New York City viral catcall video

by philg

A friend showed me a video of professional actress Shoshana Roberts walking around New York City. The two-minute film was edited down from 10 hours of being out on the sidewalk, both day and night. My reaction was “Back in the 1970s if you said that you’d walked around New York for 10 hours, in various neighborhoods and at night as well as during the day, people would ask ‘How many times were you mugged?'”

6 thoughts on “New York City viral catcall video”

  1. The video was hilarious on many levels. First of all the idea that an attractive young actress with a 34DD bra size (something that she publicized on her own web page – since taken down and cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j40n1PIkTy0J:shoshanabroberts.wix.com/shoshanabroberts%23!biography/c13dn+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
    and wearing very tight clothing could (or would even want to) walk the streets of NY (including many sketchy neighborhoods) for 10 hours and attract no male attention whatsoever.

    2nd that people saying “Hello” or “Good morning” count as harassers.

    Third, that most of the men doing the harassing appeared to be black or Latino, so that either (a) this video can be taken as indicating that minority men are disproportionate sexual harassers or (b) the video was inexplicably edited by the (otherwise very liberal) filmmakers in a racist manner that disproportionately cut out whites or (c) and this is what the filmmaker claimed – that there had in fact been lots of white harassers but just by coincidence whenever they spoke they were drowned out by a siren. Perhaps white harassers hire an ambulance or a fire truck to follow them around so that they cannot be caught on audio.

    In any case, while the video attracted enormous attention, I think that it did not send quite the message that the filmmakers thought that they were trying to send.

  3. I guess my response is “Who cares NY was crime-ridden in 1970?”

    In 1770, Americans kept slaves. Our cultural progression has to be one of the most beneficial components of a healthy society. In 1870, women weren’t allowed to vote. I’m pretty happy that we don’t enslave blacks and treat women (more) equally.

    (And I share the sentiment of skepticism that not a single white male was shown, but I don’t know that curated editing downplays the need for increased awareness that cat-calling is trending toward anti-social / inappropriate behavior.)

  4. I see white males at 0:15, 0:18, 0:40, 0:41, 1:39 and 1:41 in the video. Is this some sort of American concept of ‘whiteness’ I’m not getting, or are people complaining that the racial distribution of harrassers isn’t representative for New York city?

  6. Others have said that there were something like 6/20 whites in the video. Non-Hispanic whites are around 1/3 of the NYC population, so this was not far off. Asians (1/8 of the population , zero in the video) were underrepresented. I think part of the problem was that they were the “wrong kind” of whites – (non)working class guys who looked like they had nothing to do but hang out in the street in the middle of the work day. These guys don’t look like the poster boys for “white male privilege” at all.

    To fit the narrative, the harassers should have been Goldman Sachs bond traders in Zegna suits. Apparently such guys are harassing women everywhere and they don’t merely shout “Ay, mami” or “Daaaam” either – they go in to great detail about depositing body fluids on certain parts of a girl’s body – the problem is that just can’t seem to catch them on video:

    http://time.com/3556523/street-harassment-isnt-about-sexism-its-about-privilege/

    To me, this sounded like some kind of kinky sexual fantasy that Kay was having (a female fantasy, where brand name clothing is featured), but apparently this happens all the time – what do I know, I don’t live in the shoes of an oppressed woman like Kay who is utterly lacking in white male privilege. However, if I did, that would make me a tranny (or at least a cross-dresser) and therefore a good person, the kind of person who could be proud of his (or her) identity, but I don’t.

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