Sometimes, you never know the full extent of your rights about something until you say something, and then you find out you actually had a lot more recourse than you thought you did. For example, I learned today that in New York State, you can file a police report if you experience sexual harassment, which, according to NYS Human Rights laws, can cover incidents like catcalling. The statute of limitations on filing a report is up to one year after the last episode of harassment the victim experiences. The idea that one could file a complaint to a nearby police officer, especially if catcalled in a public place, hadn’t seemed realistic to me until I read it in print on the New York City Department of Human Rights’s website.

I’m going to run down what, exactly, has been happening that I consider harassment. My superintendent always stared at me in the building; when I had to run into him to do quotidian stuff like laundry or entering and leaving. He stared a hole in me every time, like he couldn’t believe I was there. This happens a lot. Finally, eventually, I had some occasion to talk to him and he immediately asked to ‘hang out sometime’, because I was ‘so beautiful’. I should have seen the trouble coming from miles away. Instead I thought I could actually get on friendly terms with my goddamned superintendent and invite him over for a beer. I do things like this because I foolishly think “Dashiell Finley could crack a cold one without incident with his Supt.” It’s true, right?

Instead I was subjected to the world’s most uncomfortable house calls. Right from the start it was all about how I look, and creepy hugs. My super is overweight, actually, he’s obese, and lives in a culture of clubbing and words which are misspelled more than half the time. He wanted to take me to dinner. To clubs. He brought alcohol and weed to my house in quantities that were clearly supposed to buy influence. Once intoixcated on my premises he would ask to kiss me, tried to do stupid “Spanish lessons” to get me to repeat phrases I didn’t exactly know but always had to do with physical contact like “I want to kiss you”, drilled me for stories about my own sex life and shared insane, probably fictitious tales about his own. He asked me if I walked around my apartment naked. He wanted to know what kind of guys I liked, whether I liked him. He liked me. He gave me tons of compliments about liking me so that I would have to reciprocate or feel like a total heel. I let him leave the house totally shaken after forty minutes of this but told him the next day to knock it the fuck off over the telephone. Specifically I asked him what the fuck kind of question was that, did I walk around my apartment naked? It was like I had invited all of the south side of 207th Street between Broadway and 10th Avenue to heckle me in my room. He apologized profusely and said it was all a joke and that he felt so bad and then blew up my phone with more apologetic texts. He wanted to “still be friends”.

Did I mention that I told the fucking building company the unit next to mine was free, when they made a silly bluff during a tenant meeting “well, we’d love to put a super in your building, but where would he go?” like we didn’t know which units in our own building were vacant. I feel very much like I invited all of this unto myself and the police are not helping in regards to my perception of that.

For months I have been in a Cold War of avoiding my superintendent, policing his behavior, and agreeing to see him at intervals so he doesn’t sulk and bitch that I’m ‘avoiding him’. I have no idea why I gave him this kind of consideration, seeing as he let me know out of the starting gate how I felt about having sex with him was immaterial to the matter; he seems to think I was like a spaceship and he was like a black hole, and if he could just drag me past the event horizon, sex would be imminent, and I would be cool with it and powerless to tame his Latin lust. I can honestly say I feel as uncomfortable when he’s pleased with me as when he’s pissed or hurt, like he is now, because I filed a police report about this bullshit and am drafting a letter to the building company.

But sometimes there is bad news when you talk to the cops. For example, they feel the need to mark whether your relationship with your harasser is ‘domestic’ or not; in my case, the deciding factor was had I ever acquiesced and gone on a date with the man who is sexually harassing me. It seemed a major point of contention; since I had allowed him into my apartment for social visits without enlisting my friends to act as chaperons. The fact that he had repeatedly asked me to take my clothes off once invited inside and repeatedly turned even our first conversation to visualizations of my naked body and specifics about my sex life seemed not to matter. What did I expect, asking a 26 year old Latino guy what was on his mind?

The police seem to read into that one the same way my harasser, my father, and my friends do (when being honest): “If a girl invites you to her apartment alone it’s an invitation for sex.” Or, to phrase it another way: boys and girls can never actually be friends in Straightland, because men always want one thing only. So had I gone out on a date with him, or hadn’t I? The police officers asked me this question about four different ways to confirm my meaning. I wonder why that should alter the nature of the case, as if sitting across the dinner table from this guy implied some kind of consent on my part that sitting across my living room from him did not. Apparently, whether or not you cave and actually date men who relentlessly dog you to date them & whom you cannot easily shut out of your life is the difference between a crime-in-progress and a charming “how we met” story.

