“I don’t have to watch a video to know women are harassed on the street” was my official reason for never looking at the “viral” Hollaback clip of a white model filmed by a hidden camera (she knew about the camera; passers-by did not) as she walked in New York City, getting catcalled everywhere. Although the film had the “Hollaback” name on it, a man directed it (he runs an ad agency) and “for whatever reason” edited out all the white men who harassed the model. The director, of course, is a white guy himself.
In the late 1990s, a white woman director, Maggie Hadleigh-West, spent five weeks walking along the streets of New York–but she also filmed other women (and at least one girl) on the streets. Together they were a small but diverse group: some in New York , one in San Francisco, two in New Orleans, and one in Chicago. Hadleigh-West wore a tight but fairly modest, sleeveless summer outfit (always the same one, as if she were in a science experiment) and 1,050 men harassed her. Her excellent, feature-length documentary War Zone (which streams for free on Snag Films) expertly edits together 53 of these men on camera–and doesn’t just show the harassment but also shows the interviews Hadleigh-West conducts with these men right after they catcall her. Sometimes they don’t need to make a sound. She’ll just turn around and focus her camera on a man as she says, “I just noticed when I was walking by, that you looked at my breasts.”
Hadleigh-West explains in a voice-over at the beginning how she came to make the film: “I bought this Super 8 camera at a yard sale with no idea what I was going to do with it…I realized I actually had a weapon, a weapon to take back the power that was being taken from me every time I stepped out of my house, a weapon I could turn on men the same way they turn their aggression on me.”
As a saxophone plays on the soundtrack, Maggie walks and we hear comments at the same time she does, at which point she turns around and gets a closeup of the man as she questions him. Her approach is friendly and polite, but we see the surprise and uneasiness on the men’s faces as she confronts them. She asks one Black man who is surrounded by male friends, “”You didn’t say, ‘Hey beautiful’?”
He’s not a very young man but he seems almost like a kid when he says, “No!”
She smiles to say, “Now why would you lie about something like that?”
Her interactions with men of color–less than 50 years after Emmett Till was lynched for flirting with a white woman–have a lot in them to parse. We also see a class element as many of the men in the film are blue-collar workers, like a group of movers inside a truck. She asks one (who is also Black), “So why were you whistling at me?”
He answers, “Excuse me, I’m working, please.”
She counters, “Excuse me, I was walking, please.”
Some of the more sexually aggressive men also seem to have mental illness or substance abuse issues. Some might be homeless. All the men feel aggrieved; why can’t they say what they want to a woman walking down the street? This film was made years before Hollaback or any sort of organized anti-street-harassment organizations–or public service announcements–existed. Like the men commenting on the viral street harassment video, the men on the street claim they don’t know that they’re doing wrong.
When Hadleigh-West talks to a young white man on a park bench and tells him she’s making a film about sexual harassment he says, “Well, I’ll be the star…I don’t say nothing. I just look at them. I’m not bothering them… I can look at anything…freedom of sight!”
When she asks follow-up questions, many of the men dislike having to explain themselves. They don’t want to be imposed upon, the way they impose themselves on the women who pass them. In some ways Hadleigh-West seems to call their bluff as the men claim they just want to “say hello” or that they’ve actually hooked up with women after harassing them on the street. But when this woman tries to talk to them, they get angry at her. Many of the white men in the film (often in ties and button-down shirts) start verbally abusing Hadleigh-West, saying, “Fuck you,” telling her she’s ugly (a familiar tactic to any woman who talks back to street harassment), commanding her to put her camera down, sometimes forcibly trying to strike it down themselves, walking away, turning around and then mooning the camera or trying to run away from the lens on subway escalators and stairways. I don’t think the white men being (as a group) the least willing to engage Hadleigh-West is a coincidence. These men are the ones who have historically owned the streets–and want to exercise power over any woman who walks by.
Even the few white guys who do talk to her– without telling her to fuck off–reveal this mindset. Hadleigh-West asks one, “What’s the message you’re trying to give to women when you check them out?”
He makes a face and asks “The message?”
She presses him, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how am I doing?”
After hemming and hawing he says, “You look…nice. You’re a 5.” He is hardly a paragon of attractiveness himself.
The film’s interviews with women and girls of color are even more incisive. One Asian American woman breaks down the different types of catcalls she receives from men by race. She admits to Hadleigh-West that while she pretends the harassment doesn’t bother her, it does.
We meet one pair, the mother an immigrant from the West Indies, the daughter raised in the US, who talk about their different reactions to street harassment. The daughter, who is a queer woman (she looks to be about college age, though she could be younger), hates it, but the mother says she met her long-term boyfriend after he catcalled her on the street. The women look directly into the camera together, a Diane Arbus photo come to life (the stills from this film would have made a great coffee table book) during a long silence, the mother starting to look alarmed, the daughter visibly bristling. The daughter finally says she’d rather not talk about her relationship with her mother’s boyfriend. Although fear of rape is a reason Hadleigh-West gives for her own loathing of street harassment, this part of the film, along with the scene in which a mixed race woman from New Orleans says she fears some of the men in her own family, seems to touch on how sexual assault and abuse can come from inside the home as well (the logical extension of the ideology behind catcalling). Hadleigh-West also seems to refute the idea that efforts from the police will solve this problem when she confronts a man in a sheriff’s office uniform. She asks, “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting women on the streets, not making them feel threatened?”
One of the most compelling parts of the film are the scenes with a 14-year-old Black girl from New Orleans. At first, when she is in closeup we don’t know how young she is, as she details the kind of harassment she’s received on the streets, but then we see her walking by storefronts, her school uniform skirt exposing her thin legs in ankle socks. She is at least a full head shorter than anyone who passes her and looks even younger than 14. But grizzled old men still leer at her. That “girl” would be about 30 now. I can’t help feeling sad at how little seems to have changed.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIW9iRMSqY”]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender