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Zonie63 -> RE: 10 hours of walking in NYC as a woman (11/4/2014 6:32:40 AM)
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FR
I found some interesting commentary about this video. One thing I didn't realize when I first viewed it was that the video was produced by a marketing agency and that the woman in the video is an actress.
The Problem With That Catcalling Video
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The video is a collaboration between Hollaback, an anti-street harassment organization, and the marketing agency Rob Bliss Creative. At the end they claim the woman experienced 100-plus incidents of harassment “involving people of all backgrounds.” Since that obviously doesn’t show up in the video, Bliss addressed it in a post. He wrote, “We got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera,” or was ruined by a siren or other noise. The final product, he writes, “is not a perfect representation of everything that happened.” That may be true but if you find yourself editing out all the catcalling white guys, maybe you should try another take.
This is not the first time Bliss has been called out for race blindness. In a video to promote Grand Rapids, Michigan, he was criticized for making a city that’s a third minority and a quarter poor look like it was filled with people who have “been reincarnated from those peppy family-style 1970s musical acts from Disney World or Knott’s Berry Farm,” as a local blogger wrote.
“Hey, Beautiful”: On the Racist and Classist Implications of the Catcalling Video
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The fact that the video chooses to showcase the experience of a white woman experiencing harassment almost exclusively at the hands of black and Latino men is a pretty clear indication of who the audience for this video is supposed to be, namely, those who seek to protect and defend innocent white women, aka the already existing societal power structure. It’s no coincidence that Roberts is presented in the video as being explicitly not responsible for the attacks on her because she’s not wearing “provocative” clothes and she doesn’t respond to any of the verbal assaults thrown at her. The clear implication here is that Roberts is just an innocent woman who doesn’t deserve these catcalls, thus suggesting that there are some women who, because of the way they dress or because of the way they respond, could be thought to be asking for it. Roberts is, in a sense, the ideal victim, the one we love to rally behind. Not only is she not asking for all these catcalls, but in case you had any doubts that she definitely doesn’t want to be approached, it is made clear that Roberts has a boyfriend who is filming her because he too wants to protect her from… whom exactly? Oh, multitudes of anonymous black and Latino men? How gallant of him. How evocative of countless other examples of men wanting to protect the safety of white women.
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Hollaback continues to caution that street harassment is “not a ‘cultural’ thing, perpetrated mostly by men of color” but is rather a “‘cultural’ thing in the sense that it emerges from a culture of sexism—and unfortunately—that is everyone’s culture.” Even Roberts herself admits, “I’m harassed by white men, black men, latino men. Not a day goes by when I don’t experience this.”
And yet, despite the acknowledgement that street harassment primarily affects people other than straight white women, and that the perpetrators are not limited to one racial group or one socio-economic class, the video helps to perpetuate the long-held, erroneous belief that harassment mostly takes the form of white women being bothered by “low class” men of color. Why? Well, maybe—just maybe—this has to do with the fact that, through this video, Hollaback is soliciting viewers for donations, and is thus counting on the outrage of people with money, i.e. people who have disposable income and a certain place in the pre-existing power structure which has no problem with the ongoing propagation of the myth of the white woman as the ur-victim.
The problem isn’t just that this video exists, it’s also that there’s no video of what more typical street harassment actually looks like, which is probably because a transwoman of color being harassed might not be as much of a donation getter as the video of Roberts. This morning, Ayesha Siddiqi, editor-in-chief of The New Inquiry, tweeted extensively about her problems with the video, and wrote: “a white woman filming & shaming black men for saying hi to her are you sure your gender equality doesnt look a lot like class+race anxiety,” going on to say, “the reason rape statistics are so high in this country is bc of the disproportionate lvl of violence against women of color.” Siddiqi also issued this reminder: “white women yr protection has always been the available guise for policing men of color here+abroad be careful how yr deploying yourselves;” and tweeted: ”women of color let’s make videos of what it’s like walking thru crowds of drunk white guys at sporting events/st Patrick’s day/frat events.”
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