Bill Cammack

So I’m browsing the blip videos, and I see this one called “I holla’ed back”. Having no idea what that meant, I figured it referenced the popular song about Hollaback Girls. :D The whole point of that record was saying that she WASN’T a Hollaback Girl, so I was curious to know why the title of this video indicated that this person DID “holla back”. I won’t spoil the plot of the video… You can go watch it if you’re interested by clicking this link to the original post. I didn’t watch it from the post, I watched it from blip.tv, but you get the actual context in the post. Anyway… I didn’t see any of that background information when I watched the video. I went to her blog to check out the comments, and that’s where I found out what she was talking about in her title.

There’s a network of sites called “HollaBack…..”:

All Holla Backs are independent collectives, in support of the same international mission; they are in no way affiliated with one another unless otherwise noted.

• Hi-Tech Girl – HollaBack LIVE FEED
• HollaBackARKANSAS
• HollaBackBOSTON
• HollaBackCALIFORNIA
• HollaBackCANADA
• HollaBackCAPEANN
• HollaBackCHICAGO
• HollaBackCOLORADO
• HollaBackDC
• HollaBackMIAMI
• HollaBackNEWYORKCITY
• HollaBackPACIFICNW
• HollaBackPENNSYLVANIA
• HollaBackSF
• HollaBackTEXAS

The site that referenced the “I holla’ed back” video was HollaBackBOSTON. When I followed the link, I realized that she had taken the idea of the site to the next level, hahaha :D The idea of HollaBack sites is for women who feel they were harassed to be able to tell their friends and the world about it. Some of them bolster their complaints with snapshots from their cell-phone cameras. This was the next level, because this was an actual LIVE VIDEO of someone going back and confronting her harassers.

It’s really pretty interesting to read what these women have to say about their daily experiences. HollaBackBOSTON has archives going back to May 2006 (6 months). The video was taped in SF, so I figured it was sent to Boston because there was only one site like this. I was thinking… MAN! They could write about this for DAYS in NYC… That’s when I started looking for links and found the list of the rest of these sites, including HollaBackNEWYORKCITY! :D New York’s archives go back to October, 2005! :)

This was interesting for a few reasons. One of them was that as I was heading back home from Art Bar a few nights ago, after one train completely ditched us at the platform and never stopped… I was in the middle of a subway car that had some overly-drunk guy on one end of it with a couple of guys and a girl with him, trying to keep him quiet and get him to sit down, and a couple of women sitting together at the other end of the car. This guy kept yelling drunk stuff at them, and he was really pretty belligerent. The women acted like they couldn’t hear him. As they were getting off the train, he screams at them “GOOD NIGHT, LADIES!!!” as if he had just been kicking it with them, hahahaha :? Obviously, I had my camera on me, but it TOTALLY didn’t occur to me to tape him running his mouth, because A) I didn’t give a damn, and B) I didn’t find it interesting and couldn’t figure out who MIGHT think it was interesting. Now I know… hahahaha :D

The other reason it was interesting was that I felt like this girl on the subway took a picture of me with her phone. :) I really didn’t think anything about it, because there are always Paparazzi… “those damned Paparazzi! :D” This is New York City, tourists and cameras all over the place. There’s always someone trying to take a picture of someone else.

Anyway, I find this stuff entertaining, because it’s the kind of thing that women never bring up in front of guys… they only tell other women. It’s interesting to see their perception of random guys trying to get sex from them, having just seen them for the first time in life a few seconds ago, or staring at their bodies or hissing at them or committing egregious indecent exposure or worse. I’m sure that from most of the guys’ sides of things, if they mentioned the situation at all, all they had to say was “Yo… there was this fine [chick] at the bus stop… MAN! You should have seeeeeen her ass! :D” and that was the end of the entire conversation.