
The UK now has a Hollaback site. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need one? This was sent in by Clare:
I’m 23 and dress pretty conservatively – on Friday at about 9pm I heard ‘Hey’ ‘Hey, look up’ when I was walking home. I did, to a balcony on an upper floor of some block of flats near me. A man in his twenties(?) leant over and did the universal sex sign at me – you know, the one made with two hands that boys do in school. Then he said ‘I want your pussy’.
I walk past these flats everyday.
It’s grim reading, but you should subscribe or follow the site on Twitter. HollabackNYC now lists 19 sister sites around the world.
And to rub a little salt into the wound it’s also Equal Pay Day today:
the average pay gap between men and women is 17.1%, meaning that while men in work will be paid for the full year, women in work are effectively working for free from today until 2010.
Hollaback’s tagline is “If you can’t slap ‘em, snap ‘em“. I’m honestly surprised it’s only cameras they’re pulling on us. I was going to add Hot Topic by Le Tigre here, but then I spotted this live radio performance of I’m So Excited and it made me smile so much it seemed like a better choice to share:
Women hand me my ass on a plate every single day one way or another, always exceeding my (kinda high) expectations and generally putting the guys I know to shame. How they cope with idiots like me is a mystery, but that they have to cope with fucking idiots like the ones described by Clare is criminal.
Update: Forgot to mention that the still is from GUN CRAZY (1950)

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Ryanne Hodson posted a video of her confronting some guys a few years ago http://ryanedit.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-hollaed-back.html (click the direct file link under the picture) and it generated a lot of discussion including all kinds of crazy back and forth about race and class:
http://triciawang.vox.com/library/post/web-20-vigilante-racism-and-classism-cloaked-in-citizen-journalism-hollaed-back-video.html
http://hollabacktalk.blogspot.com/2007/01/experience-interrupted.html
http://triciawang.vox.com/library/post/my-response-to-hollabacks-critical-post-about-my-response-about-ryannes-response-to-the-callers.html
I have often thought that the human race has reached the “pinnacle” of its evolution and we’re now slowly devolving into something that would’ve been roughly ejected from the primordial soup for objectionable behaviour.
Folk like the sorry example of manhood highlighted in the quoted snippet only reinforce this belief.