Public harassment is a problem the majority of women face on a day to day basis. Whether it be catcalling or comments online, they are humiliating and a constant worry. They often fall under the same theme, degrading comments about the body, insistence that they want sex in some form, or coercion to harmful stereotypes/gender roles. It’s not always even directed at the woman hearing it, as speaking about “conquests” or complaining about “prudes” is also common. All of this dehumanizing and shaming talk is brushed off by society. “It’s just boys being boys,” “locker room talk,” and “it’s a compliment,” are all habitual justifications and defenses of this behavior. It’s prevalent enough that’s accepted, or at the very least not important enough to do anything about it.
This art piece focused on the moniker of “Locker Room Talk.” Locker room talk refers to an assumed phenomenon of boys/men speaking in a degrading way about girls/women in the men’s locker room. That since there are no women to get offended, they can be as crass as they want. The four speech bubbles are split into two; two with fonts meant to be more text-like, and the other two with a regular font. The texts are meant to represent online harassment, and the regular ones are meant to represent verbal harassment. The shaky lines and messy coloring represent how strange of a justification it’s meant to be. That harassment is normal and just how guys talk to each other alone. The smudged ink of the quotes is meant to symbolize how women are convinced to accept the treatment, to not see it as the harassment that it is. The darkness of the inside of the locker is portraying how dreadful of a place the harassment is coming from. All in all, I wished to portray a sense of surrealism, it’s a recognizable shape and object, but the messiness shows how strange it’s supposed to be.
