Street harassment and catcalling are such a part of daily life that too many women have accepted it as part of daily life. To prove just how weird and strange it is for men to think women are there for them to taunt and 'compliment' in increasingly aggressive ways, Hollaback!, the organisation looking to eradicate street harassment through activism, put together this video:
If you can't watch it now, it shows a woman silently walking through New York for 10 hours in jeans and a T-shirt. She is catcalled, followed and told off for not talking back about 108 times. Almost as weird as the harassment is the amount of men saying 'god bless you' to her bum.
READ MORE: When A Guy Next Says "Cheer Up Love" You Might Want To Rant To This Woman
Rob Bliss, 26, was inspired to make the video after seeing how much harassment his girlfriend got on the street, and enlisted the help of volunteer Shoshana B. Roberts to create the video.
As Shoshana walked, she held a microphone in each hand, while Rob walked in front of her with a camera hidden on his back using a special chest harness and a T-shirt with a hole cut into it.
Shoshana noted: ‘I’m harassed when I smile and I’m harassed when I don’t. I’m harassed by white men, black men, latino men. Not a day goes by when I don’t experience this.’
As strange as this video is, when it's all laid out like this, there's something oddly familiar about it, as well. After all, 70-99 per cent of women will experience street harassment.
READ MORE: This Is The Perfect Response To Any Guy Telling You To Smile
It all seems pretty depressing, not least because Shoshana is now facing death and rape threats online for daring to talk about the reality of catcalling.
But she's sticking by her intentions, and she's right to. The more people who can define the catcalls they receive on the street as sexual harassment, the more people can help them act against it and change the pervasive perky culture.
Well, that's what Emily May says anyway. Her TEDCity 2.0 Talk happened last year, but it's just been uploaded by the people of TED to YouTube and it really will make you feel uplifted about the worldwide quest to stop street harassment.
Again, if you can't watch it right now, she tells a story of Anita Hill, an American woman who, in the ’80s, took her horrible experience of sexual harassment (her boss used to describe his penis to her) to the courts and won. The landmark ruling paved the way for sexual harassment at work to be made thoroughly illegal and the culture came over to the UK, too. Now, you can't set foot in an office without knowing it's not alright to sexually harass someone.
Emily, who is the executive director of Hollaback! uses this example to explain that if we've stamped out sexual harassment at work, we can stamp it out on the streets. And that the first step of doing that is sharing our stories.
If you get harassed today? Well, Hollaback!’s research has found that taking action can help. You can take a photo of the harasser or report them to officials, and then you are less likely to experience that weird shame/anger hybrid you get every time someone says ‘smile’. Interestingly, bystanders can have a positive effect by confronting the harasser, not just because it resulted in shutting them up, but because it also made the target feel better.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Sexism, Trolls and Rape Threats: What It’s Really Like To Be A Female Gamer
After Murders Of Two Brits, Thailand’s PM Says Girls Shouldn’t Think They’re Safe In Bikinis
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.