Psst psst cat skin#

Nothing is funnier than a hysterical woman, apparently.Īnd when you need help holding someone accountable for their harassment, who are you to go to? Sometimes, the man would get embarrassed at all the public attention he was getting for quietly trying to harass a young woman.

My coping mechanisms featured a curated slew of insults in Darija to spit back at the whispers, stares, and comments I regularly received. It will always serve as a reminder that no matter what I wear, or how hard I’ve worked to become who I am today, I am still “just” a woman'

Psst psst cat skin#

'Psst psst will always make my skin crawl. In Fernández’s research, she found women reverted to glaring at the harasser, verbally standing up for themselves, or opting for a more passive response, either by ignoring them or discreetly picking up the pace to their final, predator-free destination. Growing up in this type of environment, you learn the coping skills necessary to get through these situations with some thread of dignity. Happiness, anger, sadness, curiosity or any other sentiment could be misconstrued as flirting or requesting the attention of every man looking for his next ego trip. Noemi Fernández, author of the thesis Street Harassment Effects on Women: An Exploratory Study notes that “It is important to understand how concepts such as patriarchy, sexism, male privilege, rape culture, victim-blaming, and slut shaming play a role in the street harassment of women.” She also specifies that street harassment “ is not only gender-based but racialised.” Unsurprisingly, women of colour usually experience more street harassment.īeing told to wear long trousers or cover my shoulders – usually by people who mean well – only served to over-simplify the complex and multi-faceted reality that I could not walk down the streets of Casablanca without tensing my body and washing my face of any sort of emotion. Why do men feel like they can taunt, whisper at, and follow any woman (or girl) who passes their line of view? We need to talk about violence against women in MENA It is a threat, a label, another way to dissect the body from the woman who owns it. Pretty is no longer a compliment when it is breathed down your neck by a man who hasn’t even looked you in the eye. You can’t single-handedly rid the world of misogyny, but you can at least make sure your adolescent daughter isn’t the next target of its over-sexualised, paedophilic design. 'Being told to wear long trousers or cover my shoulders – usually by people who mean well – only served to over-simplify the complex and multi-faceted reality that I could not walk down the streets of Casablanca without tensing my body and washing my face of any sort of emotion' But watching their daughter come home in tears from being harassed at the shopping mall or beach naturally made them wary of the “source” of the incidents. They knew it wasn’t my fault that men would stare, stalk, and smirk.

They aren’t conservative, but rather, feared the reactions my outfits would implicit. My parents were always wary of what I wore when I left the house during high school.

I did not even deserve to be addressed in complete thoughts – although the words they did use were never any better. How fitting, that as a teenager, grown men looked at and called to me as they would an innocent, small, homeless creature. In Morocco, “psst psst” is also used to beckon over a curious street cat.