There are plenty of tactics a person can try using against street harassment, but as one TikToker demonstrated that there’s something to making men as uncomfortable as possible.
TikToker @caffinatedkitti has been making an effort to record more of her interactions to show how often she gets sexually harassed, and in a recent video, she enacted one trick to get a catcaller to leave her alone.
“It goes to show that if you can creep them out, they leave you alone,” she explained. “My philosophy on it is if they’re going to give me the displeasure of having to interact with them, I’m going to make sure they regret ever thinking of talking to me.”
The video pivots to an interaction with a man asking caffinatedkitti if he could give her his phone number. She insists that he doesn’t actually want to do that because everyone whose number is in her phone will be contacted by organ harvesters, a response that left the catcaller confused.
It’s not the first time that she’s used this move—she previously told a man hitting on her that she likes to dig up and eat dead things—but the results are still effective and satisfying to watch. And caffinatedkitti asked viewers to send her even more zingers to throw out to future harassers because “I have ovaries of steel and will 100% say them with a straight face.”
“You are my hero,” more than one person commented. While caffinatedkitti said in a follow-up video that she appreciated those comments, she wasn’t actually a hero—she was a villain and wanted to be referred to as such.
But along with the praise she received came inevitable comments from people who called her disrespectful, rude, told her that the man’s behavior in the first video wasn’t actually all that creepy, or said she simply could’ve politely told the man no.
After providing more context to the situation, she pointed out that she didn’t owe men anything and the dangers of what can happen when a person rejects sexual advances.
“That’s also failing to mention how I simply do not owe men any pleasantries in the first place,” she added. “And also, saying no gets women and female-present people killed every day, and that’s trying to be nice. So yeah no, be a villain.”
She also had plenty of other suggestions that people could use to discourage men from hitting on them or harassing them, which included everything from staring back at them to mentioning hemorrhoids and asking them to tell you a joke (and then not laughing). As she told one commenter, most people end up confused and uncomfortable.
“The key is the delivery,” she wrote on the video’s caption.
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