Take Back Catcalling with MEOW: Men’s Empathy of Women

Illustration by Bob Al-Greene

Four weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Designing for feminist behavior in men.” In it I described the challenge my team laid out for ourselves in designing for behavioral responses in men rather than just for an object that could help women confront or protect themselves from unwanted street harassment or perverted acts. This was an ambitious goal and proved to be difficult to reach a design solution, but I am excited to share with you the results of our work.

Our team is Josh Corn, Song Lee and me.

How might we address street harassment to target men as the problem yet also include them in the solution?

We set three goals for ourselves to guide us through this process:

1. Create Awareness
2. Support Empathy
3. Change Men’s Behavior

We knew that most men view street harassment as either not an issue or something that women should just “deal” with, but both views leave women in vulnerable positions and ask them to be both the victim and problem-solver.

The first thing we needed to research was the perspective of women and there are lots of videos online that provided us with this information. This one from Buzzfeed really drove home how catcalling makes women feel:

We also researched tactics women currently use to challenge the power dynamics that playout in these instances. A few examples are:

Non-profit Feminist Apparel Guerrilla Street Signage

Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh street art project “Stop Telling Women To Smile.”

This video from Mexico City demonstrates an unique counter to the control of power in public spaces between men and the women who are harassed by them:

Our research insights were:

1. Catcalling or Street Harassment can make women feel unsafe.
2. THEY DON’T LIKE IT.
3. Their only recourse is to confront it directly or try to ignore it. Either way it will continue to happen because men are not developing empathy.

From here we began to design different low-fidelity speculative prototypes based on these insights:

The left side was an object designed to be a smart-fabric. The wearer could activate it to create space between them and someone who is intentionally rubbing up against them on a crowded subway car. It would create immediate space and awareness of the situation, but it would fail to produce empathy. On the right, these objects would work in tandem. The top-right object was designed to represent the letter M for Man, W for Woman and E for Equality/Empathy. It would be able to record and play back on a loop the offending harasser’s words while he would be forced to look into his own reflection from a mirrored visor the woman would pull over her face. The idea was to make men reflect on their behavior and feel embarrassed by it as they listen to their words over and over in public. These objects were speculative in nature, and although they both would have brought attention to this issue in real-time, it was determined that they wouldn’t support empathy for women because it didn’t bring men into the conversation, but rather just pointed a finger at them.

So we went back to research the heart of the matter: What could make men empathize with women over street harassment?

The answer was obvious but wasn’t yet clear to us. However, after viewing some videos of men watching their mothers, daughters, sisters, girlfriends/wives being street harassed it was evident that men get upset when it’s personal:

So we asked ourselves: How can we elicit this reaction in men even when it is not their daughter/mother/sister/girlfriend/wife that is being harassed?

We determined that the way to get men involved in becoming a part of the solution was to make the entry barrier for them into the conversation very low. Our design would have to be simple in nature yet have the potential to produce a critical mass of change through peer networks.

Using the earlier prototype for recording and playing back what was said to a woman from a harasser, she could instead send out an audio clip of her harassment to men in her personal network via text messaging. This would allow women to share their experiences of street harassment in real-time with many men who would listen to the harassment in the audio clip. The idea is that men would begin to receive these audio clips from several women they know and would get upset after hearing what was said to these women that they care about. They could then follow a link to a website to learn more about this issue and be provided steps to help become a part of the solution.

We call this:

MEOW: Men’s Empathy of Women

Below is a sketch of the interaction:

In this design, we would be creating awareness, supporting empathy and hopefully changing men’s behavior as they become more aware and sensitive to this issue with women. Men would begin to have conversations not only with women about this issue, but also with their friends since they all could potentially have received an audio clip from a woman they know personally. After developing empathy for women around this issue, men should have the courage to challenge other men who think that catcalling or street harassment is either their prerogative or not a serious issue.

Below is a design of its current low-fidelity form and a short video demonstrating how it could work in reality:

We have been able to make a working prototype of the sequence of action on a computer and have the audio clip sent out as a text message, but the real challenge is now to actually scale it down to its real form. We plan to continue this project and will be participating in the Design Collective Grouphug’s upcoming show called “Judge Me”, whose theme this year is about prejudice.

I hope you will join us on this journey and help us in addressing this very serious issue.

#STOPCATCALLINGRIGHTMEOW

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