This Woman Took Selfies With Her Catcallers For A Month & They Didn’t Get It

You might think that taking pictures of the dudes who catcall you is the worst thing to do because you don’t want to give them the attention they crave (or piss off a violent one), but this is exactly what a 20-year-old woman called Noa Jansma did for an entire month and documented on the Instagram account @dearcatcallers. She’s kind of our hero.

1. Turns out, too many of us can relate. In the pictures Noa took, she posed with smiley-faced catcallers while she looked deadpan in the camera. She’s gained almost 400,000 followers after posting a total of 24 selfies with these guys over the span of a month. That’s nearly one every day, which is absolutely ridiculous.
2. It’s to bring attention to harassment. It might seem like this is just giving unnecessary attention to the assholes who catcall and sexually harass women, but it’s much more important than that. This was Noa’s way of bringing attention to the issues that plague women every time we go out in the world.
3. The fact that she made it clear what she was doing and the dudes didn’t care is kinda nuts. Noa didn’t secretly photograph the guys. She’d speak to them, asking if she could take pictures with them, and what happened was quite surprising. All the guys who catcalled Noa wanted to have their photos taken with her. Many of them smiled in the pictures, with some posing for the photograph or blowing her a kiss. Only one guy out of the 24 asked her why she wanted to take a picture. WTF?
4. She assumed they’d be suspicious. Approach someone with a camera and you’re likely to get questions or even see people getting anxious or irritable. That’s what Noa expected from the catcallers. “Most of the time they have their thumbs up, they’re happy because they honestly think that they’re complimenting me,” Noa told Buzzfeed. “They really didn’t care about me. They never realized that I was unhappy.” Even though she looks unhappy AF in all the pictures, they’re smiling next to her. This is quite chilling.
5. Shockingly, this behavior is seen as normal. Noa told a Dutch newspaper, “[The men] are not at all suspicious because they find what they do completely normal,” she said. It’s become normal for men all over the world to do this and get away with it. It’s become normal for women to have to deal with it, but it’s not normal! This is harassment, plain and simple!
6. What these guys said to Noa ranges from annoying to awful. On her Instagram account, Noa didn’t just post pictures of the men—she shared what the guys in the photos actually said to her, and some words are quite disturbing. One guy said, “Hey beautiful, why are you sad? Why not smile at me then? You’re too sweet to be sad.” Another guy said, “Weheee horny girl.” Others didn’t say anything, they just whistled or made kissing noises. It’s all unacceptable!
7. Sometimes it was scary AF being out there. Would you have the balls to take a picture of a dude who was catcalling you? It’s scary and Noa realized that. Some men even followed her around for some time, with one old man asking her to get into his car. Ugh.
8. As she writes in her Instagram bio, harassment is NOT a compliment. Damn straight! She wasn’t sharing these posts as a compliment to the guys. She wanted to expose their disgusting behavior. On her first post, she wrote, “This Instagram [account] has the aim to create awareness about the objectification of women in daily life. Since many people still don’t know how often and in whatever context catcalling happens, I’ll be showing my catcallers within the period of one month.”
9. It won’t end with Noa. This project is a great initiative to show what’s happening to women out there on a daily basis, but Noa’s aim is to make it become a global phenomenon. She’s passed the account to different women around the world so that it can continue. Awesome!
10. Not everyone’s reactions to her project have been positive, but many have thanked her. Although Noa has received positive feedback from most people, she’s been harassed online. She’s been called an attention whore and a liar. WTF? Still, many men have thanked her for opening their eyes to the problem. Hopefully, if more men are made aware of what really happens to women and how being the victim of street harassment feels, they can support us and stop catcalling women themselves because it’s not innocent behavior. We need to stop catcallers in their tracks!
11. Street harassment needs to end now. A study by Stop Street Harassment found that only 3 out of 916 women have not experienced street harassment. Over 87 percent of women in the survey have been the target of a sexist comment, nearly 81 percent of women have received sexually explicit comments, and nearly 57 percent have been touched or grabbed by a stranger. In Amsterdam where Noa lives, street harassment is going to be punishable in 2018, and people who do it will be fined approximately $200. In many places in the United States, street harassment is already illegal but catcalling sadly continues.