User:Vipul/10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman

(very incomplete right now, rough draft)

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. 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. The behaviors ranged from casual greetings and unsolicited compliments to men following her for several minutes, attempting to engage her in conversation.

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. Rob Bliss himself shot the video by walking a few feet in front of Roberts with a GoPro camera in his backpack. 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.

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.

Initial criticism
Initially, there were two main angles of criticism of the video. First, commentators disputed the implicit characterization of many incidents in the video, such as people casually greeting Roberts, as harassment. 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.

The other chief angle of criticism was that the video was racially biased because it largely picturized on black men harrassing Roberts (a Jewish white woman) even though the video creator claimed that she was catcalled by people of all races. 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. 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.

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

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.

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. Some notable videos include:


 * A male model walking 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.
 * 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.
 * A man dressed as a hipster walked through the streets of Austin, Texas with a hidden video camera recording people's reactions.
 * A gay 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.

Spoof response videos
A spoof Funny or Die showing a man walking around for ten hours in NYC and getting harassed 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.

Comedian Scott Rogowsky also made a spoof video showing 10 hours of walking through NYC as a Jew.