Via Facebook, international edition

-Unpaid internships: not just in the States, not just in glamorous professions.

-A Brussels woman, Sofie Peeters, makes a documentary about street harassment. Not sure at all what kind of website this is, but the comments suggest something unsavory. The documentary itself is maybe a bit naive (what grown woman in the West has only just now noticed that there are sexualized images of women on billboards and such?) or forced-seeming (how convenient that just as she's making this documentary, she glances out the window and notices a woman in her building is moving out of the building and neighborhood, asks why, and learns it's to escape the street harassment! and with that, its credibility for me was shot), but racist? Maybe? Maybe not? The documentarian insists repeatedly that she's not a racist, but, which doesn't necessarily clear things up.

The documentary follows Peeters around a predominantly immigrant-and-young-artsy-white-person bit of Brussels, where careful editing and her own choice to approach les jeunes du quartier give the impression that she literally can't leave the house without a horde of Arab men demanding her orifices. There are interviews with other women of different ethnicities and one Muslim man, but the overall impression one gets is that this is a woman with an inflated sense of the amount of attention she attracts, and a misguided notion of the danger of The Brown Man. Because she intentionally misrepresents the amount of catcalling anyone, even a naked supermodel, could possibly receive on the street, she comes across as someone who totally would mind if men weren't hollering at her, which makes her maybe not the best spokeswoman for what is, after all, a legitimate cause. Street commentary - depending the context, the recipient - can be anywhere from flattering to frightening. (The only time I ever found this kind of street harassment genuinely frightening was, as it happens, in Belgium.) If a woman can't live alone in a certain part of Brussels, and no one's looked into this before, then yes, that's groundbreaking and important.

But the documentary itself doesn't really convince. The sense one gets from it is that Peeters has no particular context for these "guest-worker" men in shabby neighborhoods, and only cares about minorities insofar as they impact her quality of life. Why do they live in these neighborhoods? Why are they mere "guests," and how might that produce - if not excuse - a lack of goodwill towards the natives? Why aren't they integrated into Belgian society, where they might have acculturated to whichever norms of not catcalling? (Or not - a couple years ago a friend and I were called "salopes" for ignoring some preppy French guys right out front of the hyper-prestigious Paris école whose dorm we were living in. I think it's safe to say Islam didn't factor into it.)

This would be a lot to ask if she were just complaining about this to a friend, but as a documentarian, it would seem appropriate for her to be curious about aspects of these men's lives that don't relate to her, that aren't about hollering at random Flemish women. The message might have been sound, but the perspective just felt off.