Holla Back NYC (www.hollabacknyc.blogspot.com) was started last fall by a group of twentysomething friends, many of them New York University graduates, who were fed up with catcalls, leers and groping.
"There are a lot of people who just accept that if you're a woman in New York City, this is something you have to deal with," said co-founder Emily May, 25, a director of development at a nonprofit. "But there are a growing number of women saying: 'This isn't fair. My husband lives in a completely different city than I do.' "
The website features postings from women recounting incidents of street harassment: crude comments, public masturbation and even attempted assault. The entries are often accompanied by blurry photos of men, some e-mailed directly from the women's cellphones. The site's motto: "If You Can't Slap 'Em, Snap 'Em!"
The aim of Holla Back NYC is to help women feel empowered and to change cultural attitudes about lewd public behavior, said co-founder Sam Carter, 24, one of three men involved in the project.
"We're not interested in engaging harassers directly," said Carter, who studies public policy at NYU. "We'd like to create an environment in which street harassment is stigmatized."
The website cautions women to avoid confronting men if they're alone in an unpopulated area and suggests taking photos from a distance, without alerting the harasser.
Still, some contributors said that they had been upfront about their actions and described a man's look of shock after snapping his photo and telling him it would be posted on the Internet.
"It changes everything to be able to turn the tables once in a while, even just a little," wrote one woman.
The idea was sparked by the experience of Thao Nguyen, a 23-year-old marketing director from Queens who took a photo with her cellphone of a man exposing himself to her on the subway in summer 2005 and posted it online. The New York Daily News ran the photo on its cover and the man -- a restaurateur -- was arrested.
May said the story generated intense discussion among her friends about their sense of powerlessness when they were harassed. Many said they felt ashamed by the experience, as if they had somehow triggered it.
"You kind of blame yourself: Maybe I shouldn't be here, or be wearing this," she said.
Holla Back NYC gets about 100,000 hits a month and has inspired more than a dozen similar projects around the country.
