Recently I was getting coffee with a friend when she mentioned a new app she had downloaded on her phone.

“It’s called Hollaback!” she said. “It lets you report street harassment."

"Sounds like a good idea,” I replied.

And I meant it. Street harassment is not a trivial issue. An overwhelming majority of women, as well as of LGBTQ individuals, experience it and it can lead to depression or worse.

Following, the central motive of Hollaback!’s creators is to allow women and LGBTQ individuals to report any street harassment they experience; those reports are given to legislators, who can in turn utilize the information to make the streets safer.

Despite good intentions, however, the way in which Hollaback! approaches the problem of street harassment leaves me feeling dissatisfied and uncomfortable.

Why? Because street harassment almost always involves both men and women, and Hollaback! only is not interested in the former.

I need to be clear: I’m not suggesting that we need to make street harassment about men, or that men are somehow the “real” victims. (They’re not.)

There’s something to be said, however, about trying to resolve street harassment without dealing with the person doing the harassing.

I dislike the fact that Hollaback! frames sexual harassment as a feminist issue, because I see it as more of an equality issue.

Once again, I need to be clear: feminism is beneficial and necessary for equality. There are many feminist issues involving, foremost, a woman’s right to her body.

Yet approaching street harassment without including straight men seems to me a flawed solution.

There’s a great importance in encouraging women who have experienced street harassment to share their story, as storytelling often leads to healing and change.

But when we approach street harassment as a feminist issue, aiming solely to empower women, we deny the harasser knowledge of himself. This seems wrong to me.

I think there needs to be more of a space in society for the harassers to ask of themselves why they act in this way, certainly why they feel it’s alright to act in this way.

Let me try to explain my view in a different way. Hollaback!’s creators claim that street harassment is a dialectic of power – the harasser takes power from the harassed. Hollaback!, consequently, is all about taking back one’s power.

But would it not be worthwhile to also ask why the harasser feels the need to take that power in the first place? Would it not be better in the long term to try to understand the harasser as well as the harassed?

Hollaback!’s solution seems to me to only deal with half of the issue – and unfortunately I think many other solutions to pseudo-feminist (read: equality) issues only deal with half of the issue.

I realize that my opinion is not a popular one. I realize that many people may read this and feel as though I am criticizing the empowerment of women. I am not. I think what Hollaback! is doing – namely, encouraging women to share their experiences – is a vastly important measure to take.

I recognize, also, that many people would say that empowering and focusing on women is not the same thing as limiting and ignoring men. They are correct. But why should we approach a two-sided coin by attempting to fix only one side?

Once again, I don’t want to suggest that the harassers are somehow the victims here. But if we don’t question them, as well, and ask them to share of their experiences, we lose a great deal of insight.

What happens when we don’t allow the harassers to share their stories, namely, is that we begin to assume that all straight men – the exact group alienated by all instances of the phrase “women and LGBTQ individuals” – want to harass and do so simply to feel powerful. We begin to generalize and begin to be unfair.

What I would like to see is Hollaback! to continue its efforts but to make an effort to include straight men in its discussion.

Why? Because not all straight men harass women. Because a straight man may have a valuable opinion as to a time when they used to harass women but learned a valuable lesson, or a time when they stood up for a woman being harassed. A great deal of information and insight is lost when those voices are silenced.

That is why I think we should approach street harassment as an equality issue and not as a feminist issue. Empowering women is important in this case, but so is understanding those who are limiting them.

How can we expect to solve a two-sided situation by only considering one side?