By MEREDITH MAY
Monday, February 12, 2007
She ain't your baby, and no, she doesn't want to take a ride with you.
But she does want your picture.
A new generation of female bloggers _ armed with camera phones _ has started an Internet site to post pictures and videos of guys they say harass them in public.
Under the motto "If you can't slap 'em, snap 'em!," HollaBack is based on the same sort of camera phone vigilantism that has been used to shame bad drivers, litterbugs and rude sales clerks.
In September, San Francisco joined more than a dozen other cities and states that have HollaBack blogs. Women fill the sites with pictures of men they say verbally, and sometimes physically, harass them on the street.
"Some men assume they have a right to comment out loud about a woman, and we're supposed to just shrug it off," said Jessica, 22, who started HollaBack-SF out of frustration over the catcalls and kissing noises she heard whenever she left her San Francisco apartment. She asked that her last name not be used to avoid being harassed.
The point of HollaBack, she said, is to shift the power dynamic so women have an alternative to simply hanging their heads and walking away.
"I don't necessarily think the men who are photographed are going to stop because of HollaBack, but this could start a discussion among women and their male friends about what is appropriate and what isn't," Jessica said.
HollaBack started in New York a year ago, when a woman posted a cell-phone picture of a man after an incident on the subway. She uploaded the photo to the girl-power Web site Laundromatic.net.
Within a week, 45,000 people saw the photo, including seven young Brooklyners, who then created HollaBacknyc.blogspot.com. Word spread fast through feminist media outlets such as BUST and Ms. magazines, feministing.com and Girls Against Cat Calls on the MySpace social networking site.
Today, HollaBackNYC can receive 75,000 daily hits. Europe has HollaBackEU.
Women use screen names to post to the blog. One of the first submissions in San Francisco came from someone using the screen name "Pamela," who wrote about a man grabbing her arm and saying, "I just like to touch pretty ladies."
By its nature, HollaBack is controversial, especially among single men who worry that women have gotten so sensitive you can't even tell them they are beautiful anymore without running the risk of getting labeled a letch.
Matthew King, 40, who works in construction and moonlights as a manager at a tiki bar in Alameda, Calif., said one man's clumsy attempt at a pickup line shouldn't send him into the HollaBack creepy-guy hall of shame.
"I'm probably the biggest flirt of all time; I give my number out to three girls a week," King said. "But now maybe I shouldn't do that because it can be construed as harassment."
In the Information Age, when even the most trivial missteps by ordinary citizens can be exposed _ from bad parking to letting their dogs poop on the sidewalk _ people should realize what they read online is just one anonymous person's opinion, King said.
"Still, I admit I love sites like HollaBack. I want to check it out to see what women's opinions of what too much is," he said.
Michael Bachner, the New York attorney who represented the fellow on the subway, said it's doubtful HollaBack would wind up in court over one of its postings. A man could sue for defamation, but a jury would have to be convinced that his behavior wasn't offensive.
"Then it becomes an issue of opinion _ her opinion versus his _ of what's creepy," Bachner said.
The law is on the woman's side, at least in the office, said San Francisco attorney Philip Kay, who specializes in sexual-harassment and employment law.
"What's considered an offensive comment in the workplace is defined by the person on the receiving end, not the person who said it," he said. "There are no similar laws about the streets outdoors, but that's an interesting new area."
Jessica doesn't filter submissions to HollaBack _ if a woman is offended, it gets posted, she said. But she hasn't come across any stories that seem like simple misunderstandings between two people. Instead, women tell of being cussed at, touched, followed or sexually propositioned. Some encounters are so frightening that women say they feared they could have been raped.
(E-mail Meredith May at mmay(at)sfchronicle.com.)
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