Street harassment has been receiving quite a bit of attention lately. The Daily Show, Buzzfeed and the non-profit organization Hollaback! have all drawn attention to the seriousness of street harassment through the use of humor, gender role reversal and real-life recordings.

The responses to the Hollaback! video, in particular, are astonishing. If you haven’t seen it, a woman walks through Manhattan for 10 hours with a hidden camera and is harassed over 100 times on her silent walk through the city. Throughout the video, men shout a variety of demands, pick-up lines and derogatory words in her direction like “smile,” “you should say thank you more” and “damn!”

A theme among responses to these videos surround the ideas that these instances of harassment should be viewed as harmless complements, because boys will be boys and women are somehow provoking such attention. A second theme is that this is a feminist attack on men.

“Catcalling is not flattering. It’s scary,” said senior Bedania Blandon. “If I’m walking down the street, especially if I’m alone and it’s nighttime, and someone shouts something at me, the entire environment changes. It’s extremely uncomfortable.”

Aside from women’s lived experiences, here’s why street harassment is most definitely not a compliment. For starters, it’s completely objectifying. It reinforces the belief that a woman’s worth has only to do with her physical appearance. Second, it’s a way to express power and dominance. For some reason, women’s bodies are everyone else’s business, and everyone is entitled to scrutinize them. Those who believe that the issue is being blown out of proportion are not thinking about its implications. Tolerating street harassment sends the message that if a woman isn’t smiling, she needs to be told that she looks prettier when she smiles. If a woman isn’t grateful for a “compliment” from a stranger on the street, she should be reminded of her manners (which is incredibly ironic). It reinforces the idea that women exist for the pleasure of men.

“It goes along with rape culture. It’s a dominance thing,” said Blandon.

The positives that have come from attention being given to street harassment are promising. It’s becoming more mainstream to dismantle these “harmless compliments,” and it’s giving women a chance to tell their stories—and people are listening.

“I still remember the first time I experienced street harassment,” said Blandon. “I was walking down the street in Nicaragua when men started whistling and making kissing noises at me. It was so uncomfortable because I was holding hands with my dad. I was only in middle school.”

As disgusting as Blandon’s experience was with street harassment, she’s not alone. This is happening to women all the time, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. Addressing street harassment when it happens is difficult because it can compromise a woman’s safety, which, in my opinion, is all the more reason to spread awareness about such a widely tolerated issue.