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__A ROMP IN ROME _|_ PAGE 2 OF 2

"Bella ragazza," a man in white jeans said one day as I walked down a narrow, shop-lined street. "Ve-ry beau-ti-ful," he said again, looking at my body through the blue cotton dress and then at my face with a smile. I may not be interested in what he's interested in, I thought, but how could I not smile back at such a compliment?

I felt as though my body were being appreciated rather than attacked. I began to wear the short spaghetti strap dress I had, and the nearly see-through sheer skirt, not just for the pleasure of the warm wind and sunshine touching my skin -- I also anticipated with a little girlish pride the looks and occasional comments I would receive.

What was happening? Was my feminist stamina lapsing? Where was the icy don't-fuck-with-me face, the bitterness of my Seattle pedestrian days? It just wasn't the same. Some of these guys might be lecherous, but they weren't aggressive. For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt safe enough to stop worrying about it. Even when the overall-clad man in the Campo dei Fiori market pinched my ass, my first thought was simply, "Oh yeah, that'll win me over, big boy." His gesture was silly, neither flattering nor threatening. I rolled my eyes and off he went.

Had I treated the place like an amusement park, as some of my young countrywomen did, I could have gotten into trouble. But I found that I could be aware of my surroundings without holding onto my fear. And by losing that fear, I could be pleasantly surprised by this other system of social behavior. In that month I had more genuine interchanges with Italian men, using the few words I knew of their language or their few words of mine, in bars and shops and out under that bright sun than I have in a year with unknown American men.

Now that I'm back on the streets of Seattle, some of the shields are up again, because the fun is gone. "Hey, baby," doesn't have quite the same ring as "Ciao, bella," for starters. But there's also an anger behind the eyes of the men here, a barely concealed resentment. Catcalls here don't mean the same thing. Those Campo boys would never shout "bitch," either. The old feminist refrain comes back to me: It's not about sex; it's about power.

I'm sick of that refrain; I'd rather understand what's driving the behavior. But seeing one's own culture is always more difficult. For now, I simply content myself with the knowledge that it isn't like this everywhere.
SALON | March 11, 1998

Fiona Morgan is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle.

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