After video of a woman being subjected to street harassment while walking around New York City made headlines, the New Zealand Herald attempted to recreate the video on the streets of Auckland. Something amazing happened: almost nothing.
A model named Nicola Simpson served as the bait with a hidden camera tracking her stroll.
A few men look. One attempts conversation, and another asks for directions. Both were described as "polite."
"I didn't feel uncomfortable at all," Simpson told the paper, adding that when she lived in New York for several years, the catcalling "was extreme ... I hate it; I don't want, or like the attention at all. It's not a compliment."
The Herald said it conducted the experiment in an attempt to measure the level of street harassment to which women in Auckland are subjected. The results are quite a difference from the original version, in which a woman clad in a black T-shirt and black pants was catcalled or harassed about 100 times over a 10-hour walk.
Cosmopolitan wrote that while the Auckland experiment, like New York's, could never fully represent the incidence of catcalling, "It's nice to imagine a world in which it just doesn't occur to guys to shout at you."
H/T Elite Daily