The Broccoli Theory

What we see should not be all we get

In case you are among the fortunate few who read my first post, “The Doritos Theory,” please know that your dedicated blogger has not gone vegan on you. Still, what, you may ask with breathless anticipation, is the Broccoli Theory? Stay with me, and it will all make sense.

It’s been said that numbers never lie. But numbers certainly can be exploited to lend credibility to a particular agenda. Let’s take the sad problem of homelessness. According to HUD’s 2013 Annual Homeless Report to Congress, 610,042 persons are homeless on a given night. On the one hand, you can say, “Over half a million people are homeless on any night in the U.S.” This makes the problem sound quite serious. However, since there are about 300,000,000 people in our nation, this means that .002 percent of our population is homeless on a given night. Or, flipping the coin over, 99.998 percent of the population is not homeless. This makes it sound like less of a problem, doesn’t it?

Speaking of percentages, maybe you saw the recent viral video of the woman who walks down the street in Manhattan for 10 hours and allegedly receives 100 or more harassing remarks from men. This would equal at least 10 such remarks per hour. I am not a woman so I do not know how it feels to hear unwanted remarks in the context of gendered dynamics. Women’s comments on the video have ranged from “right on” to “right off.”

A two-minute clip of this 10-hour trek has been circulating the Internet. Two minutes of ten hours is .001 percent of the total film time, which means that 99.999 percent of the film is not being circulated. 

Like anyone else who has not seen all 10 hours of footage, I am asked to assume that these numbers are true, and that nothing was staged. We also are asked to believe that the territory she covered on foot—and the locations do vary—makes for a representative sample of the male population. So far, we have learned from Salon.com and other sources that the comments made by white men were edited out. Perhaps most telling of all, we also have learned that a marketing firm oversaw the editing of the video. 

About 30 subtitled remarks appear on the screen, though sometimes the same man makes more than one statement. The video moves fast, but I counted about 20 offending men in the clip. Given the subtitles, I am guessing that each remark was added to the total. If instead the number of harassing men were counted, it would average something more like six or so remarks per hour. Also not taken into account are the number of men she passes by who say nothing.

Though certainly this is a subjective process, I counted about 12 of the 30 remarks as sexual in nature. If this is more or less representative of the entire 10 hours of film, more like 40 sexual remarks were made over the 10 hour period, or about four an hour instead of 10 an hour. This may well be four an hour too many, but I find something a little too convenient, too Madison Avenue slick, in the total being around 100 in 10 hours.

Indeed, one is expected to assume that all the remarks were meant to be sexual. At one point, a young man of color says, “God bless you, have a good day, alright?” We then are shown that he walked alongside her for two, then four, then five minutes total. This cumulative editing trick makes the behavior seem that much more invasive. But since the young man’s face has been blurred, we don’t really know if he was looking at her or if he just happened to be keeping pace with her. (In his fleeting seconds of screen time, he usually seems to be looking straight ahead.) Even if he did sometimes look at her, we do not know why. Maybe he was wondering if he should tell her about Jesus, or any number of other things. Yet we are asked to empathize with the fear and loathing experienced by a white woman when a man of color is walking near her. In this video clip, someone saying, “Good evening,” is the same as someone saying, “Hey baby.” “God bless you” is a sexual come-on.

Other people, including men, have created their own videos of walking down the street in Manhattan and enduring the remarks of strangers. Indeed, having lived in both Manhattan and Queens as an adult and child respectively, I can attest firsthand that virtually anyone is approached by any number of strangers who call out many kinds of remarks—some kind, some crazy, some bullying, and yes even to men or boys some sexual. Conversely, when I lived in San Francisco and Portland it was quite common for strangers on the street to be platonically friendly and say hello to each other.

In sum, I feel this video is less about the very real problem of women being unsafe in our society and more about the creation of a product. It is a skillfully edited artifact intended to present as “documentary” one point of view and one point of view only—that of the client paying the marketing firm to create and promote the video.

It seems to me that one problem in our society is how naïve we are—how easily we take what is presented to us as “truth.” But in actuality film is edited, and a published photograph is selected from hundreds of shots that were taken. Any time a story is told verbally or on paper, selectivity plays a role. Seldom does anyone tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Like the disgust we are expected to feel for a white woman who must endure a black man walking near her for five minutes, we could, for example, learn that someone died choking on a piece of broccoli. We could acquire a sobering photo of the corpse, and post it with the caption: “This person died eating broccoli.” Or maybe: “Think twice before you eat broccoli.” If the person was a child, so much the better. Above the angelic young face we could say, “Two weeks later this child was dead from eating broccoli,” or “Broccoli kills the young.”

Perhaps you have seen or heard of an ad run only once in the 1964 presidential campaign, though it has been credited with causing Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. Sometimes called the “daisy girl ad,” it features a child innocently (mis)counting the petals of a flower, and then we are shown a mushroom cloud of atomic hatred. Following a pacifistic quote from President Johnson, we are told that the stakes are too high to vote for anyone else. A little girl and her flower and then an atom bomb—how’s that for manipulation? But substantively, what did it have to do with President Johnson, who is still remembered for his unpopular escalation of the war in Vietnam?

Just because something alleges to address serious issues does not mean it does so honestly. Call me weird, but I believe honesty matters more than intent. We—meaning myself, too—have to think more about what we are shown, and ask more questions about it.  Otherwise, we can end up thinking anything is true, including that broccoli kills.