This summer I worked in New York City. And when I say New York City, I definitely do not mean some swanky internship in Manhattan. Nope, I commuted ever day for eleven weeks to and from a lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
After working eleven hour days five (and occasionally six) days a week, I’d do a two hour commute home, walking nearly a mile through the Bronx, getting on the subway for forty five minutes to Harlem, and taking the commuter train out to the suburbs. And for the first time in my life on that commute, I got catcalled, and not just once – enough to make me dread it and bow my head and watch my back both in broad daylight and at dusk.
Before coming to live in Latin America for three months, I did my research (see one and two) on machismo, what I thought would be the region’s version of this same deal. I read all of Sarah Menkedick’s pieces on Mexico that I could find. I had dinner with Josh – a friend of my dad’s – and he told me that in Peru at least I was most likely going to be ignored, rather than have anything said directly to me.
Now I’ve been here exactly eight weeks today, and I can honestly say I heard worse on that Bronx-and-Harlem-to-the-burbs commute than I have while here, in a country in a region notorious for machismo and its poor treatment of women. The most I’ve ever gotten is a slightly suggestive hello, and a couple of “Hola linda” (“hello pretty”). Maybe my Spanish isn’t subtle enough, but I don’t dread it on my commute every day, like I did by the end of this past summer.
If I’ve learned anything with regards to women-suppressing attitudes while here, it’s this: we need to fix the problems with machismo in the US before relegating it solely to Latin America, even if machismo itself is an untranslatable word.
Putney Mediates the Media 