How about another 1000 unsolicited words on
the video of the woman walking around New York City streets for 10 hours collecting catcalls for social research and community uplift? Do I really have anything new to say on the subject? I’ll try, and I’ll start with this…it was more than a little ironic that much of the discussion the video generated was about the awful invasion of this woman’s privacy. This during the most invasive period in American culture—election season when most of us are being importuned in front of our shopping places and through our TVs, phones, and emails by people who are willfully disrespectful of our private space.
If the conversation the video inspired had been more macro than micro, some meaningful connections might have been made between what the woman went through and the inclination of our society through electioneering, telemarketing, and ordinary “salesmanship” to encourage and promote such intrusions. Alas, the conversation bogged down in the usual take-no-prisoners gender battleground. Nonetheless, I was drawn to it. First, Bliss’s effort to document the gauntlet some women go through under everyday circumstances underscores a point I tried to make in a grossly mangled diary some months ago. That point was that there are men who are active allies in trying to help women achieve gender equality, and to dismiss all men as complicit in the subjugation of women is both unfair and counterproductive (trying to make this point in Internet discussions however usually draws the derisive #notallmen, shorthand for shutting down anyone who dares counter the pernicious argument that at heart all men are Ted Bundy).
I was also drawn to it because the video perversely echoed a post of mine in another venue, a reflection on my 50th high school reunion where my classmates and I joined in a raucous version of the Manfred Mann hit from our graduation year, Do Wah Diddy:
There she was just a-walkin' down the street,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
Snappin' her fingers and shufflin' her feet,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
She looked good (looked good), she looked fine (looked fine)
She looked good, she looked fine and I nearly lost my mind
Before I knew it she was walkin' next to me,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
Holdin' my hand just as natural as can be,
Singin' "Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"
What transpires in
Do Wah Diddy is essentially what happens in Rob Bliss’s 1-minute plus edit of his actress walking down the street for 10 hours…with two notable exceptions: the woman is not singing
Do Wah Diddy and none of the guys (ahem) commenting on how “good” and “fine” she looks actually score with her. Still,
Do Wah Diddy conveys
the lighter side of the ritual captured in the video, and that lighter side is the one that has long prevailed in our popular culture from Hollywood romantic comedies and musicals to cartoons to TV commercials, where armies of men in hard hats, tool belts, painter pants and cabbie caps trip over each other and fall off ladders ogling smiling women—newly coiffed, skin toned or accessorized--as they pass by. The video attempts to expose the darker side of that mythic portrayal of American life.
Very long before this video went viral, I was introduced to the uncertainties of walking in public. In childhood we had a family friend known in certain quarters of our town as “Fat Ann” (this would be in the idyllic 1950s when such cruelties were more common than current memory might allow). One evening Ann and my parents went off to the local movie theater, which took them to the corner of our street and Main Street where The Midnight Spa stood. At that particular time The Midnight Spa was just coming into its own as a hangout for the local Brando-inspired leather jacket juvies with their chains and duck-ass haircuts. In my father’s telling of the story, as they turned the corner at The Spa, one of the punks sitting on the curb said, “Hey, Fat Ann, you’re breaking up our sidewalk here.” Ann reached down, picked the kid up off the curb, laid him out on the hood of a nearby car and warned him never to call her that again.
That worked for Ann, but for a long time whenever my route took me by the Spa, I chose to cross the street…twice…to avoid an encounter with the guys standing on the corner, which did not save me from having them call me a sissy for doing so. (Today I’m almost as averse to encounters with the guys who sell newspapers on our city streets. They man each major intersection…one to each corner, and if you’re stopped at a light they’ll approach with a friendly, “Hi, how are you?” in an attempt to sell you a paper. They’re polite to a fault, and one is loathe to be rude, but one is also not willing to explain each morning why one does not want to buy their newspaper. So you use the tools available—roll up the window, turn up the radio, fake a cell phone call, etc.)
In the 1970s I was walking out of Fenway Park after what would be my last Red Sox game as a resident of New England. Before me on Lansdowne Street were two young kids hand-in-hand with an elderly man in a Sox cap. From the roof above us came a loud, intimidating voice, “Hey, old man, what are you doing at our ballpark? We don’t want old men at our ballpark. Hear us, old man? Don’t come back here.” I looked up to see four teenage toughs scowling down at the man and his kids. I cannot recall who the Sox played that day and whether or not they won the game, but I can remember that incident vividly.
