Ah, creepy catcalls: an entirely unwelcome, often unavoidable, sexist fact of life for most women. While comedian Jessica Delfino was recently filming herself walking around NYC’s Chinatown midday for her daily comedy segments on Periscope and Meerkat, a guy not-so-subtly hit on her, watched in real time by her livestream audience.
Delfino talked to her audience about the harassment they’d just witnessed, and one viewer said that if Delfino was less attractive, she wouldn’t have been harassed. The incident (and that exchange with a viewer) prompted Delfino to hit the streets a few days later wearing a white trash bag while live streaming. The objective: to see if the undesired come-ons would keep coming, even while wearing a very unsexy outfit.
“I’m not particularly attractive, I’d say I’m a 7 or so on a good day. But if you are a woman who lives in NYC, you get harassed,” Delfino wrote in a story on Mashable. “I used to think it was kind of flattering, and then I noticed it happening all the time. I realized it wasn’t about me; it was about these guys wanting to exert their animal prowess and dominance over women.”
Turns out, the getup did keep the creepy attention in check, for the most part. “There was one man who was somewhat flirtatious but pretty polite, and there were a few people who said things under their breath when I walked by, or eye-banged me pretty hard, but no one said anything directly, overtly gross to me,” Delfino wrote. Not that she’s suggesting that the catcall-fatigued switch over to exclusively plastic wardrobes (and no, plastic bag unitards are not really a trend in Taiwan). “But wait, women should not have to regulate what they wear to prevent men from targeting them in the first place,” Delfino wrote. We couldn’t agree more.