For women who live and work in the city, street harassment is a common experience – especially in the summer. Just as we take to the streets to enjoy the nice weather, street harassers dust off their favorite lines. Holly Kearl, a national street harassment expert, conducted an informal survey of more than 800 women in 2008 and found that 99 percent of the respondents had experienced some form of street harassment. Harassment can be at minimum annoying and at a maximum terrifying. Either way, it’s embarrassing and degrading to have men calling out suggestive comments when we’re walking in public.
Sadly, women who complain about street harassment don’t find a lot of support. They are often told to either lighten up or fight back. But addressing the harassment is very difficult. Ignoring the harasser can make you feel helpless and victimized. Responding can be dangerous or interpreted as your willingness to engage. Street harassment feels like a no-win situation.
Suyin Looui, an Interactive Producer and MFA graduate from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College in New York City, has perfectly captured that no-win feeling in her new 3D video game and website, “Hey Baby.” Looui says, “Street harassment can make women feel uncomfortable or unsafe in their daily lives. Cities are such amazing places, and it’s important to create positive interactions in shared public spaces. Hey Baby gives women a space to act out their ridiculous revenge fantasies and to laugh about it. The process of making the project has generated many interesting and heated conversations, and is a project that every woman can relate to.”
I played the game and I get the concept but I didn’t laugh about it. As the player you are a woman walking though the city encountering a never-ending stream of creeps making comments – from the benign, “Hey Baby” to some really raunchy and upsetting things that I won’t print here. You can choose to either shoot the men at close range or say thank you and shower them with red hearts. If you shoot them, blood spills all over the screen and a tombstone pops up.
I hate violence and never condone it in any form. Therefore I failed to find any humor in “Hey Baby.” But I appreciate how the game was designed. You can’t win “Hey Baby.” There is no score and the game never ends. The harassers just keep appearing endlessly. And in that way, it captures perfectly the feeling of being victimized with no viable recourse. As the press materials for the game state, “This acts as a commentary on real world interactions, and forces the player to think critically about the nature and intention of the experience.”
For more information on street harassment, check out these two sites:
HollabackNYC encourages women to snap photos of their harassers and submit them to the site.
Kearl’s Stop Street Harassment offers practical advice on dealing with the problem and has some interesting facts and statistics on the problem.
And to play “Hey Baby” visit www.heybabygame.com. What do you think? Is it a powerful social statement or an irresponsible call to violence?
Isha, sorry to read about your experience. It can be very scary.
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