Ladies: How bad was this? (A slight cat call I guess)

Are your daughters are in the habit of making audible commentary about the sexual attractiveness of strangers in parking lots who are smaller and more vulnerable than they are?

I’m honestly hoping this is a joke, because otherwise…well, it looks like you’re redefining the interaction to paint yourself as a victim of sorts. Because at first, it was a light-hearted comment and she just said something to you. But now that people are criticizing your response to whole thing, it’s “an intense moment” and she’s yelling at you, that’s why you didn’t respond appropriately. Like you were just Pollyanna’ing along and made some totally innocuous joke and just out of nowhere this horrible aggressive harpy descended upon you screaming like a drill sergeant. And that calls into question every single thing you’ve said about respecting women and teaching your son to respect them and regretting the incident.

Face it, you were being a bit of a pig, and you got busted. You weren’t joking, or bonding with your son, or any of your other defenses. You were being a bit of a pig. Not a huge pig, most women wouldn’t even consider that level of piggishness worth recounting to someone else. Just enough of a pig that you can be one and still comfort yourself with the notion that you respect women.

Way to over analyze.

Just expressing my opinion that there is a vast gulf between noticing an attractive person, informing someone you are with of an attractive person in the vicinity, making such observation in a manner that is audible to the person in question, catcalling, and stalking.

Some (not all) folk in this thread seem not to acknowledge any possible distinctions along this continuum.

And my daughters are pretty tough, and don’t tend to go for beefy dudes. :stuck_out_tongue: But I’ve worked pretty hard at trying to persuade all of my kids to be discrete in all sorts of actions others might reasonably or unreasonaby find objectionable.

Hey, I’m not the one who plopped this story out and asked for women’s opinions.

Pretty sure we’re aware of that distinction. Pages and paragraphs spent here on defending our…defensiveness with regards to catcalls. For every example we’ve given, some guy has showed up to discount our anxiety about it and ridicule our “overreaction”. You have daughters, so it’s kind of crappy to minimize our anxiety over being confronted in a parking lot by strange men.

shakes’ example pings so low on the radar that it’s at worst mildly offensive. But because most of us have felt fear and anxiety when confronted by forward men in parking lots, parking garages, sidewalks, and other insecure locations at least once in our lives, we’ve been trying to explain why it startles and angers us when it happens. It may happen to your daughters if it hasn’t already, and depending on the situation they may say “eww, Dad, some old guy called us sexy bitches at the mall” to “Oh my god dad come get me I’m afraid to walk to the car”. Surely you can understand the anxiety about being cornered when we’re vulnerable.

Sure. I get the concerns. It has been decades since I was shocked when my wife said she would not get into an elevator if there was a single man in it. I’m not saying she was unreasonable, just saying that NEVER crossed my mind. Feel free to assume where I stand on the piggishness scale, but I assure my wife hasn’t been pregnant for 22 years during which time I at least occasionally allowed her to don shoes and exit the kitchen.

But the same way men may not instinctively appreciate such concerns of women, at least some women seem not to appreciate how tiresome it is when they bring their stalking/rape stories to every discussion of this sort.

I assume the commenter was a bit of a pig and a bit of a bad example, AND the women likely overreacted a bit. You know, however big and scary guys might look to women, in the majority of cases (of guys I have known) a disapproving look can shrivel most guys balls with no need to go to the comment. But I wasn’t there, and certainly wouldn’t tell anyone how they ought to respond to a perceived insult/threat.

Hell, we haven’t even addressed the situations in which someone would be pleased to realize someone - even a stranger in public - found them attractive…

Sure, at the beach, at a club, at a bar, a concert or any number of social venues. But when we’re just running errands, that kind of behavior is out of context and deliberately asocial and confrontational, especially in parking lots, garages, sidewalks, etc. And please don’t equate a catcall with a compliment. They aren’t the same thing at all. Let’s not pretend the catcaller is on some altruistic mission to build self-esteem in women.

Here’s a for-instance. I’m headed out to the home improvement store, and I’m shopping for flashing and roofing materials. I’ll be the lone or one of very few women on the contractor end of the store during working hours. I expect a handful of guys will grin at me, couple will assume I’m lost and ask the little lady if she needs help, and a few will elbow each other and point in my direction. Somewhere between my car and the checkout, some dude will catcall, whistle, or say something about me deliberately loud enough for me to overhear. I’ve got things to do and I’ve got to invade the traditionally male trade-worker’s natural habitat for half an hour. I’m not scared, I know what to expect. I’m also going to be alone, and I’m not stupid enough to smart off or risk throwing an insult back. I’ll ignore it, and hopefully it will stop with one comment. But it’s possible I’ll be insulted for not responding to a catcall the correct way, whatever that is.

Point is, guys do the out-loud thing for a reason, and that’s to make us uncomfortable. Whistling or saying “heeeyy sexy” doesn’t serve any purpose at all other than to needle me. So why shouldn’t I bristle up and get momentarily pissed off? That’s his goal. He knows it puts women on the spot, knows they usually ignore rude men, shoot a dirty look, and occasionally smart off. And we know he has a wife, a mother, a sister, or a daughter. Yet he acts like a jerk anyway.

I just want to say: Thank you for doing that.

What is so hard to understand that most times, it is unadvised to engage with such cretins, so women suck it up, regardless of how they’d love to call them out as the jerks they are being?

