My Thanksgiving story is not G-rated. While at home in Dallas, Texas, over Thanksgiving break, my tire blew out on the freeway, and I had to have my car towed to a nearby service station. After the tire was fixed, my friend and I were walking back to the car when we noticed one of the mechanics standing by his truck with the headlights turned on so we could clearly see him.
Then he exposed himself and started masturbating.
Unless the infamous McKeldin Library masturbator has recently moved to Dallas, this type of behavior seems to be more common than I had previously imagined. I’m not sure what these offenders are expecting to achieve by publicly exposing themselves. I have the vague idea that the guy thought it would somehow spark our interest in him. But really, what woman wants to see that?
As I tell more people this story, there seems to be no general consensus about what could have motivated this man’s behavior. Maybe he was crazy, maybe he just wanted to scare us or maybe he thought it’d be a nice way of breaking the ice as a prologue to a deeply meaningful conversation. However, one thing all my friends agree on is that the incident was offensive and violating.
And yet, while having public nudity thrust in one’s direction is certainly offensive, it seems to differ in degree – and not in kind – from all the little offenses one endures on a daily basis. When I walk to the bus stop every morning, I inevitably encounter some greasy guy’s lecherous stare or an invasive cat-call from the window of a passing car.
It is probably not a great virtue in me that I respond to such actions by loudly telling the offenders to go f— themselves. Most of my friends warn me that I’m going to get myself shot, that I should just let the cat-calls and the stares roll off my back. They have a point. But I find it surprising that when I tell these same friends about the incident in Dallas, they immediately start asking me if I called the police.
Where, then, do we designate the point at which this kind of harassment goes beyond mild cat-calls and turns into something truly dangerous?
Most people seem to have drawn that line somewhere between verbal harassment and public masturbation. When the nature of the harassment changes from verbal to physical, we can all agree that some serious reaction to the incident is necessary. But I worry that for most of us, this line between mild and serious harassment is very blurry. It certainly was for me before this incident occurred last week.
I don’t have a well-defined idea of where that line on harassment falls. But I do think that each of us, individually, should make an effort to figure it out for ourselves. Without a good idea of what we personally consider serious harassment, we run the risk of letting something serious pass for something mild. Even I, who get frustrated with the most harmless stares, couldn’t help thinking the situation with the mechanic was kind of comical. I was so unprepared for that incident that I was more astonished than offended or angry. Had the situation turned serious, I wouldn’t have been ready. I hope that if the rash of public masturbation incidents on the campus and elsewhere continues to spread, I’ll have a better-planned reaction the next time.
Susan Holcomb is a physics major. She can be reached at holcombdbk@gmail.com.
