Nothing makes a woman’s skin crawl like hearing catcalls while walking down the street. Noa Jansma, a 20-year-old student living in Amsterdam, decided to take action since she was very fed up with it and the situation. She snapped a selfie with every single stalker who harassed her throughout the month of September, shared them on Instagram, and captioned each photo with the abusers’ statements.
What are the images saying? Jansma illustrates how common, real, and upsetting these experiences are for women worldwide by contrasting the catcallers’ callous, unabashed grins with her own exhausted, agonizingly familiar visage. However, she also obtains control over them by recording their actions and making them publicly visible. While her individual experiment has come to an end, she has invited entries to the @dearcatcallers Instagram page in the aim of igniting a global conversation about the struggles that women face collectively.
In the Netherlands, where Jansma is from, catcalling will be illegal as of January 1st, 2018, and violators will be subject to fines of up to 190 euros ($220). Perhaps additional countries will follow if her risky project continues to become popular.
