9:38am July 25, 2014

I just got yelled at in the street.

youneedacat:

slavicmustard:

youneedacat:

Which is not uncommon.

Unfortunately, due to language processing problems, I have no clue what the guy said. So I am left guessing as to whether he was yelling at me for:

Being (read as) female

Being gender-ambiguous-looking

Disability of any of many kinds

Something about how I was dressed

I assume it was one of the above, but I can’t even close to figure out which.

If you can’t figure out what he said, it’s probably a bit presumptuous to assume he was being malicious about your person. He could have easily been telling you there was a car coming or something.

I know a malicious tone of voice (not to mention the sneer and the hand gestures, very visible because the guy was on a motorcycle) when I hear one, I’ve had years of experience of street harassment to become very aware of such things. And cars don’t come onto sidewalks. It’s probably a bit presumptious to assume that I can’t tell the difference between a friendly reminder and a menacing shout.

Yeah, after a while, it’s not that hard to recognize the difference between *garbled urgent warning* and *garbled noisy douche-baggery*, especially if you’re a) usually read as female and b) frequently travel alongside busy roads. If you have experienced both (especially if you’ve experienced both frequently from a wide sampling of passers-by), it’ hets a little easier to catch the tonal difference between mean-spirited harassment and genuine concern.

For example: I have a serious and recurring problem with insomnia. When neighborhood temperatures are not alarmingly sub-zero (Fahrenheit), I often deal with this by walking myself to the point of exhaustion. When I’m out wandering the roads on foot at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, I sometimes encounter motorists who stop to ask me if I’m OK/need a lift. It’s pretty damn clear, after a few encounters, whether the driver is asking because they really think I may need help, or if they’re a creepy mother-fucker who thinks I look like an easy mark. Even as a fairly-sheltered teenager, the way dudes who thought of me as prey vs dudes who genuinely thought of me as am apparently-lost damsel-in-distress was pretty apparent. Among other things, dudes (and it was always dudes - for whatever reason, the ladies I bumped into in the wee hours never gave off either an menacing nor a paternalistic vibe) who were actually worried about my safety would always maintain physical distance and offer rides/the use of a cellphone/an escort, then leave if i maintained I was fine/in familiar turf/trying to walk off insomnia. On the other hand, dudes who initially saw me as easy prey would try to encroach on my space/try to insist on accompanying me/ try to avoid letting me contact people outside the immediate situation, depending on the specifics of where I encountered them. The difference between “hey lady, do you need a ride, or is there someone you wanna call?” and “hey baby, why don’t you get in the car, we’ll give you a ride, of course you need a ride get in the car now, bitch“ eventually becomes apparent to a lot of us who are/are read as women or girls

I’m not trying to imply that people-read-as-vulnerable have an infallible radar or anything similar - I was pretty badly hurt by someone I thought was safe when I was a teen - but rather that you-as-a-listener should pay attention when someone (especially if they are a member of a vulnerable group) mentions that another person is a creepy motherfucker/giving off an alarming vibe.

I’ve known a lot of survivors of assault and systemic violence, and I had a manipulative/borderline abusive college roommate who would flat-out make shit up (as in, I was in the room to see an interaction occur, and they would later tell me that a completely different sequence of events happened during the time I was there, sometimes involving people who were not even present at the time) to frame other people as villains, and my policy is still to assume that if someone tells me a person threatened or harmed them, to treat that person with caution, even if they are not in an apparent position to harm me.

Because, seriously, the downside to treating person X with caution because person Q said they were dangerous is that if I or person Q were wrong, maybe I don’t initially give person X a fair chance, and it takes them longer to gain my trust (already a long damn process) if it turns out they’re actually worthy of it. As opposed to assuming everyone is safe unless person X unambiguously proves a threat to me, and consequently exposing myself (and possibly encouraging my friends to expose themselves) to harmful people who are thought to be “safe”.

Given those options, I think I’ll stick with the cautious one. If someone tells me you might be dangerous, I’ll take that under advisement, and subject you to a longer-than-normal evaluation period before I decide whether or not you’re someone I should trust to not be harmful.

Wow, that got really rambly and off-topic. Anyhow, the upshot is, if someone says another person makes them feel unsafe, take that under advisement and look closely rather than immediately dismissing the complainant as a a crank. They might be right, they might be wrong, but don’t flat-out dismiss what person Q has to say before you check it out.

And also, people with receptive language problems often develop well-nigh-uncanny abilities to read vocal tone, especially at moments when we can’t understand the words. (I’m not even just basing this on personal experience, Oliver Sacks has written about it in terms of people who develop severe receptive aphasia. Which is different from developmental receptive language problems like I have, but there’s enough similarities.) It’s not that hard, even as an autistic person, for me to detect severe, mocking hostility in a stranger’s voice.

It would actually be harder for me to detect the man’s tone and intent if I had understood the words. For autistic people, we have trouble multitasking, usually. This means we can usually understand either the tone or the words, but not both at once. The closest we can come to both at once, is to understand one, then have a delayed understanding of the other. Like understanding the tone first, then the words five minutes (or days, or years, yes years) later.

Many autistic people develop a tendency towards hearing only one or the other. You’ll usually hear about the ones who hear words but not tone, because they’re the ones most likely to be able to communicate about their experiences. But there are some of us who learn to communicate in words, but whose natural bias is towards hearing tone but not words. I’m one such person: My bias is strongly towards tone-but-not-words, but if I am concentrating at the time I do words-but-not-tone. I wasn’t concentrating at the time, so I caught his tone and the movements of his body, but not his words.

And what I got was an intense sense of menace, mockery and hostility. Plain as day. No ambiguity. He said something nasty, and then he laughed at me.

People have been doing things like following me around making mocking comments or trying to engage me in various ways in order to laugh at me, shouting retard at me out of car windows, and other such things, since I was a teenager. I really know what it sounds like, what it looks like, what it feels like.

And as I said in another post, people who are unable to understand the words not only tend to be more able to pick up on the emotional content of such communication, but we tend to feel it more intensely. When someone’s communication feels like a jab in the side, a fist in the belly, a stab in the back, you feel it. And you know what it means, even if you don’t hear the words. Seriously. I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation, it’s insulting. (Not the last poster, but the person who thinks I can’t even tell the difference between street harassment and helpful directions, I mean seriously?)