Phoenix artist Jen Urso has a thing for maps. But, she’s always wanted something more out of them than you’d normally get.
The maps she makes reflect not just the streets and landmarks, but memories, experiences that happened there — the good and the bad. And, last year, she made one that struck a nerve.
It’s called a "Guide to Running While Female in Central Phoenix." At first, it looks like a hand-drawn map of Central Phoenix, but look closer, and there are a lot of memories buried in it. And a reality that Urso discovered most of the men in her life knew nothing about. Urso joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
JEN URSO: I had been talking a lot with my partner about, you know, experience of running and realized in our conversation how much he didn't realize like what my experience was like versus his as a guy. He was saying, you know, I love running at night in our neighborhood because it's nice and dark and quiet and nobody's there. And I'm like, that's precisely why I don't run in a neighborhood at night. I'm like, I stick to main streets. I do this.
And I had also told him about an experience of going down this one street where this guy was always hassling me, you know, like, you know, yelling crude things at me. And so I just started to avoid that street and he was like, well, that, that's really not, that's not great because that's like altering your behavior. And I said, what do you think it's like every day? You know, like when I go run, I'm thinking about all of these things, you know, how I dress?
What time I go? How populated is it? Is it a weekend? Is it a weekday? You know, I'm, I'm constantly thinking of all these different aspects before I step out the door for my own safety as somebody who's been running for now. God, I just turned 50. So I've been running for 37 years.
LAUREN GILGER: Always a factor and a lot of different factors. OK. So this is radio. So you have to talk about what this looks like a little bit because people can't see it. It's a map of central Phoenix, right? Like around where you live and where you run and there are symbols on it, like there are on many maps, but they're not kind of your average symbols. You've got bright lights, little sunshines, right? Like little kind of megaphone things. You've got one that's a little sports bra with a circle around it that's crossed out. So decode this for us. What are you describing?
URSO: So I was thinking of the different routes that I would take and there were three things that stood out to me. It was like, where would I run only in the daylight? You know, where is it not safe to run at night? So a lot of that's like, I would never run on the canal at night. I don't care how lit they make it and how pretty they make it like it's not, not an option.
The little megaphone thing was places I remember being catcalled and that's like, remembered. It doesn't mean like those are all the places that I feel like I was surely catcalled and honked at many other times.
GILGER: You can like the ones that were especially egregious.
URSO: And then the other one is a sports bra with the line through. It was when I think about like, I'm so hot, I just want to like run in my sports bra. But I know as soon as I take it off, there's like this transition where now I know I'm going to get honked at like, it's like I'm making myself open to it. And I've had moments where like, I've been out running, no honking at all and then the shirt comes off and I'm just in a sports bar and then I get honked at or yelled at immediately.
GILGER: Yeah. Wow. So talk about your own experiences in this. Like, it sounds like this is not like a great thing for you. You've been running for a long time and running for a long time in Phoenix. But it's challenging. Like I, I run a lot in the city as well. Does it ruin it for you? Like, I'm, I'm curious that you still do it right.
URSO: I love running and I love just the feeling of that my body can take me, you know, this long distance. And right now I'm, I'm training for a 50K and it's like trying to imagine myself in a space like traveling that amount of, you know, those miles is, is incredible. There have been a lot of negative things that have happened to me in my life and it's never like, stopped me from doing the thing that I love to do. It's, it's almost like, well, how can I overcome this and how can I figure out a way to do it where I can still enjoy it.
And,, you know, would I like to go run on a trail by myself and feel safe, I would love that, but I'm not going to do it. But, oh God, I don't know why do I still do it? Like I couldn't not do it. And I would say, you know, 90% of the time it's not like, you know, you're not getting harassed, but there's always a chance. And I think now that I'm an older woman, there's less of a chance. So I have that freedom of like being older and my sexual invisibility increasing, which has a little bit of a freedom to it. I kind of enjoy that.
GILGER: So, so you have this important kind of note at the bottom of this map that it's PS and you say like this is ridiculous, right? Can you read that part for us?
URSO: It says PS, we note this is all ridiculous, right? I should be able to run anywhere in a sports bra and short shorts, young or old, skinny or fat with headphones without worrying about being raped or murdered , much less harassed and assaulted.
GILGER: Yeah.
URSO: I mean, you know, the, the, the nature of this map was kind of meant to be sort of funny, like, you know, because I find it absurd and absurd things are hilarious, but it's also, it's so frustrating, you know. And the thing that, that was really remarkable to me when this map came out. So, you know, all the women I've shown it to are like, yeah. Yeah. It's totally, this is like just walking, you know, because it's not necessarily like running. It's any time you're out alone.
And then a friend of mine shared it and then a male friend of hers shared it and he got all of these comments and all of these reactions. All of these men saying this is so sad. This is terrible. What does this say about our society? You know? And I'm just like, oh my, I'm shocked that they're shocked. Like, how did they not know?
I think mostly it's because a lot with a lot of the stuff we internalize it and we just do it because it's how we have to survive and how we've learned to survive. I mean, like I've had close calls like I've had as a teenager, some man following me in his car hiding in a driveway. I had to run across a field from a high school to get him to, to shake him from me. You know, I've had people like, block me. I've had people pull over. I used to count the cars.
Pay attention in my small town like, oh, I've seen that car pass me now four times. Like I need to change my route or I need to turn around or, you know, like I've figured out all these little survival tactics. I'm not paranoid, you know, like it's happening.
GILGER: No. Yeah. Like we do, we internalize this kind of stuff. So it seems so obvious. What do you think? Like, is that part of the release of putting this out in the world? Even if you didn't really kind of intend that when you did it?
URSO: Yeah. I mean, I think with a lot of the maps that I create it's about giving a voice to something that I don't feel like has a voice, you know, and it could be something silly or serious or a mixture of both like this one is. You know, I wrote a blog post about this and then that became my way of sort of expanding on this idea. And when I initially wrote it, I was thinking this is just gonna be me talking about it hitting a nerve with people and how unusual that was.
But then as I was writing it, it turned into this expose, sort of, of my experience as a woman, as a girl, like being a runner and kind of the pain and the frustration of it too. So I realized like how, how much more depth there was to this feeling of what, you know, the impetus behind creating this map in the first place.
It's like it makes me angry that this is the reality, but it's also the reality and it's not going to change tomorrow. So, I don't know, what else can we do but give a voice to it and not sort of gaslight ourselves all the time. Like as soon as we make men aware and not like in an insistent, like you need to see this but just talk about it because this is reality.
