“Hello, princess!” he says. I can feel his gaze between my shoulder blades, right where the muscles knot over my vertebrae. Is he following? Should I check? If I check, will he keep talking?
Next a long, slow whistle, the pitch rising like the hairs on my neck, cutting off just as he exits my line of vision. The whistles always get under my skin. The casual lilt of my dehumanization. I am not even worth a word, just air sucked over teeth, like a dog.
“Hola, chica lindas!” he yells. Hey, sexy ladies. I count all of my teammates’ rigid spines in front of me as we walk down this gauntlet of a street. I try not to turn around all the way down the block.
//
I spent April on an island in the Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua, a province of Colombia called San Andres. It should have been a Racer’s dream month: I had my own bed, a Western toilet, a real shower, and we were only a 15-minute walk from the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen.
But to get to the ocean we had to exit through the gate of the church and turn right down a street that smelled like fish and rotting trash, then turn left onto a long main street lined with businesses. There were always men sitting on these streets, sometimes working, sometimes not.
Every time I left the house, I got cat-called. Shouts and whistles and, once, bumps to both shoulders as a group of young men split and forced Rachael and I to walk between them.
As much as I am trying to write articulately about this, I am angry.
Almost a month ago, a woman was murdered at my university. They found her body in the creek that runs behind my freshman dorm.
Last week in Oklahoma, a court ruled that because a girl was unconscious from alcohol, it wasn’t rape when a man forced her to have oral sex.
One in four college-age women will be sexually assaulted. One in five women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. These statistics hold true in my friend group.
And last month, my team couldn’t walk down the street without at least two shouts of “hello beautiful!” or whistles or someone trying to stop us and talk, always starting with, “Hello, princess, how are you today…” Every single time I left the house, I was reminded of how unsafe it is to exist in a woman’s body.
//
Once, a woman stopped Meggie and I on the street. We were both dripping sweat and just wanted to get home, but we’d ended up at the back of our group, because a man started following us. At six feet, I am six inches taller than most men on the island, and I didn’t trust the way this skinny man in a pink polo shirt crowded behind Meggie and Rachael. We walked slowly behind the rest of the team and glared at him until he crossed the street.
The woman stopped us and started speaking in rapid Spanish. “Lo siento, no habla espanol,” Meggie said, but the woman kept gesturing to the street and talking. Finally, we realized what she was saying.
This street is not safe for you.
“Oh no, esta bien, we’ll be okay.” Maggie said, and I nodded, one eye on the rest of our team that was halfway up the street by now.
The woman just shook her head no.
//
Cat-calling is a crime against humanity.
It’s not a compliment, or a validation. It’s a threat.
Every time I am cat-called, I am reminded that my body is an object for consumption, no longer wholly mine in the eyes of the men who line the streets of San Andres, no matter what time of day it is. Every time, it reminds me that I am not safe, that lurking behind the whistles and shouts is rape culture which says that I should be flattered that a man would dare to look at my body and give positive feedback, as if it belonged to him.
The casual acceptance of cat-calling as a part of any culture (not just Colombian culture) supports the structures that let people harass women on public transit, or blame the victim for their rape, or wonder why the girl who was murdered was walking home alone in the dark.
Cat-calling is a crime against female humanity, because if our female bodies do not belong to us when we walk on a public street, how can they belong to us in a private bedroom? Or the back seat of a car? Or walking home in the dark from the corner store with a pack of M&M’s, feeling the man behind us in line with a six-pack of Miller Lite watch us all the way down the street?
As strongly as I have every known anything in my life, I know that Jesus would not condone cat-calling. Jesus did not create rape culture. God created women in the Imago Dei, the Image of God, with full ownership over our strong, powerful, beautiful, Spirit-woven bodies. Jesus gave women a voice when they had none; he was raised by a holy rebel of a woman who gave power over her body to no one but the Lord.
Jesus came to break down every bit of culture that oppresses, cat-calling included.
