Being a woman in the city is a quite taxing job, especially when you are a student, young and eager to create a life for yourself in one of the most exciting places in the world. It seems a common experience to come to New York City with a buoyant and optimistic outlook on life and yourself, only to realize what traumatic and daunting forces seem to be constantly working against you.
There were a few driving factors behind this blog. The first and most obvious is that this is a project for my Introduction to Feminist Thought and Action class, a course that, along with personal experiences living in the city, has made me become immensely aware of the roles women are often placed into both in New York and elsewhere. Inspired by a visit to our class from Courtney E. Martin, feminist author and editor of the blog Feministing, I wanted to create a type of oasis for women like me. This blog is meant to bring people together under certain shared and arduous experiences that come with being a woman in a city quite notorious for crude treatment of women in public spaces, while at the same time incite conversation and question by means of a blog, an increasingly popular media construction. With the internet as a network connecting billions of users, a blog seemed like the best way to reach out to those in the same circumstances I and others whose work you will see happen to be in. Plus, I’ve never made a blog before and this was a perfect opportunity!
The subject of this blog, I guess summed up as misogyny in public city spaces, came from a theme running throughout a midterm paper I wrote. Below is an excerpt.
This is what my mind deduced of feminism until moving to the city and experiencing the extreme amount of demeaning and humiliating comments murmured to women on the sidewalks, the sickening stares from men that fill us with so much resentment, and the backlash of saying “No, I’m not going home with you tonight.” My first response towards coping with the standard treatment of men towards women in the city was to flip someone off or reply to my adversary by throwing back an expectantly more piercing comment than the previous one, but I could function this way only so long and I realized I was exerting far more energy than the situation deserved. I wanted some sort of a method for managing and thinking about these ill-fated situations.
In this blog you will see a sort of potpourri of personal essays, links to websites, art pieces scholarly articles, etc. So, if you happen to come across this and are inspired to write or post anything, you can email me at publiccityspaces@gmail.com and I can share it with others to experience!
