Walking around New York City for 10 hours, Shoshana B. Roberts encountered more than 100 instances of verbal street harassment. Hollaback, an organization committed to ending such hounding, recorded her experience and posted a video of it on YouTube last week, drawing more than 30 million views.

For having the temerity to participate in this video, Roberts has reportedly received rape and death threats. Many commenters, most of them men, have been eager to prove Hollaback’s point by reacting to implicit criticism with hysterical, over-the-top defensiveness. Thanks to these troglodytes and their threats, you don’t have to be a women’s studies major to see that the world is a hostile place for women.

Most women have reacted to the video with anger and weary recognition, as have some men. Some activists have proposed laws that would criminalize street harassment. Some women of color have shared their stories of harassment; others have called the video out for its “fucked up” racial politics. (Roberts is white; most of the harassers depicted in the video are not.)

And yet what does the video actually show us? The most disturbing part is a five-minute segment in which a man silently shadows Roberts, leering at her intently. But the majority of the behavior we see is not threatening so much as tedious and potentially irritating. “How you doing today?” asks one guy. “What’s up, beautiful? Have a good day,” says another. The most common remarks include “Hey, beautiful,” “How are you this morning?” and “Have a nice evening.”

When it comes to sexual harassment, it doesn’t pay to eliminate distinctions of degree. Following a woman or threatening her is not the same as smiling and calling her beautiful, even if the latter is intended as a come-on. And by eliding the difference, we are placing the comparatively minor sin of catcalling on a par with the more insidious forms of harassment women still face behind closed doors.

Rob Bliss, the video’s director, has been criticized for what some see as its racist undertones. He claims to have edited out a number of white male harassers because noise pollution rendered footage of them unusable. Hollaback has issued a statement saying, in part, “We regret the unintended racial bias in the editing of the video that overrepresents men of color.”

Perhaps men of color were overrepresented in the video. Or perhaps catcalling is more common in some communities than it is in others. Most videos are edited, and none of Roberts’ harassment was staged.

In my experience, when I’m on a college campus or walking around an affluent residential neighborhood, it is rare for a strange man to whistle, catcall or comment on my body.

This doesn’t mean that educated, affluent men do not harass women. It just means that it’s less public and more damaging when they do. Think of the allegations against Jian Ghomeshi, Bob Filner, Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood, to name just a few.

On Nov. 2, The New York Times ran a front-page story about a sexual harassment case at the Yale School of Medicine. The case, which has been egregiously mishandled by administrators, involves the former head of cardiology, Michael Simons, and a much younger Italian female researcher. The older, married doctor shamelessly pursued his female colleague, whose boyfriend was under his supervision, by, among other things, handing her a love letter written in what the Times called “effortful” Italian.