Earlier this month, thousands of people in Berlin held a vigil for Tugce Albayrak, a 23-year-old student who died at the hands of a street harasser. Albayrak bravely intervened when she witnessed a group of men harassing two teenage girls on November 15. In retaliation, one of the young men, an 18-year-old, turned on her, […]
Tag: Street Harassment
We Heart: A Thoughtful Response to Hollaback’s Catcalling Video
By now, major news outlets and just about everyone and their cousin have discussed Hollaback’s anti-street harassment video that shows a woman being catcalled as she walks the streets of New York City for 10 hours. But what many have yet to see is Jezebel’s “A Hollaback Response Video: Women of Color on Street Harassment,” written and […]
Columnist Says Ladies Are Missing the Point About Street Harassment
OK, the Ms. Blog and others had some problems with the racial disparity in the Hollaback catcalling video that’s traveled through cyberspace this couple of weeks. But there’s one thing we’d never dispute: the extreme unpleasantness of being sexually harassed while walking down the street. It’s an experience shared, a recent study showed, by 65 […]
All About That Catcalling Video
By now you’ve probably heard about the catcalling video co-created by anti-street-harassment group Hollaback! and Rob Bliss Creative. The video features a woman who, while walking around New York for 10 hours, gets harassed by men more than 100 times; it’s been making its way speedily around the Internet and think-pieced in high volume. While some have come out in […]
The Importance of Sharing Our Stories of Street Harassment
“Does street harassment really happen?” Despite a recent survey finding that 65 percent of all women respondents in the United States have experienced some form of street harassment—including having been touched (23 percent), followed (20 percent) and forced to do something sexual (9 percent)—the question of whether street harassment actually occurs is almost as frequent as […]
Shout It From a Billboard: Street Harassment NOT Cool
When was the last time you saw a billboard flashing messages about consent, respecting women or street harassment? I’d guess never. I had never seen one either, until a few days ago when I drove to Lancaster, Penn., and stood in front of a digital billboard along Dillerville Rd. displaying these three messages. As an […]
We Heart: Playboy’s “Should You Catcall Her?” Flowchart
We know what you’re thinking: “You heart PLAYBOY?! Oh no, Ms., you’ve lost all your feminist cred.” But hear us out! Playboy.com published an infographic earlier this week that, on first glance, seems typical of the historically sexist publication. However, further investigation revealed the graphic to be delightfully—and surprisingly—feminist. The first part of the graphic, pictured below, certainly […]
Hey Baby: On Insidious Street Harassment
Nothing makes the bottom drop out of my stomach quite like a grown man calling me baby. Baby girl, baby doll, sexy baby, pretty baby. Hey baby. Come here, baby. These little words have the power to completely ruin my day. Suddenly the outfit that made me feel so cute and confident when I put […]
Misogyny Kills: How the Isla Vista Shooting Proves What #YesAllWomen Already Know
On Friday night in Isla Vista, Elliot Rodger began the “day of retribution” he promised on YouTube, killing six women and men as part of what he himself called a “war on women.” I had arrived in Isla Vista five minutes earlier. I didn’t realize that when I pulled up to join my friend for the […]
Hunger: The New Solution for Street Harassment
Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of the typical “Hey baby” cat-call, you heard something like this from men on the street: “You know what I’d like to see? A society in which the objectification of women makes way for gender-neutral interactions, free from assumptions and expectations. You go, girl!” Well, Snickers Australia has discovered […]