I’m a runner. Four or five times a week, I lace up my shoes, pop in my headphones (usually with Hamilton blasting through them), and head out to pound some tension away. It’s time purely for me and I relish every second of it.
One day last spring, I was out for a run, and I was on a corner waiting for the light to change. A guy in a taxi in the lane closest to me leaned his entire torso out the window and started talking to me. I took out my earbuds, thinking perhaps he had a normal thing to say to me, like asking for directions or something. What he actually said, as he hung out the window of his cab on a frigid morning, was “I don't know why you’re still running. You look great.”
Gee, dude. Maybe I run because of the stress from living in the kind of patriarchal society where randos feel entitled to start blabbing at me about my body. Ever think of that, taxi-man?
I didn’t say that, of course. I didn’t say anything. I put my ear-buds back in and turned away.
You can’t say anything because you never know what a guy will do.
He might decide to physically attack me. Or shoot me. Because guys do feel entitled to comment on women and they get testy and dangerous when we call them out.
I’m not the only runner with stories like this to tell. A Runner’s World magazine survey found that 43% of women who responded have faced street harassment while running. 63% of female runners choose routes based on safety. One in four women time their workouts to be during daylight hours. Half of female respondents worry about their safety when they run.
Of the men who responded, 96% said they had never faced any kind of harassment on the streets while running.
There’s a surprise.
Some people like to call this a women’s issue, but the problem isn’t women who run (or walk, or appear in public in any way). The problem is men who need to shut the fuck up. Cat-calling and other forms of street harassment suck. Women find it scary and intimidating. But we don’t have the power to stop it because we’re not the ones doing it. Only the cat-callers can make the cat-calling stop.
That means you, dudes. That. Means. You.
