Hanna Rosin On 'The Problem With That Catcalling Video'

Published October 31, 2014 at 1:20 PM EDT

The video of a young woman walking down the street in New York City, getting catcalled over and over, has been everywhere this week.

It’s started a lot of conversations about street harassment and what many women experience on a daily basis. It’s also started some conversations about race.

As writer Hanna Rosin put it in Slate, it’s not just a video of a woman being harassed by men as she walks around New York City: “More specifically, it’s a video of a young white woman who is harassed by mostly black and Latino men.” It turns out that many of the white men who catcalled the woman were edited out of the video.

While the video has spawned a Funny Or Die parody called “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man,” Rosin says a more accurate representation of catcalling already existed — a Daily Show segment by Jessica Williams called “Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere.”

Here & Now’s Robin Young talks to Rosin about her piece in Slate.

Read Hanna Rosin’s piece, “The Problem With That Catcalling Video”

Guest

Hannah Rosin, writer for Slate. She tweets @HannaRosin.