There is no doubt that street harassment is a real issue for women, an issue that should be combated whenever possible and not taken lightly or brushed aside. That said, the video about street harassment in NYC that has exploded on the Internet over the last 24 hours made us at Mass Appeal scratch our heads. The title reads “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman,” but the video itself immediately clarifies the footage was captured in “all areas of Manhattan.” However, with careful scrutiny, we learned that the makers of this film, intentionally or not, focused only on specific neighborhoods, not NYC as a whole. Unfortunately, we believe this confuses the meaning and impact of the point they are trying to make, as street harassment is a serious issue which needs to be considered carefully.

As the pie chart below presents, the makers of this film focused almost exclusively on a small radius in Harlem and a small radius near Times Square. The filmmakers claim to have shot this video while walking the streets of Manhattan for 10 hours, but over half of the shots in the video are actually taken from just one street, namely 125^th St. in Harlem. It makes one wonder whether the filmmakers intentionally chose to concentrate their filming on a couple of neighborhoods, or if, out of many locations, these are the only places where harassment occurred. Would the same woman be harassed as often in the Financial District or Chelsea? How about in other boroughs, like Brooklyn and the Bronx?

This video of a woman being harassed mostly by black and Hispanic men has received strong support from social media as well as traditional media outlets. But would the media remain so supportive if the harassers were white? Take for example the story of Joe, a homeless white millennial who tries to hook up with a different woman every night so that he has a place to sleep. Despite the fact that this guy is taking sexual and financial advantage of women, the media talks glowingly of the “triumphs” of his “epic lifestyle,” and the YouTube video about Joe (below) has nearly 5,000,000 views and over 9,000 likes.

While there’s no doubt that street harassment is a very real issue that effects women every day, it’s unfair to judge the whole of NYC based on the reactions of people primarily from one or two specific races, cultures, or neighborhoods especially given the cultural norms thereof. This viral video can serve as a great introduction to those who don’t believe that street harassment even exists, but it raises a lot of questions about race and culture that need to be answered in order to more deeply understand the issues at hand.