Sexual Harassment on Sidewalk

        Sexual Harassment On Sidewalk

   In the book, Sidewalk by Mitch Duneier, the author discusses about sidewalk vendors. He is interested in them and wants to find out more about their social lives and if there is any social inequality. Mitch Duneier is a sociologist who lives on the same neighborhood where vendors are located. He wants to learn: How do they survive? What do people think about them? How do they communicate with pedestrians especially with women?

   There are a lot of African American male vendors on the sidewalk located on 6Th Ave, Greenwich village, which is white neighborhood. Almost all of the people who live here are rich and educated. The vendors are pretty organized. Each vendors has to have their own table on which they sell their stuff. Moreover they all get their own spots on sidewalk. If they don’t want to lose it, they have to hold it for all night. Or they can hire “place holder” who will keep their spot during night time. They aren’t doing it for free, vendors must pay for this service. Besides they even have “table watcher” who can watch vendor’s table when they need to go somewhere. Watcher can sell stuff while owner of the table move away. Most of the stuff vendors get from trash and donation, and a small percent they buy from superintendents or thieves. Thieves is the people usually who works for printed material company, so they take the material from their jobs. Some of the vendors are unhoused. They live on a street and sleep there, some of them doing so to hold their spots. A lot of them are middle age who were in jail. Furthermore, many of them are drug and alcohol addicted. Most vendors are uneducated people, some of them even dropped out from school.

   Most vendors said that they chose this kind of life. Mitch Dunier discovered that it’s not true, they didn’t have a choice. Their families threw them out from home, because they were aggressive and had very bad behaviors. For example, they shout on their family members or just sit a home and didn’t do anything instead to go and find a job. They can’t live a normal life. It’s very difficult to them to communicate with people even with their families and do their responsibilities. So that’s why it’s better to them to be independent; be on their own in informal economy. Vendors don’t see that working in an informal economy it’s a deviant behavior. They think like that they are just selling their stuff and don’t do anything wrong. Some people see them as someone who makes the streets safer, by watching around and make sure that everything is fine. For example, people say “If something happened to you, they will come to your aid.” But many people see them as deviant behavior. For example, store owners which locate near vendors, tell that they are losing their money. Vendors sell stuff cheaply than stores, so that’s why people prefer to buy things from them than from stores. Furthermore, some of them are selling drugs on the street. Vendors have problems with bathroom. Store owners don't allow the vendors to use their bathroom, because they are dirty and smell bad. So they urinate on the streets. By doing so, they make streets and sidewalks disgusting. Most of the vendors are communicate with people in a nice and polite way but not all of them do so. Mitch Dunier noticed that some magazine vendors sexually harass women. For example, Mudrick the magazine vendor is always bother women passersby, by telling them something in a rude way. By doing so he hurts womens’ feelings, and makes them feel unsafe. Most vendors don’t like the way that Mudrick communicates with women, especially book vendors. They said that they are losing their customers because he touches womens’ feeling and they will never become their customers. Women become stigmatic. Why is he talking to them this way? It is because they are different gender.