The city is swelteringly hot. I’m on my way to an appointment, and I am late. Ahead of me, a van is edging out onto the main road. I notice immediately that all three of its occupants in the front are staring directly at me. For a split second, I wonder what I’m wearing. I will later wonder why I wondered that. I feel the burn of a line of six eyes. I’m being watched. Closely. I need to cross the road, but the van’s position would force me into oncoming traffic. I can’t see if it’s clear. One of the occupants is now gesticulating at me. “This way”, his hand seems to be saying, like a waiter showing me to a particularly unappealing table. This action immediately confirms my decision to pass behind the van, and I’m aware of all eyes on me until I’m out of sight. As I reach the pavement, the van accelerates hard before slowing next to me. I get a good look at the driver, who is older than I’d thought. He leans out and shouts: “Cheer up, luv!” This has happened to me, and every woman I know, more times than anyone can recount. This happens to women and girls around the world, constantly. This bothers me a lot. I notice the van’s logo and I’m not sure why, but I take a photo. This is a company that goes into people’s homes. For the next hour or two, this bothers me more, and more and more.
Catcalling is a form of sexual harassment. According to a UN Women UK survey from 2021, over 70% of women in the UK report that they’ve experienced sexual harassment in public, and almost 9 in 10 women in cities around the world report feeling unsafe in public spaces. Catcalling is loud, but its impact is quiet and insidious. I’d had no recourse to respond.
I felt silenced. I felt humiliated, ashamed and embarrassed. Thinking back to my immediate thought that day – what am I wearing? – I had a secondary repulsion at the shame it invoked in me. Freshly fed up, I felt mobilised.
I searched for the name of the company and there was a match for it. The branding matched the van’s logo in my photo. The driver who’d catcalled me was on their social media pages. There were posts about the company’s achievements, and many, many online reviews. This was a company taking great pride in its online presence. I decided to share my experience of being catcalled by them publicly. I was careful to be clear that I had not commissioned the company’s services. I wrote an online review about what had happened. I hit send.
Later that evening, my phone pinged. The owner had responded, and he was by all accounts devastated. He’d spoken to the ‘lad’ who had ‘meant it ‘in a nice way’’. He wanted to apologise to me personally and he left a number for me to call him.
I thought of Sarah Ahmed’s words in Living a Feminist Life. “When you expose a problem, you pose a problem.” I was curious about what the business owner had to say, but guilt began to pool in me. Had I done something wrong in publicly sharing this? Is it wrong to share something like this online? Am I performing more emotional labour, by having the conversation?
It is easy to hide behind screens. It is easy for them, too, to hide behind the steering wheel. If they’re comfortable with catcalling in public, and I’m comfortable with calling it out online, then we should both be able to have a conversation. I phoned the business owner.
He began with an apology, which I accepted. I became aware of a sense of distance between him and his staff; this wasn’t his usual team, he said. The conversation began to tilt however, after I’d said I’d seen photos of the driver on the company’s pages. He started talking about the impact of reviews on his business, and about the cost of living crisis. At times, it felt like he was packaging up my harm as his, and handing it back to me.
I noticed too, how he drew on his own orbit of women. He told me that his mother had said that I was within my right to share the experience. I felt the validation of this mother figure washing over me, via him. He told me, without context, that he had daughters himself. I found myself entering this orbit of women too. He mentioned his mental health, and I found myself almost called to reassure him. He was keen to reiterate that it was my right to leave a review but towards the end of the conversation, while he acknowledged that I probably wouldn’t want this, he asked if vouchers could make up for it. This felt a lot like a transaction. I declined.
I’m reminded of Audre Lorde’s words, “for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Calling out misogyny within patriarchal systems, by default, demands too much from women. I felt I’d expended emotional labour on both the experience of being catcalled in public, but also the response and its aftermath. The costs add up and up, and they are even higher for women of colour and those from marginalised communities.
I was catcalled and it was taken seriously when there was a potential business impact. Of course it was; this is capitalism. I had tried to have a conversation about it, and I was compared to other women. Of course I was; this is patriarchy. My hope is that in continuing to call it out, we can return the cost of it to those responsible.
Written by Maddie Grace
Maddie Grace is a Lazy Women contributor and feminist. She is a freelance copywriter and writer based in London, currently doing an MA in Creative and Life Writing, and publishes regularly on her substack @Maddieiswriting. A central theme through her writing is an exploration of how truth is defined and who gets to tell it. Alongside writing, she loves reading, theatre, and getting lost in an art gallery.
Illustration by Dorottya Juhász
