Several months ago, I found a
documentary photo project online that completely slayed me. As I was sitting in my friend Ximena's car late last night at a stoplight, I was reminded why. A panhandler came up to the window of her car holding out a styrofoam cup. It was just after 1 am and we were the only car sitting at the light on I-35 and Cesar Chavez in Austin. As he approached the car, my muscles tensed and Ximena reached for her door and hit the locks, pausing for just an instant in conversation. In the silence of the car, the automatic locks of her aging SUV tried again and again to catch as we kept our heads forward, trying not to make eye contact.
When I first saw The Unaddressed photos, I felt like an awful person. I spent hours looking at them, often in tears, and (though I know it sounds dramatic) questioning my humanity. Just before I'd seen this doc, I'd heard two friends (after we'd been approached by a homeless man as we left a restaurant) discussing how they always give homeless people money, no matter how broke they are themselves, and I had walked uncomfortably and silently beside them.
The answer to this discomfort lies partly in something that happened to Ximena and I earlier in the evening. As we'd been walking from her car down to 6th street to buy some street pizza, we came upon a white minivan that was parked by the sidewalk, facing us. There was a man in the driver's seat and the passenger-side door was open. Another man was standing there with his shirt off and he shouted toward us something along the lines of
Hello and do you know you're the most beautiful women I've ever seen? We said
Thank you and kept walking, not slowing down.
From the time I was a young girl, I've been warned about dangerous men. My mom grew up right next to what was called
The Killing Fields, an area off the Gulf Coast of Texas where young women's bodies were dumped
for almost 30 years after being abducted and murdered. To get to our house from town, there was a 10-mile stretch of almost no houses and complete darkness. Every night when I was coming home from a friend's house or my job at Baskin Robbins, I'd call my mom to let her know I was on my way and she'd say "Lock the doors. Don't stop. Come straight home." She knew how long it should take me and if I wasn't there when I should be, she'd be up waiting, trying to decide whether to call the police.
I may have mentioned this before, but when I was TA'ing at UC Santa Cruz, the professor for the Intro American Studies class brought in a woman to talk about sexual assault. She asked (in an auditorium of about 180 students) how many men had ever been worried that they'd be raped while walking to their car or down the street alone. About 3 or 4 men raised their hands. Then she asked the same thing of the women. From my seat in the front row, I craned my neck to look around the room. Every woman I could see raised her hand.
When I started looking at the photos in The Unaddressed, I was so distressed that I went through one at a time trying to piece through it. The two-dimensional photos affected me in an entirely different way than being confronted with a living, breathing person would. Why was I able to engage with the representations of the people so much differently than actual people? Finally, while looking at one of the photos of women, I realized that I never felt the same distress with women panhandlers or homeless. They could approach my windows at night and I had no fear of a knife coming out or them reaching in to pull me out of my car or pushing me down on the street. It was about men, not about homelessness. Any man who approaches me on the street, whether to catcall, ask for money, or pass me by on his way somewhere else, poses the same danger.
Last night, sadly, I realized that--despite figuring this out many months ago--my reaction hasn't changed.