As recently as a few months ago, my wife mentioned a friendly guy coming up to her at Lowe's and attempting to spark up a chummy chat with her. Lorna is advancing on Social Security age, but she has always been a looker (certified by the Staples High class of 1966 as "Best Looking Girl") and both of us have had to live with random guys hitting on her for most of our 47 years together. Despite this arduous burden, I do not subscribe to that old pop song warning: "If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife." As for Lorna, although she recognizes all these overtures for what they really are, she treats them as what they pretend to be…courtesies. Though it may not be for everybody, it's a strategy that's served her well for decades as she's traveled the country on business.
I mention these personal experiences because the message of the the Hollaback video implies that it’s only attractive young women who are at risk of drawing unwanted attention on our streets. I accept that attractive young women are probably more at risk than overweight older women or old men. How much more at risk we really don’t know since the makers of the video only focused on an attractive young woman. What results they may have gotten if they had chosen to follow an overweight woman around for a day or a disabled person or an ostentatiously gay man, we don’t know.
There are some other factors that seem important to changing hearts and minds on the subject of street harassment as the video’s creators hope to do. For instance, in an Internet post after the video---and not as text within the video where it might provide crucial context--Rob Bliss admits: "Really it's a numbers game, 1% of dudes do stuff like this I'd say, so first we had to walk by the first 99%." Also, of those “catcalls,” how many might be objectively categorized as merely social and non-threatening, as in a “Good morning, how do you do?” kind of way? And if this experiment had been conducted 5, 10, or 20 years ago, would the number of catcalls and their tone have been different and how?
The last question is the most impossible to answer, of course, but would probably be the most helpful in determining whether society is getting better or worse in this regard. I personally was struck by the lack of vulgarity and overt hostility in the comments directed at the woman, which was in marked contrast from the tone of the discussion the video inspired on the Internet. Changing hearts and minds is such a nebulous undertaking. One never knows what’s going to work in attempting it. But there are numerous lengthy Internet threads in reaction to this video, and I’ve read through a great many of them. If Hollaback believed its video was going to be a consciousness-raising experience it might be disappointed in how the “dialog” is playing out on the Internet.
In one 400+ thread I tracked, dominated by women, a dogged but seemingly reasonable fellow suggested that some of the comments in the video weren't all that awful when taken at face value, and he questioned whether the fierce reaction to the video was only hardening the divisions in our society…especially between men and women. For this act of thoughtful inquiry, he was mercilessly savaged—getting hit with everything from the cliché of “not getting it” to the accusation of being unfit to raise his 19-year old daughter. What he “didn’t get,” he was told over and over again in the harshest language allowable, was that women daily walk our streets in constant fear of men as the agents of murder, rape and abuse. By merely suggesting that a man may greet a lady on the streets of New York as kindly as a man would, say, on the streets of Savannah, Georgia, he was proving himself to be sexist at the least and most likely misogynist.
As I perused more male-dominated threads, the conversation devolved even further. The vulgarity and overt hostility the catcallers in the video mostly avoided was in full flower on the faceless Internet. The few women who dared to enter into exchanges were addressed in the crudest possible terms; both their attractiveness and sanity were called into question; and their requests for men to put themselves in the shoes of the woman in the video were totally ridiculed. And in the most depressing irony, a number of males sneeringly pointed out that the catcallers were mostly black and Latino, thus turning what was supposed to be an enlightening conversation on sexism into another excuse for engaging in racism.
As with so much in America these days, the video appears to have sparked more heat than light. I don’t know what Hollaback plans to do with their funds to raise awareness on this issue. It might be helpful if they support some school programs to combat social aggression; it might be disastrous if they pursue some legislative remedy. It would certainly be outside the box if they tried to change the paradigm by promoting smiles and greetings for everyone…if Americans, especially urban Americans, made it a new source of pride to be friendly, so the next time someone records a young woman walking down a city street for 10 hours, its success can be definitively measured by the amount of civility it generates.
Then again, if civility is not your cup of tea (and these days that seems more and more the case), perhaps comedy and satire will do you.