While walking to my local shops a couple of days ago wearing a dowdy sweatshirt, track pants and ugg boots, I encountered a familiar sound. As I passed the block of apartments next to my own building, sure enough, the group of around five males in their early to mid twenties who live in the ground floor apartment, sat perched outside; smoking cigarettes, swigging back on their long necks, and leering at female passers by.
After enduring months of subtle jeers and heckling directed at myself as well as other women passing this offending group while walking home from the bus stop every evening, enough was enough.
Like clockwork, with typical cowardice, only once I’d adequately passed the building, did the low wolf whistles and snide remarks follow. Fed up with feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable in my own street, I turned around to confront the men.
“You know, I hope that wolf whistle wasn’t directed at me, because that’s not the way to treat a woman. I don’t know how you were raised, but that is very disrespectful.”
A few moments of dumbfounded expressions and silence filled the air, only to be just as quickly pierced with simultaneously reciprocations pertaining to a range of colourful expletives hurled towards me: “F&** you,” “Go and get F*^$%@,” and “F%^& off.”
A positively charming, articulate and exemplary response, to be sure.
Relaying this chain of events back to a couple of friends of both genders the next day evoked surprising responses. Both were lax in their opinions. My male friend wondered why I felt the need to respond to behaviour that’s somewhat expected and accepted by a particular age group of men in this country. My female comrade shrugged it off, also pointing out that had they been attractive, well-dressed and in a different environment, rather than t-shirt and boardies-wearing larrikins, my perception of their actions may possibly be vastly different.
After seeing ABC’s Australian Story episode recently and reading various news articles, in particularly one from The Daily Telegraph centering on the suicide of television newsreader and former colleague Charmaine Dragun, and the subsequent root of her depression, which played a significant role in her death, I beg to differ.
Revelations that this attractive, intelligent and effervescent young woman, just a year shy of her thirtieth birthday and impending marriage to childhood sweetheart and fiancé, was haunted by depression stemming from a wolf whistle and comment made by a construction worker more than a decade ago, as she innocently walked past a worksite.
The worker’s remark in regards to her appearance may have been made offhandedly and in jest, but what ensued was the dangerous planting of a seed into this young woman’s mind, questioning her value, and wreaking future years of havoc on her self-esteem, which ultimately culminated into the onset of an eating disorder and subsequent bouts of depression.
In this day and age of increasing female equality, why are women still expected and encouraged to simply turn a blind eye to this demeaning behaviour? Tolerating such offensive and unacceptable conduct not only allows this to continue to thrive and exist in our society, but also perpetuates the myth that women are in fact, the weaker sex, openly and readily subjected to ridicule, degradation and bigotry.
Similarly, recent accounts of bullying and defamatory abuse on popular networking websites, Myspace and Facebook, have emerged, with teen perpetrators sued, charged and even imprisoned for slanderous and libellous postings.
I implore each and every one of us, to reconsider the words and actions we speak and commit, with extreme caution. Senseless and heartless words unfortunately have the ability to cut deep into the psyche, burying into our subconscious, later manifesting in destructive ways with repercussions affecting not only the person initially affected, but also a myriad of people around them. While this may not have such an extreme effect on every person, it’s a game of Russian roulette, with the verbal bullets being shot out, having the potential to induce a hit or miss effect on one’s future sanity and mindset.
My retort towards the cursing cowards may not prevent them from continuing their behaviour; it may not even register in altering their social repertoire, or lack thereof, but it allows me to maintain a sense of self-dignity in my own life and my own mind.
And that can only be a healthy thing.
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