Stop Telling Women to Smile Stories of Street Harassment and How We're Taking Back Our Power

The debut book from a celebrated artist on the urgent topic of street harassment

Every day, all over the world, women are catcalled and denigrated simply for walking down the street. Boys will be boys, women have been told for generations, ignore it, shrug it off, take it as a compliment. But the harassment has real consequences for women: in the fear it instills and the shame they are made to feel.

In Stop Telling Women to Smile, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh uses her arresting street art portraits to explore how women experience hostility in communities that are supposed to be homes. She addresses the pervasiveness of street harassment, its effects, and the kinds of activism that can serve to counter it. The result is a cathartic reckoning with the aggression women endure, and an examination of what equality truly entails.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a classically trained oil painter and street artist, a Forbes "30 Under 30" recipient, and one of Brooklyn Magazine's "Most Influential People." Her street art series, Stop Telling Women to Smile, has been covered by Time, NPR, MSNBC, Oxygen Network, and others. Fazlalizadeh lives in Brooklyn, New York.