Street Harassment of the Day: Burned-Out Car Edition

I've blogged before about unwanted male attention on the street, which is particularly bad in Bushwick.

In the first week after I moved here, I was walking to the subway in a business suit; it was hot, so I stopped to take off my suit jacket, exposing the long-sleeved shirt I was wearing underneath. A car slowed down and someone stuck his head out and made that obnoxious come-on hissing sound. This, for an outfit provocative only in certain Germanic counties in Pennsylvania.

Today I was annoyed in a new way.

I was walking to the subway and there was a burned out car -- a windowless carcass of a car, with only a stump where the steering wheel had been -- sitting on the sidewalk. I mean, it looked like this thing had been set on fire for an hour. And why was it on the sidewalk? How did it get there?

When you see something crazy, you know how you want to look up and make eye contact with someone and make the "Isn't that crazy?" expression, and then move on and go about your day? If you saw something crazy, you want to make sure someone else saw it too, by damn it.

So I looked up from the crazy car corpse, and sure enough, there was a guy approaching the car from the other direction, and I made the "Oh my god, isn't that insane?" expression. The guy, who clearly had also seen the burned-out car, immediately contorted his face into a sleazy, squinty-eyed expression, and replied, "Oh, yeah, baby ... you like?"

Sometimes street harassment is just gross and/or intimidating, but it reaches a new level when it prevents us from engaging one another as human beings with universal predilections, like occasionally making communicative eye contact with fellow humans in acknowledgment of events taking place in our common environment.

As author Janice Erlbaum quipped, "My feminist demands aren’t that extreme; I just want the simple things -- like to be able to eat a banana in public without feeling self-conscious."