Whistle stop tour

By B.R.

A REVEALING video is going viral, showing Shoshana B. Roberts, an actress, walking alone around New York. In ten hours strolling the streets Ms Roberts, who is young and attractive but plainly dressed, receives a hundred catcalls (watch below). Some of the encounters are plain scary. One man walks alongside her—silently, intimidatingly—for five minutes. The experience was captured by Rob Bliss, a videomaker, who marched a few paces ahead of Ms Roberts with a concealed camera pointing backwards from his rucksack. As the Huffington Postreports:

In 10 hours of walking, Roberts faced more than 100 instances of street harassment. Responses ranged from catcalls -- "beautiful," "sexy," "God bless you" -- to angry remarks.

"Somebody's acknowledging you for being beautiful. You should say thank you more," one man said.

"You don't wanna talk? Because I'm ugly? We can't be friends, nothing? You don't speak?" another persisted.

Most reasonable people would find the whole thing shocking; although with depressing inevitability, Ms Roberts has apparently already received plenty of sickening threats online for daring to highlight the situation.

Of course, this sort of harassment goes on in every city; many worse than New York. But I tried to imagine being a visitor—particularly to a city I didn’t know well—and being subjected to such intimidation. It is hard for a man to empathise. One problem is that there has been a blokey reaction against the strident feminism of the 1980s. Indeed, the term feminism is now often thought of as pejorative. Hence, many of the individual men calling out would not see their actions as intimidating. Many probably even believe it to be a compliment (one man calls after Ms Roberts:"Somebody's acknowledging you for being beautiful. You should say thank you more.") But the cumulative effect is not only frightening, it also feels hugely demoralising.

For the purposes of a business travel blog, it would be interesting to discover the extent to which this sort of behaviour affects where and how women travel. Instinctively, it is the sort of thing that you might associate more with certain areas of the world. Certainly I have walked with women through Middle Eastern cities where the unwanted attention has been constant and often physical (an unmarried colleague tells me that she always wears a wedding ring when travelling in the region in attempt to deflect at least some of it). Parts of Europe, notably Italy, are similarly in your face. In Rio, some men became so aggressive with two female acquaintances that I had the sickening feeling that I would need to step in, even though it was just about the last city in the world I would want to stand up to a menacing stranger.

One result is that many cities now boast firms which cater solely to female travellers. In London, for example, there are several women-only taxi firms, with female drivers. In New York, some hotels even have women-only floors. Tokyo's famously crowded metro has women-only carriages on weekday mornings. It is depressing that we sometimes feel the need to revert to such social division. But, having watched the video, one cannot blame some women for wanting this.