire drill held and all of Barnard Hall evacuated at 2 a. m. so that every last room could be checked to make sure the poor naked dude wasn't lurking behind some bookcase. It was, also, unquestionably, a bit pathetic. Any man who has to get his kicks by displaying himself in front of a bunch of weary, bleary-eyed Radcliffe girls must first find himself in pretty desperate straits. But ideologically, the issue is even more alarming. For the moment, consider it an act of sexist chutzpah and listen to the remaining evidence.

The summer between last year and this cleared a few heads, blew a few minds, and raised a lot of consciousnesses. Kids who went to Europe returned appalled and nauseated by the generally carnivorous attitudes of the continental man on the street. Some who went to California said it was better than Cambridge, except for Telegraph Avenue which was worse, and the ones who stayed in New York had no fixed opinions on street life whatsoever, having been forced to stay indoors all summer to avoid death by smog poisoning. There were also, of course, hundreds of kids dispersed across the country, picking watermelons in Georgia or salmon fishing in Alaska who were much too busy, too happy, or too far from the streets to worry about sexism or incidental acts of perversion. They are the lucky ones, but for the present purposes of consciousness-raising will be bypassed.

I will admit that I did not come back to Cambridge this year expecting too much in the way of street liberation. Sure enough, the Harvard Trust had bricked up its front windows, the Bick was gone forever, and the male chauvinists were out in droves. I'd been back no less than three days, when a kid walked up to me in the street and said, "Hey, are you married?" "No," I said, icily. "Well then," he demanded, giving me the old Don Ameche wink, and smirk, "howdja like to take me home with you?!"

What I answered was undistinguished, but the truth: "I'm awfully sorry. I have to go to tutorial now." Later I wished I'd just said "Fuck you" and left it at that. Though, of course, it's never tactically advisable to "Fuck you" during a street confrontation. Someday someone might take you at your word.

SYBIL is a typical Radcliffe street walker. She has typically long dark hair and lugs her books in a typically purple canvas satchel. She looks a lot like your roommate, or maybe, more like your girlfriend. Sometimes she rides a bicycle to class, but the morning under surveillance she has decided to walk.

She leaves Currier House at 11:45 a. m., just lucky enough to pass by a row of workmen who have quit work for lunch. All six of them immediately stop eating to stare at her, whistle, and make obscene remarks under their breaths. Since she is a brunette, they have no way of greeting her. If her hair were blond or red, they could have screamed, "Hey, blondie" or "Hey, red," and razzed her just that much more.

Safely out of the quad, she stops at a street corner to wait for the light. A car pulls up to the curb and a guy leans out and sneers, "Howdja like to do some modeling?" His face has the horribly lascivious look of Loerke, the demonic artist in Women In Love. Sybil ignores him. "It pays $15 or $20 an hour." She continues to ignore him. He drives away, on the prowl for a better broad.

She has walked about ten feet into the Common when two guys in tie-dye shirts and bell-bottoms approach her, ogling and giggling. "Hey, classy Radcliffe girl," they taunt, "Got any spare change?" As she mutters she doesn't, she is immediately greeted by a guy strumming a guitar on a bench and whispering, "LSD for the Lady. LSD for the Lady."

By noon, she is safely out of the Common and standing on the traffic island waiting to cross into the Yard. She sees a bunch of little kids pedaling by on their bikes. She musters a weary smile. Children, she thinks, innocents, our only hope. And just then, one of the brats leans off his bicycle and pokes her in the boob.

Few Radcliffe girls may be privileged enough to experience all Sybil's electrifying confrontations in one fun-filled morning. All Radcliffe girls can check off at least a few and elaborate on them. But what is absolutely vital to every legitimately sexist street confrontation, is that the woman must never feel as though she is being singled out for her individuality, her good spirits, or her charm. A street confrontation is never personal; it is always, in Buber's terms, an I-It relationship, never I-Thou. The woman must always be made to feel like an object under appraisal. Slim and rich, like a good cigarette. Soft, like a pair of slippers. Sleek as a Jag.

Street confrontations like Sybil's can drive the most mild-mannered, apolitical young Radcliffe thing to Bread and Roses. They can (and did) mobilize a group of New York City liberationists to stand on street corners and whistle at construction workers, complimenting them on their biceps and hardhats. And street confrontations can anger women like N. O. W.'s Ti-Grace Atkinson to remark that the only honest woman is a whore: at least she gets paid for walking the streets.

ONE FLEETING, final confrontation. It is the end of a heavy autumn day, probably a Thursday, Sybil is walking back from the Coop, carrying all the books for two new courses, a lamp-shade and a box of ginger snaps. Coming towards her, she recognizes Stanley, an old boyfriend whom she has not seen since the summer. She looks up at him, and he stares at her, stares right through her as if they have never met. They have known each other for years, have exchanged birthday presents, have probably slept together. He looks right through her and doesn't speak. It is worse than all the Hey, blondies in the world.