Where Were The Feminists When This Man Was Being Harassed In New York City?

Ideological feminists are at it again, trying to depict all heterosexual male behavior as inherently toxic or threatening.

The latest example of this obsession with depicting straight men as villains for acknowledging attraction to any woman can be seen in the much-discussed video by HollaBack! which claims to show a white woman being subjected to over 100 instances of “harassment” during a 10-hour walk in New York City at the hands of mostly minority men. Two examples of the ugly instances of “harassment” faced by Soshana Roberts, the subject of the video, include the harrowing experience of having total strangers ask “How are you doing today?” and “How are you this morning?”

The video, which was manipulatively edited down to less than two minutes from the 10-hours, has ignited an important debate about what constitutes harassment. In typical breath-taking stupidity, many ideological feminists were quick to claim that the men in the video engage in cat-calling in order to “control public space”.

While I don’t endorse cat-calling as a particularly effective means of trying to meet a woman, this kind of “analysis” just goes to show how clueless so many ideological feminists are about the actual motivations of men. Instead of engaging with real men struggling to find ways of connecting in a world vastly different than the world of our forefathers with empathy, these feminists have to create and demonize a caricature of men in order to gain greater audiences and relevance.

It is also interesting to note the deafening silence from many of those same self-righteous feminists since the release of a newer video which is unlikely to enjoy the airplay and prominence of the first video. The video, by Model Pranksters, explores the experience of a conventionally attractive man walking in the city for a few hours.

In over a decade of hearing some of my male friends engage in cat-calling, I have never once heard of any man who wished or was even remotely hopeful that women would all stay inside. The guys I’ve known who engage in cat-calling like to do it as a way to flirt, however haplessly, with women. And also as a way to test the boundaries to see which women are receptive to their style of come-on.

Rather than wishing to see women driven from public spaces, my experience has been that these guys are the most likely to lament the absence of women when women are absent from public spaces.

The producers of the video cynically spent over half their time in minority neighborhoods for this video shoot so they could troll for donations by appealing to the image of the urban black brute offending white womanhood. They even went as far as to edit out all the instances where the cat-calling was not done by men-of-color, claiming that sirens and other audio problems occurred precisely at those moments.

The feminists behind this latest attack on male heterosexuality should realize that sometimes “Good morning” is just a pleasantry, even if misguided, and not a declaration of war by one gender against another.