At no point did Roberts make eye contact with any of the men she passed or talk to any of them. That didn't stop the comments from coming. When she didn't respond, one man told her, "Somebody's acknowledging you for being beautiful. You should say thank you more!"
Roberts said the number of comments the day the video was shot was nothing out of the ordinary for her.
"The frequency is something alarming," she said.
Martha Sauder, walking on a Manhattan street on Wednesday, agreed that street harassment is a problem and said it happens to her frequently.
"It's inappropriate. It's like an invasion of your space," she said. "I'd like it to stop."
But the video also has faced some online criticisms, among them that the men shown all seem to be minorities. Bliss and Roberts emphasized that the comments came from all racial groups, and Bliss said some interactions that were filmed couldn't be used for reasons like the audio was disrupted by passing sirens.
"My experience, what we documented, it was from everybody," Roberts said.
Another criticism was that some men's comments seemed innocuous: "Good morning," ''Have a nice day."
Some men could have been "genuinely being nice," said Gerard Burke, a Brooklyn resident who readily acknowledged street harassment exists and has seen it happen to women in his family. He said he thought the video shed light on a bigger problem, "but some people just genuinely want to say hello."
That's the problem with street harassment, May said, because when there's a fear that a simple good morning could escalate into sexual comments or actions, there's a reluctance to engage at all.
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