But I did countenance it; I ignored it for months. This was the initial advice I got from nearly everyone I asked, along with some gentle teasing about my “new boyfriend”. I want to remind everyone this happened in 2013, not 1923, regardless of my blog’s byline. This I want to remind myself this happened in 2013 (and 2014), two years after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence and lost any kind of passcard for naivete. I’m publishing this to remember that when the rubber met the road I transformed back into that shrinking violet woman who passively accepts or lukewarmly reflects unwanted sexual attention and compliments in the hopes that if you give men what they want, they’ll leave you alone without further incident.

But it never works that way. At least, not when the person harassing you is at your work, or your school, or lives in the apartment unit next door. At a certain point I became obedient to his calls and got the privelege of fast response from the super in return; like when he turns off the water and whatever. At least he wasn’t scowling at me, I thought, until he started texting me with his personal problems and shit. He claimed he lost his wallet, and then requested I loan him money. I gave $80, which I thought was more than reasonable, then like an asshole he asked for $100 more. Either he’s got no one else to ask or losing his wallet was going to be no bar on his going to the strip club that night. I meekly gave it over, like you’re supposed to when you’re getting mugged. Last Thursday he asked me to give him some weed and my reaction was ‘sure, whatever it takes for you to back the fuck off.’ So I’ve been paying out these bribes to not be harassed, or something.

So after calling the cops, I was called back today by a detective. He told me he’d tell my next-door neighbor to leave me alone, in a thick Queens accent. So far the only woman in the law I’ve talked to about this was the 911 operator, and she didn’t give me nearly as hard a time about allowing this guy in my apartment, didn’t ask why I didn’t kick him out and get aggressive at the first agitation. Obviously, if we were all alpha males, that would have been the thing to do; go stick my head in the lion’s jaws, provide the kind of ballistic rebuke that could provoke anyone into wanting to slap me upside the head. Mix that with denied sexual desire and a key to my apartment and I’m sure you see why I didn’t do that. Once you get it, tell the NYPD too.

Finally I called my superintendent to tell him I would never be inviting him over for social visits again, and to leave me alone. He seemed confused about it, but about an hour after the call blew up my phone with apologetic texts, much as he had the first time. He was so sorry, he said, he felt so bad. But I don’t think he’s upset because I’m uncomfortable with what he’s done, been doing; he knew I hated that shit all along and it was like a fun game for him, to see what he could get away with before I blew up and bounced him from my pad; he’s only upset because another man, from the police no less, called him to ask him about it. As a parting shot he promised he would ‘never even look at me again’. I should try to get this sexist bully fired from his job and his proximity to my residence.

Today, in the Times, editors were enlisting people to write in the comments section about their experience with street harassment. Both men and women wrote in, and I will do the same. 

I try to avoid 204th Street when I can, especially the south side of the street. Between Broadway and 10th Avenue in particular the likelihood I will be harassed is very high. Normally it’s polite, sort of benign harassment; the kind of sexism that doesn’t send me scrambling for the defenses. Often it’s whispered in my ear right as I pass, one word, like “beautiful”, so that before I have a chance to react we could be ten feet away on a crowded subway platform. Many times I have been harassed and not noticed, conditioned not to pay attention to what strangers might be saying in public amongst their own friends. Other comments have more time to play out. On Broadway (near Dyckman Street), a man once looked me up and down and said “Hey, Red,” which would have been smooth if he wasn’t at least twice my age and had bothered to dress like Don Draper, instead of in sweatpants. I know a little Spanish and I can tell when ‘ella’ is in reference to me. Especially in Spanish men speak as if I am an inanimate object, like an appealing dessert; muy bonita, pero no? I want to fire back but I’m not that swift at it yet; and I forgot that one way my girlfriend taught me to say in Spanish “I can hear you and I’m not impressed.” It began ‘Yo puedo…’ but, really, lo puedo no. So I learn my Spanish by decoding their everyday sexism, which seems half a contest to some Latin guys, how many blanquitas will I scare today? Sometimes I get the feeling people are staring at me. It makes you worry more about how you look if you get the feeling strangers are looking at you all the time, and when they sometimes enforce how you look. Once in the subway, I found it necessary to pull up my pants a little, maybe three inches. A drunk black man hooted at me like it was some titillating display. I put on my steeliest New Yawker voice and told him to shut the fuck up; which is my right. 