This was broad daylight, a man with a young son, at a shopping spot. She is more than entitled, in my opinion, to shout at him, be unconcerned about his feelings, and say what she really wishes she could say every time she’s faced this!

The OP needs to evolve a little is all.

Point is, you are mistaken. But I have no expectation of convincing you.

I thought the OP made it abundantly clear that his intent was to communicate privately to his son, and that he had NO desire to be heard by - or to get a reaction out of - the women.

Now if by “the out-loud thing” you mean catcalls or statements the woman is intended to hear/respond to - I agree, that is a dick thing 100% of the time, and offenders ought to be called on it. But I think it is pretty clear that is not what happened here.

Heck, the woman’s response in the OP really wasn’t much different than “what are you loking at?!” or “Take a picture, it will last longer.” Believe it or not most of us guys are pretty aware of our near-boundless ability to be stupid and offensive without even saying anything.

Yeah, I’ve already told shakes several times that his overheard comment was no biggie. I was taking the same route as you by using hypotheticals to explain my position. Even though shakes’ incident was mild, women have had bad experiences with catcalls thus the heated responses here.

And if I may expand on your point a bit, Troppus.

The point is that these catcalls and exchanges don’t exist in a vacuum. Sure, the OP may have been harmless (which is likely why she was comfortably smarting back to him), but when this and worse shit happens to you virtually every day of your life from the time you sprout boobs. . . well, it gets old fast. Real fast. Up thread, I gave two examples of countless that I’ve experienced and I know I am not alone in this. I in no way wish this on them, but I’m certain that your daughters will have similar experiences in their lives, because most women I know have.

After a while, you get fed up with all the bullshit, so even the innocent stuff is a trigger. Is it totally fair? No. But it’s the douches who ruined it for the rest of you that men should be upset at, not the women who are trying to protect themselves.

I was in agreement up to here. If you act like a douche, comment like a douche, cat-call like a douche, then you fully deserve for us to assume you are a douche. If you act like a gentleman, then it’s likely we’ll assume you are a gentleman.

There are no “innocent” or “gentlemanly” ways to openly comment on the physique of a complete stranger. And it is completely unreasonable to expect that it will be received as a “compliment.”

Excellent clarification. You’re 100% right.

I’ll go further and say this is true regardless of the genders of the people involved. The target’s responses may vary because of very differing histories in regard to how often they have to deal with it, and the threat level commonly involved when they do, but unsolicited commentary on a stranger’s appearance is rude, at best. If a woman catcalls a man, or another woman, or a man catcalls a man, I’m not going to think much of them, either. These people may not get an offended reaction – and the reason for that likely varies between “not feeling threatened” to “not willing to risk an escalation” – but that doesn’t mean their behavior was okay to begin with.

If teenagers are impressed by the hottie, I don’t recall who said this, but it’s a good example of “save it for the car.” The fact that people roll their eyes at teenage behavior like this should give a clue that this is not behavior we expect from someone who’s behaving in a mature, adult fashion. Teens get a “pass” – to the extent that we expect to have to correct this kind of behavior – because they ARE immature and are still learning how to behave appropriately in public, especially with regards to sexuality. Not because their behavior is A-Okay, and a model for how grown-ups should interact with each other.

And I’ll reiterate – the woman Shakes spoke to did not overreact. She was moderately annoyed / offended by his comment, and he was moderately embarrassed when she called him out on it. It was a completely proportional response.

AND it worked. Seems Shakes learned something from this. Win-win.

Today I got a “Need some help with that, pretty girl?” and a friendly smile. I’m not a girl but I was struggling with a box of shingles, so I gratefully accepted help from a fellow shopper. Great day for me.

Leaving the store, a curvy woman in her early twenties was having trouble loading a bag of mulch or potting soil in her trunk, and two young guys walked by, one said in a low, dirty voice “I’ll stuff it in there for her”. Shitty day for her. Would have been just as easy to say “Need a hand?” but that wouldn’t have made her uncomfortable and given them the same jollies.

Yes, you sure whooshed me with your deadpan impression of a man trying to avoid responsibility for his own behavior.

I understand that what you’re saying is basically that you’d like not to see what could be attributed to negligence attributed to malice, and that’s fair enough. But I think you’re saying you get the concerns without actually thinking about what the concerns are, and whether or not they are entirely reasonable.

If it’s “tiresome” that people bring up stalking stories during a discussion of whether or not it’s an overreaction to say “Excuse me?” in response to a stranger saying “Oooh, sexy mamas!”, it seems like maybe you aren’t totally appreciating the point of those stories. My impression is that you’re focusing on what was in Shakes’ head, and comparing it to your own experiences and thinking that really since there’s no malice there, no harm done. But it isn’t really about what’s in Shakes’ head or what used to be in your head. It seems to me, at least, that when you think about the possibility that you could actually be the other human being involved in the little exchange, and that then you wouldn’t know whether there was any malice there, the stories about stalking and assault will make a lot more sense in a conversation which is, again, about whether or not it’s an overreaction to say “Excuse me”.

You know, some kids talking in the car about who’s a hottie is not the same thing as saying sexy momma about a stranger in public who’s standing right there. It’s a really simple point. They’re maybe not different from the perspective of the person who is just, after all, appreciating physical beauty, but that isn’t the point. There’s like another person present for the Shakes version. That’s a difference.

Yeah, give it a rest, ladies, your rape stories are a little played out.

Holy shit, are you for real?