Hey gorgeous, gimme a smile
What will it take for street harassment to stop?
If you’re reading this, raise your hand.
Put a finger down if you’ve ever been cat-called on the street.
Put a finger down if you’ve been told by a man to smile.
Put a finger down if you’ve ever been told by a male stranger that you’re pretty.
Put a finger down if you’ve ever had a male stranger press himself into you.
Put a finger down if you’ve ever been followed, no matter how far, in public.
Put a finger down if you’ve ever said you weren’t interested in talking/the date/whatever was being offered.
Put a finger down if you were immediately called a bitch after declining the aforementioned offer.
Now with your fist raised in the air, what are you going to do with it?
How will you fight–if at all?
Last week I saw an ad on TikTok for a L’Oreal campaign against street harassment. I was curious, so I looked into it more. Turns out the campaign started in 2019, and has been releasing ongoing content over the last five years. I can’t recall ever hearing anything about it until now.
A click through to L’Oreal Canada’s YouTube page, and a few related videos pop up. One video shows people putting giant posters up along the streets of Toronto with messages like: “Women who go on blind dates are asking for it,” and “Women who wear lipstick are asking for it.” The bottom of the poster encourages anyone who disagrees to rip the paper down. We see passersby tearing down the posters, revealing a white poster inscribed with the statement “Women are asking for it to stop.”
This isn’t a new or profound statement–women have been asking for men to stop cat-calling and blatantly harassing them on the street for decades. But no one, including the men we’ve been shouting at to stop, have been hearing us. While these campaign posters make an original impression on people who care, they’re likely to become whitewashed background noise in no time. The people whose behaviour needs to stop are deaf and blind to the hurt they cause. It’s all just good fun, right?
She has something to say
Canadian influencer, Spencer Barbosa, worked with L’Oreal on an ad for the campaign that was released this past spring. Barbosa, who has over 10 million TikTok followers as of this writing, has always been outspoken and an advocate for women and anti-bullying.
Two summers ago, she shared a story of how, while on a walk one day, she “ended up in the back of a cop car because I had to call 911 because a man got naked in the middle of a trail, started recording me and masturbating.” A year later, she shared a new video with an update.
Her hot girl walks are her “me” time, she says in the video. She’s not bothering anyone, so why is she being… bothered?
She continues her story: “So, today I was walking, and a man biked past and he gave me that look. If you are a girl, you know what I mean by ‘that’ look. They look at you like you’re naked and you’re paralyzed with fear.”
As a woman, I knew immediately what she was talking about. I’ve experienced that look many times in my life. I’ve had experiences similar to Barbosa’s original encounter with the naked man on the trail, but the naked masturbating man in my story was in a very public park in Chicago and I was suntanning 200 metres away on the grass with a handful of other young women doing the same.
I was fortunate enough to never see this man again (to my knowledge), whereas Barbosa said as soon as she saw the cyclist’s eyes, she knew it was the same guy that harassed her the first time. The man biked past her, turned around and biked past her again, staring her dead in the eyes. Barbosa says her body reacted with chills and her heart rate sped up. She messaged her friends and said all she wanted was “to be home, lock my door, be home, feel safe.”