The other day, Shani O. Hilton posted over at Ta-Nehisi’s place about Holla Back sites — Holla Back DC! and Holla Back NYC, websites that encourage women to document their experiences with public sexual harassment:

But [Holla Back DC] is more than just a place to tell stories. Each post includes the location and the time of the incident. (They also have a pretty interesting anti-racism policy that says contributors should leave out race as a factor unless it’s a constructive contribution to the story.) And the blog has increased awareness of perps, like one post where a woman took a photograph of the man who took an upskirt photograph of her the day before. Eventually he was taken into custody by the Arlington police.

One thing that nearly all of the posts have in common is an acknowledgement of the effects that street harassment have on women. Most write that they felt shaken, angry, helpless, or tearful after an incident. They write that it took time for them to pull themselves together. That’s the thing I think many men don’t understand about the harassment: it completely strips a woman of autonomy and it forces a reaction that lasts long after the incident is over.

…[As] hard as it is to read HBDC at times, I’m deeply grateful the blog exists. Street harassment is one of those topics that needs to be talked about more and more, since women (and a few men) mostly experience it while they’re on their own. Gathering the stories in one place is empowering (and I rarely use that word, so know that I mean it).

One of the key things here, I think, is the fact that harassment is experienced in isolation. It can make you feel entirely alone, or possibly crazy. This is at least equally true for survivors of sexual assault, and I learned that the more survivors know that they’re not alone (or crazy), the better able they are to confront their experience, call it what it is, and heal.

In RCC circles, there can be a tendency, that I believe to be wrong-headed, to call every kind of assault “rape” — there’s a reason that our vocabulary is broad, and words need to mean what they mean — but bottom line, street harassment is firmly on the sexual assault continuum. Just as we’ve learned that having some random dude pat your ass is not a compliment, it’s an assault, we need to learn that “Wow, wow, wow, where did you come from?” (my personal favorite of the lines that have been shouted at me) is a verbal assault.

Street harassment is meant — consciously or not — to establish the dominance of the person doing the shouting, over the person being shouted at. It’s meant to clarify for all within hearing range — the shouter, his crew, the whole damn world — that the harasser has the right to say whatever he wants to the harassee, who is a passive vessel.

We seem to be clearer about this when the harassment concerns not Living While Female but daring to be, say, black, or gay (what oppressed minority doesn’t have tales to tell about nasty things hollered by those above them in the social pecking order?). But the fact that public sexual harassment takes an outwardly complimentary form (“hey baby, you are fine,” would, after all, be a lovely thing to hear from one’s partner, right?) makes women wonder — wait, am I being a bitch? Was that dude just being nice? (I would wager that African Americans and gay men don’t generally wonder if they shouldn’t feel complimented when someone yells the n-word or the f-word…).

What we forget is that men do not have the right to comment on women’s appearance by virtue of their being men and our being women — and that thus, when they do, they are not actually talking about us, but about themselves. “I am in a position of dominance over you, anonymous woman, and you have to take it.” Our body, our appearance, is nothing but a tool by which they are able to establish their position of power.

Some women may be able to brush it off when they are harassed — and some may take all day or week to get past it. Because different people bring different things to the world, and no one is a passive vessel, an Other onto whom we get to project our need to be the Subject. We all get to be Subject.

The very existence of the Holla Back websites moves me, and encourages me. As a society, we still have so much to learn, but good women and men are using these new tools in ways that allow all of us to evolve, and repair the world around us.

I mean, seriously, check it out: There’s even an app for that!

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Full disclosure: Most of what I wrote above first appeared as a series of comments in Shani O. Hilton’s thread.