Free Republic

The director of a video showing a woman being catcalled on the streets of New York has weighed in on the seeming racial disparity of the men featured. Rob Bliss, who posted the video on behalf of the anti-street-harassment group Hollaback!, told CNN that those shown were just a small sample. "First, we regret the unintended racial bias in the editing of the video that over represents men of color," Hollaback! said in a statement released Tuesday. "Although we appreciate Rob's support, we are committed to showing the complete picture. It is our hope and intention that this video will...

If you want to know why liberals such as myself are feeling less at home on the Left these days, some of the reaction to this viral video about street harassment with a woman named Shoshana Roberts is a good place to start. Unlike some men, I’m not the least bit surprised at the amount of harassment she was subjected to while walking around New York City. I’ve seen it firsthand many times, and have had plenty of women tell me about the “creepy guy” on the street or the subway that they just had to put up with. It’s...

Is "hello" harassment? Rob Bliss, creator of the viral video documenting the verbal harassment a woman encountered walking through the streets of Manhattan for a day, says "yes." Some are hailing the video – which claims this woman was catcalled or otherwise harassed 108 times in a 10-hour span – as an exposé on a serious social scourge. But others are criticizing the video's assumptions, such as that a man greeting a woman on the street is harassment. Bliss, who has a video marketing agency, admits that some of the scenes are more mild than others, but that "hello," in...

... the video chooses to showcase the experience of a white woman experiencing harassment almost exclusively at the hands of black and Latino men... ... the video helps to perpetuate the long-held, erroneous belief that harassment mostly takes the form of white women being bothered by “low class” men of color... Hollaback is soliciting viewers for donations, and is thus counting on the outrage of people with money, i.e. people who have disposable income and a certain place in the pre-existing power structure which has no problem with the ongoing propagation of the myth of the white woman as the...

When the street harassment video was launched earlier this week, we hoped that it would make an impact but never imagined that it would be viewed more than 15,000,000 times in the first three days. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many women feel a little less alone and a little more validated in their experiences and we have heard support from our partners, new and old. Rob Bliss Creative donated time and labor to create this video and support our work. We are grateful for his work and the wide reach that his video has achieved but we feel...

A new video about street harassment has gone viral and it proves that . . . how do I put this? It proves that I was right. The video, released by the nonprofit anti-street-harassment organization Hollaback, features a moderately attractive woman, Shoshana Roberts, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, walking in silence through Manhattan for ten hours. The trek was recorded on a hidden video camera, carried by Roberts’s boyfriend, who walked in front of her. The camera picked up over 100 instances of street harassment in one day, according to the group, ranging in severity from men shouting “good morning,”...

This, however, seems to be too rubish a deduction for its critics. So reflexive has the search for complexity become that even the most straightforward of questions are now twisted and bent into more pleasingly distressing shapes. In her Brooklyn Magazine piece, Iverson argues that “it’s no coincidence that Roberts is presented in the video as being explicitly not responsible for the attacks on her because she’s not wearing ‘provocative’ clothes and she doesn’t respond to any of the verbal assaults thrown at her.” At first blush, one would have imagined this to be a positive thing. Does not the...

<p>On Tuesday, Slate and everyone else posted a video of a woman who is harassed more than 100 times by men as she walks around New York City for ten hours. More specifically, it’s a video of a young white woman who is harassed by mostly black and Latino men as she walks around New York City for ten hours. The one dude who turns around and says, “Nice,” is white, but the guys who do the most egregious things—like the one who harangues her, “Somebody’s acknowledging you for being beautiful! You should say thank you more,” or the one who follows her down the street too closely for five whole minutes—are not.</p>

Full title: Release the suppressed footage of white men catcalling Shoshana Roberts so that Hanna Rosin can re-edit the video. The insensitively-named organization Hollaback!, together with internet marketing agency Rob Bliss Creative, recently released a video of an actress being repeatedly harassed by catcallers as she went about her business in New York City. Unfortunately, as Hanna Rosin has pointed out in her Slate piece entitled "The Problem with that Catcalling Video: The White Guys Were Edited Out," the video was made in a way that reflects the omnipresent implicit racism of our day: it doesn't depict a representative number...