Everything you need to know about Hollaback’s catcalling video

By now there’s a decent chance you’ve seen the video from Fort Greene’s Hollaback, a fundraising PSA for a new organization that’s working to confront street harassment. The organization was recently the recipient of a Knight Foundation Prototype Grant for some sort of mobile app.

In case you haven’t seen the video, here it is:

Founder Emily May is an Ashoka Fellow. She describes her strategy for Hollaback at the end of this video. May says it’s part street activism and part digital storytelling.

The video was made by Rob Bliss Creative. Bliss agreed to give Hollaback unlimited usage rights, but he also had complete creative control over the video. The structure was simple. An actor walked in simple clothes, holding a microphone in each hand (they sort of look like weights) while Bliss walked in front of her, with a camera hidden in his backpack. The actor just walked, with a blank look on her face, not engaging with anyone, and the results were recorded.

The video was made to drive traffic to the organization’s fundraising campaign on Network For Good.

It worked.

Response to the video has been enormous. As of this writing, it has 18.3 million views.

The actor featured in the video, Shoshana Roberts, got invited onto Anderson Cooper 360° almost immediately, in part because of the substance of the video and in part, it seems, because of the hostility that’s been directed at her since it came out, including threats.

Comments on Twitter and beneath the video have been huge. Unsurprisingly, scrolling through them is not necessarily a recipe for enhancing one’s faith in humanity.

Shortly after the video came out, the blogosphere also began to have its say. Here are a few samples:

• We first saw the video on Brokelyn, which tweeted it out and just asked, in the post, if people could still argue that this was a non-issue after seeing it. For the record, the video is of a woman walking around Manhattan, as she explains to Anderson Cooper.
• Vox lobbed the video into the context of #GamerGate, where women who stand up for their experience get attacked.
• XO Jane went after the video for its shortage of white catcallers, calling it a racially biased video.
• Slate points out that the filmmaker has been accused of racial bias in his work before, and recommends another video from The Daily Show. Emily May, the founder of Hollaback, actually appears in that video, though she isn’t named.
• Salon walks the middle ground, noting that many of the men’s reactions suggested that they actually didn’t know this was happening, while also critiquing the ones who got defensive.
• The filmmaker weighed in on Reddit and also in a post on Gothamist, and in both spots he speaks to demographics. In the Gothamist piece, he explains that they covered most of Manhattan walking in two-to-three hour shifts over several days. Weirdly, he deleted the video he didn’t use.
• Funny or Die weighed in too, with a parody video about a white guy walking through Manhattan. We were nervous, but it’s actually pretty great, in this reporter’s humble opinion.
• And Hollaback itself issued a statement yesterday that first apologized for the racial imbalance and also went after all of those threatening Roberts. In that statement, Emily May says:

First, we regret the unintended racial bias in the editing of the video that over represents men of color. Although we appreciate Rob’s support, we are committed to showing the complete picture. It is our hope and intention that this video will be the start of a series to demonstrate that the type of harassment we’re concerned about is directed toward women of all races and ethnicities and conducted by an equally diverse population of men.

Hollaback! understands that harassment is a broad problem perpetuated by a diversity of individuals regardless of race. There is no one profile for a harasser and harassment comes in many different forms. Check out our Harassment Is: Identities and Street Harassment guide on how individuals experience harassment differently.  This video should have done a better job of representing this knowledge.