Why We Should Stop Saying Street Harassment Is a Compliment

Originally published on Lefty Cartoons and cross-posted here with their permission.

If you ask street harassers why they catcall women, chances are they’ll say they mean it as a compliment. “If women on the street said I look nice, it would make my day!”

But the thing is, street harassment is not a compliment. It’s obnoxious at best and terrifying at worst.

This cartoon demonstrates how absurd and dismissive it is to expect people to be flattered by street harassment. To read more of his awesome comics, click here.

To learn more about why street harassment is wrong and what you can do about it, please check out:

• 5 Excuses for Street Harassment We Need To Stop Making…Now
• Why We Act to Stop Street Harassment
• 7 Steps You Can Take To Address Street Harassment
• What Men Can Do To Stop Street Harassment

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Barry Deutsch is the Portland-based author and cartoonist of Ampersand, a political comic with a generally progressive sensibility. A new Ampersand comic appears in every issue of Dollars and Sense Magazine. Barry attended Oberlin College in Ohio in the late 1980s, the School of Visual Arts in New York City in the 1990s (where he took classes from comics legend Will Eisner), and graduated from Portland State University several years ago. While at PSU, his political cartoons won the Charles M. Schulz Award. His current comics project is my comic book Hereville, a fantasy adventure comic about an 11-year-old Jewish girl. Check out his blog and follow him on Twitter @barrydeutsch.