10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman

10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman is a video created for Hollaback! by Rob Bliss Creative and featuring 24-year-old actress Shoshana Roberts, and released on October 27, 2014.^[1][2] The video showed Roberts walking for ten hours through various neighborhoods of New York City, wearing jeans and a black crewneck T-shirt, with a hidden camera recording her from the front. The two-minute video included edited and selective footage from within those ten hours showcasing what it labeled street harassment of Roberts by men, and claiming that there were 108 such instances. The behaviors ranged from casual greetings and unsolicited compliments to men following her for several minutes, attempting to engage her in conversation.^[3][4][5][6] As of April 2015, the video has received over 39 million views on YouTube.^[1]

Production and goals

Roberts said that she got involved with the video by responding to a Craigslist posting by Rob Bliss a few months prior, and that although Rob Bliss told her that this was potentially a viral video, she was skeptical but was open to giving it a try.^[7][8] Rob Bliss himself shot the video by walking a few feet in front of Roberts with a GoPro camera in his backpack.^[3] Bliss and Emily May (executive director and co-founder of Hollaback!, for whom the video was made) clarified in comments to the Washington Post that Roberts' conservative dress choice (jeans and a crewneck T-shirt) was made so as to debunk the misconception that women only get harassed if they wear revealing clothing. Roberts also claimed that she experienced similar harassment every day on the streets of New York City as was shown in the video.^[7][3]

Reception

The video was hailed for providing visual proof of what many considered an important problem relating to the treatment of women in city streets.^[3][4]

Criticism

There were two main angles of criticism of the video: dispute over the characterization of the incidents depicted in the video as harassment, and criticism of the perceived racial, ethnic, and class bias in the videos.^[7]

Dispute over characterization as harassment

Some commentators disputed the implicit characterization of many incidents in the video, such as people casually greeting Roberts, as harassment.^[9] People making this criticism included conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who said: "I was expecting some real boorish, sexist, dangerous — I was expecting some real, real rotten conduct by guys. I didn't see that. I saw, 'Hey baby,' 'Looking good today, girl,' 'Have a good day.'" However, after playing the video in its entirety, he conceded that there were three or four instances of troublesome behavior in the video.^{[10][11][12][13]}

Other commentators responded that even though the words themselves may not seem like harassment, the social context of those words, including the fact that they were directed only at Roberts rather than at male passersby, made them harassment.^[14][4][15]

Perceived racial and class bias

The other chief angle of criticism was that the video was racially biased because it was largely picturized on black men harassing Roberts (a Jewish white woman) even though the video creator claimed that she was catcalled by people of all races.^[16][17][18] Hollaback! responded to the criticism by noting that this video was only the first in a series of many videos that would document different forms of street harassment, and said it regretted any racial bias in the video.^[19][18] An analysis of the video documented that most of the scenes shown in the video were taken in neighborhoods with predominantly black and Hispanic populations, raising the question of whether the video was shot mostly in these locations, or whether harassment was more prevalent in these locations than in others.^[20][21]

Combination of both criticisms

Some critics combined both angles of criticism, noting that the comments that Roberts considered street harassment were so perceived by her (and by her audience) because of race and class differences between her and the men making the comments.^[22][23]

Threats against the video creators

Roberts, the woman featured in the video, reported receiving death threats within days of the video being released, and claimed that she no longer felt safe.^{[24][25][26][27]}

Response videos

Summary

Details of videos are in the following sections.

Serious response videos

A series of videos were made depicting different types of people walking through different kinds of city streets and documenting the way strangers reacted to them.^[35][8] Some of these are described below:

• A male model walked around New York City for three hours, recorded via hidden camera by Model Pranksters, was shown to have received over 30 catcalls, many of them qualitatively similar to what Roberts received.^[29] The video was taken as evidence that a hot-looking man in a body-flattering outfit could get harassed in much the same way that many women did, but commentators noted that whereas harassment was a reality for almost all women, only extremely good-looking men had to deal with it.^[36][37][38]
• A video was shot in Auckland, New Zealand with a very similar setup to the original video, featuring model Nicole Simpson. The video reported no catcalling instances, and noted that she was stopped only twice, once by somebody asking for directions and another time by somebody who complimented her on her appearance but followed up by apologizing for stopping her.^[31] The video was cited as evidence that harassment is not an inevitable reality of life but rather dependent on the culture in a region, and that it was possible for big cities to have substantially lower levels of harassment.^{[39][40][41][42][43][44]}
• A woman walking around New York City, initially dressed in ordinary Western clothing (for five hours) and then in a hijab (for another five hours).^[33]Although she got harassed in a manner similar to Roberts in the first five hours, she didn't get harassed in the next five hours. The video was created by Karim Metwaly and the woman in the video was a friend of his. The implied message in favor of wearing the hijab was critiqued by commentators, who argued that such messages continued the tradition of blaming the victim and requiring women to be the ones to adjust their behavior while being judged by the male gaze, a problem allegedly prevalent both in the West and in the Middle East and other Islamic countries.^[45][46]
• A man dressed in a stereotypically gay manner walked around New York City for 3 hours, recorded by hidden video. The creators identified over 50 instances of street harassment faced by the man. The video was cited as evidence of the existence of openly expressed homophobia in society.^{[34][47][48][49]}

Spoof response videos

A spoof Funny or Die video showing a man walking around for ten hours in NYC and getting harassed^[28] was picked up by many media and news outlets as visual evidence of the difference in the way men and women are treated in public spaces.^[50][51][52]

Comedian Scott Rogowsky also made a spoof video showing 10 hours of walking through NYC as a Jew.^{[30][53][54][55][56]}

A man dressed as a hipster walked through the streets of Austin, Texas with a hidden video camera recording people's reactions.^[32][57]

References

External links

YouTube video