Olde world ogling and modern Mrs.

BY: Claire Harvey - The Daily Telegraph.

THE lovely photograph accompanying this column is 55 years old (but still so stylish). It encapsulates, I think, something powerful about old Europe.
It's the classic milk-bar picture; one of those framed posters as familiar as the scrape of chairs on a linoleum floor and the smell of hot newsprint around steaming chips.
I've always hated this photograph, in a funny way.
For single women travelling alone in old-fashioned Europe, the daily joys of life are leers from across the footpath, the romantic brush of a stranger's hand over the bottom on a crowded train, the small grunted slurs from some fellow in the street.
With a male chaperon by her side, however, the life of a lady on the continent is extraordinarily different. She won't be ogled but she will be ignored.
After years of travelling, I just took my first holiday with my husband by my side and boy, what a difference.
The Greek hotel clerks kept their eyes studiously averted. The rental-car agents handed the keys directly to my husband.
He got the wine list, and the restaurant bill, and the change, even when I was paying. Our separate surnames didn't compute.
The Turkish highway patrol cops looked to him in plain confusion when they pulled me over for a licence check: what's with the chick behind the wheel?
It wasn't bad it was just noticeable, and a sharp reminder of how easy, how free it feels to be a woman in modern Australia, where marital status is irrelevant, customer service is generally gender-blind and public leering is generally confined to the building site.
There's a special art of enduring the sleazy attention of men in the Euro-street, or anywhere else where it's considered normal for men to click or wink or touch or whisper in the street.
I've never bothered to get too worked up about it and I've learnt not to make the mistake of interpreting it as flattery.
A woman need not be even passably attractive to attract attention on the streets of Venice or Paris; she merely needs a skirt and a pulse.
The catcalling and the ogling happens to everyone.
It is not, I presume, meant to be offensive, although it can be excruciatingly embarrassing like the time I fell on my face while trying to jog in deeply unflattering track-wear through Zagreb, feeling nothing but indignity and mortification as the whistle of some unseen bloke turned to laughter.
The photograph, Ruth Orkin's 'American Girl in Italy, 1951', is hard to fault as an image; a striking icon of American photojournalism. It appears beautifully fluid and choreographed.
In fact, according to the photographer, it was a real moment in time.
Orkin, then a young woman travelling alone, was walking through a Florence square with a woman she'd met in a hotel, Jinx Allen, when they encountered this lounging group of girl-watchers.
Orkin heard the whistles, turned to photograph Allen walking among the men, and then had her backtrack and walk past a second time, to get the picture right.
The fellows happily obliged with more ogles and whistles. For them, it was presumably a harmless moment of Saturday afternoon street theatre.
For the young American woman, it was what? Enjoyable attention? Harassment? It's hard to tell. The ambiguity is what makes this image powerful.
I think, framed on a truck-stop wall, it's meant to suggest European sophistication and a sense of sexual liberation beyond our own mundane Anglo-Australian stitched-upness.
But I've always felt a sense of menace beneath the flattery.
The picture captures something essential about the nature of solo travel for women, I think the emotional isolation of being female and unaccompanied in a foreign land; the feeling of being utterly conspicuous as a foreigner; the rawness of unashamed European flirtation.
The blokes in this picture and the ones who stare and flirt in Florence today don't seem terribly interested in speaking to the object of their attention.
They don't particularly care if she's embarrassed or not, interested or not.
They do care, as I discovered over the past couple of months, if she's married or obviously with a man.
Male respect for masculine pride or perhaps wariness of masculine temper acts as a kind of sharp-edged protection for a married woman. She might not be harassed, but she also won't find it easy to catch the waiter's eye.
And if she is harassed, say in France, she's expected to keep quiet about it.
Turns out there are dozens of Frenchwomen who've been tormented by the likes of grotty old French silverback Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his friends over the years, but their stories have gone untold because well, because what's wrong with groping and ogling?
Take it as a compliment, mademoiselle.
In Australia in 2011, thank goodness, none of that really applies any more. There's very little public harassment or even overt flirtation between strangers, regardless of what a woman is wearing.
In hotels and restaurants and pubs and car-hire joints, a woman will usually be treated exactly the same as everyone else, regardless of whether there's a bloke standing behind her. It's delightful.
It's one of the underappreciated joys of Australian life and although I'm not pretending our society is completely free of sexism, I'm delighted that particular brand of it has died off.
The colourful difference of Euro-style gender relations stay behind the glass of the picture-frame; picturesque and no longer our problem.

                                      Ruth Orkins famous American Girl in Italy, 1951.