Recently, I attended a book reading and Q&A featuring Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, author of Stop Telling Women to Smile and popular artist. She is working on a project to draw attention to catcalling and street harassment through her art, and speaks on her experience with harassment growing up related to her gender and race. 

Tatyana writes in her book of the constant harassment she received throughout middle school and how she was repeatedly faced with unacceptable behavior. She writes about how she was sexualized by the boys at her school, and how nothing was ever done to address this growing issue. She continues to move to Philadelphia when she was 17 to pursue her education- learning to use her art to vent and to express the harassment that her and many other women were facing. Later, educating herself further on the issue, she began to interview all types of women of their experience on catcalling and painting murals of them along with empowering messages. In 2020, Stop Telling Women to Smile, her book containing her experiences and the interviews she recorded was published.

Something she focused on during her Q&A that is never spoken about enough is the racial component associated with her artwork. Tatyana speaks on how she constructed a mural featuring a man she had spoken to with the words “let black men be soft”. She mentions that she received lots of negative feedback from this because  “the word soft has a very particular condensation in the black community”. For her, putting art like that in the street is always an experiment, a test to see how people will respond. Additionally, she speaks to a woman who “ talks a lot about being a black woman and [the] particular type of harassment that she gets from black men”- adding an interesting question if street harassment is often associated with race and not just gender.

Generally, Tatyana adds a unique and styled perspective to the issue of sexual harassment and how it affects all different types of people through her literature and her art. Hearing her Q&A was incredible and inspiring me, critically as a young girl facing street harassment. 

Find her at: https://www.instagram.com/tlynnfaz/