Sometimes I feel men try to say something to me on the street to be complimentary, like the McDonald’s delivery guy who compliments my eyes. I will suggest another way to do this that always works to get me in good with the women-folk. Compliment something the woman can control. ‘Sexy’ and ‘beautiful’ are ‘great’ and ‘happy’ if you get my meaning, and it’s more successful if you break the ice if you use more specific adjectives. ‘I like your bag, where did you get it’ or ‘I like your dress’ works very well for me as an icebreaker when I’m charming random ladies on the subway. Then again, maybe coming from me it’s all cis-gendered hetero stuff; because I never try to screw them. 

Vice Magazine has revived the practice of sending young, male correspondents abroad into combat zones, politically hostile nations and significantly within harm’s way as a means of getting shocking street-level imagery of current events from the perspective of an average citizen; unfortunately the charnel house, culture shock, and angry Russian bouncers doesn’t make what Vice is doing actual journalism. Vice Magazine would like to style itself as the place where a millennial Hunter S. Thompson would have worked, the gonzo reporter of the YouTube Age: this is the standard conceit of any news video on Vice.com.

I can never really learn any foreign policy or cultural understanding from Vice News, which increases proportionally as the reporter himself becomes a character in the story. Vice Correspondents are generally twenty something white guys with at least some college, if not a bachelor’s (but rarely more than that), and can be American, British, or European; their first language is English or English bilingual to something else (like Russian.) They are always fairly attractive, intelligent men who seem to want to try and tell the story they’re covering, and either get caught up in the minutiae or wind up asking puerile questions to their interviewees. These are the kinds of reporters that in the bygone days would have been snapped up by a newspaper; and for all their honesty come off as hopelessly green. (Full disclosure: I am not a reporter.) But whether they’re headed to watch Ukranian townies fight the revolution with rocks and pot lids or just uptown to the South Bronx, it seems like the Vice Correspondent initiation ritual must involve, among other things, having a gun put to your head.

But it still isn’t news. As I write this article I’m listening to the walking joke Eddie Hwong, Korean guy wearing star-of-david bling on his pinky finger, telling me how to eat at the nearby Malecon restaurant in Washington Heights. He sort of started with a good thought about how New York is a microcosm of the world; but if I lived in Santo Domingo would I have some idiot screeching “Chinaman got to have his rice, and don’t eat stewed goat if you don’t like pussy” in my restaurant? Probably not. Eddie Hwong has no more right to review Washington Heights than I do; actually he has less; I lived there for six months. Now a montage of Goya products; what is this supposed to be? Grocery ethnography. Then we cut to his apartment and some dreamy hip-hop for blunt-rolling. That’s Vice News, people. Make sure to wear your toilet shirt to work (not kidding.)

The one big article I found with a girl as correspondent was pretty awful; it was a review of Atlanta strip clubs, which, Atlanta is, according to this video, famous for (but so is Tampa, according to a different strip club review on Vice.com.) It’s kind of sad that Joanna Fuertes-Knight refers to herself as a music journalist when she has to listen to (male) strip club managers talk about “soft skin on dick” in search of “the real ATL”, as she calls it. Even though she claims to have “been crazy about the dirty-south stripper anthems” as a girl in the UK, I want to call that bluff. Which were those songs? The video itself has a pretty generic thump-thump beat informed by the vaguest whiff of hip-hop, but I think that’s just called ‘pop’. The imagery switches back to women shakin’ dat ass at least every two minutes in case the male viewers are getting bored. If you ever do go to Atlanta to the see strippers, make sure you throw the dollar bills directly at her bare ass and groin, apparently that’s how they do it in the ATL. The article took a turn for the horrifying when, without warning, we headed to the plastic surgeon all the strippers in Atlanta go to and he told Ms. Fuertes-Knight all the things he could potentially have done to her, pinching every tiny roll and piece of fat around her bra to get ‘cleaned up and curvy’. Her butt was ‘long’. It would cost 15,000 to fix everything on our female correspondent.

Vice has a do’s and don’ts section, which is more of a what’s-what of what the boys are looking at: topless girls, ugly girls, their own frat brothers drunk, and stuff they’re reblogging from tumblr; there’s never a photo credit. Not to skip around, but everything Vice does is fast and loose; and depends on going to armpit Soviet satellite states like Kyrgyzstan to get access; only in Kyrgyzstan or NY Fashion Week or similarly irrelevant events do Vice reporters get real access. (And they seem to have an incredible amount of access to all the little Eastern European countries no American knows about, god knows why.) Are you cutting your teeth, Vice guys, or are you just wasting your time? Is it outsider journalism or just inept vlogging?