She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, and shared the following:
Page 99 of my new book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, is only half text. The top half of the page features an image taken from a travel brochure that the U.S. Navy distributed to seamen on leave in San Diego during World War II. The image is a cartoon depicting a sailor playing checkers with an older woman in old-fashioned clothes. The sailor has whipped his head around, mid-turn, to watch as a younger woman in a shorter skirt and high heels walks by. The caption reads, “In a travel guide for enlisted men on leave in San Diego, illustrations like this one suggested that sailors would encounter young women throughout the city and might ogle them as part of their leisure activities.” You can view the cartoon in its original form in the digitized pamphlet.Visit Molly M. Brookfield's website.
The bottom half of the page includes some of the larger context that helps readers understand the significance of the image. It reads:…troops as no different from the average, virile white American male in their sexual appetites and exemplified the military’s expectation for a certain amount of sexual boisterousness and eagerness among enlisted men. As Marilyn Hegarty has argued, the armed forces harbored a quiet but ‘official acceptance of . . . men’s need for sex’ and hoped to control and direct that need rather than suppress it altogether. A doctor tasked with evaluating the military’s recreation programs espoused this belief when he insisted on men’s ‘normal desire for feminine companionship.’ The doctor worried that recreation programs that employed older women as motherly figures for homesick troops would not fulfill servicemen’s needs. If the military did not put enlisted men in contact with young, attractive women, the doctor warned, servicemen might seek such…You could do worse than land on this page using the Page 99 Test. For one, analysis of images and popular culture is a big part of Watching the Girls Go By. In the larger book, I focus a lot on how humorous depictions of white men ogling, catcalling, and otherwise accosting women in public space normalized these behaviors as harmless and even desirable. So, the image analysis on page 99 gives readers a sense of one of the key methods I use to show that pop culture helped convince Americans that it was normal and funny for white male strangers to intrude on women’s time, attention, and bodies in public space.
The text on page 99 is less representative of the whole book. On the plus side, it describes part of an important hinge point in the history of street harassment in the United States. During World War II, the U.S. military was instrumental in normalizing behaviors like catcalling and ogling as natural for white men. Military personnel, who worried about troops contracting sexually transmitted infections, warned servicemen to avoid sexual intercourse with women as much as possible. At the same time, higher-ups also feared servicemen turning inward and engaging in same-sex sex with other troops. With these dual fears in mind, military brass encouraged flirtation, ogling, even catcalling amongst servicemen, as a kind of non-physical way of letting off steam and satisfying sexual urges. All kinds of military propaganda and media—including the pamphlet featured on page 99—promoted humorous depictions of servicemen engaging in intrusive behaviors with women. The message: better to catcall and ogle a passing woman than engage in what the military perceived as risky sexual behaviors.
You might get some of this from the text on page 99, but not the whole story. And even this hinge point is just one small part of the over-100-year story I am telling in the book. Still, the Page 99 Test gives a glimpse into what to expect from the tone and methodology of Watching the Girls Go By, and I hope anyone flipping to page 99 will be curious to read more.
--Marshal Zeringue