In Honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month

I came across Laurie Anderson, an American photographer, while brainstorming a photography project while in the midst of reading Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Laurie Anderson may not claim to be a feminist, but her piece "Fully Automated Nikon" has feminism all over it.

Laurie Anderson describes the method behind her 1973 black and white photography series:

I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant. ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.

I found this an excellent way to respond to street harassment and found out that women in anti-harassment campaigns such as HollaBack! have already adopted this strategy and encourage victims of harassment to do this. Women have adopted strategies to avoid street harassment such as constantly assessing our surroundings, crossing the street or taking another route, scowling, putting on the bad-ass look, avoiding eye contact, wearing headphones, talking on a cellphone, the list goes on. Street harassment has become so normalized in a woman's life that these experiences go unreported because they do not seem "important". The literature of law and social science is largely silent about the harassment of women in public spaces. This is not viewed this as an issue worthy of attention.

What can we do? One way to stop street harassment is to stop supporting unhealthy definitions of masculinity and educate men about street harassment:
I came across this video a couple weeks ago at the height of "Shit (?) Say" viral videos and was so happy that this video was made: Shit Men Say To Men Who Say Shit to Women on the Street.