I’m not trying to shift the blame here (well not a lot of it, anyway) but a lot of men seem to think talking to random women, with really fake-sounding friendliness (at best) is a winning strategy. Are all these men both horribly misguided and freakishly committed to this strategy, or does it actually work on some women, encouraging the men to continue?
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You know who it probably works best on? Fifteen-year-olds with crappy boundaries who’ve been sexually abused as kids. Not a pleasant thought, but there you are…
Seriously? Her body shape is an invitation for men to leer? She needs to mask her attractiveness in order to walk done the street? Otherwise she’s deliberately providing sexual stimuli? You do realize that this is the rationale for forcing women into burqas, right? Because men are simply incapable of reacting to the visual sexual stimuli that women deliberately provide by being women.
For fuck’s sake, all of the men that I know are perfectly capable of keeping their comments to themselves, even when faced with the spectacle–deliberately provided!–of an attractive woman in tight jeans and a t-shirt.
So wearing normal clothes and walking is “deliberately providing” a sexual stimuli? What should she do, wear a burqa? Stay inside all day?
I’m not terribly surprised by the reactions either, but I am surprised by the defense in this thread. This sort of behavior, common or not, is shameful. No, it’s not rape, and it’s not slavery, but it’s a bad thing that should be criticized – people should aspire to be more than just better than rapists and slavers.
Well I have to admit there’s another possibility–that some minority members are more likely to catcall than others. This would make it a pretty sensitive issue to talk about–it would be difficult to portray the wrongs of catcalling without accidentally, and wrongly, portraying minorities in a bad light. But its being difficult to pull this off would make catcalling no less wrong, minorities no more “bad”, and the topic no less needful of discussion.
Hell, you don’t even need to go that far. Picture how you feel about telemarketers. Now picture a SD thread with a bunch of people saying “but…why are you so negative about them? It’s only half a minute of your time. Maybe they’re selling something you really need.”
Obnoxious, isn’t it? Strangers poking at you, interrupting you and demanding a response, and getting pissy when you don’t respond, is annoying. It just is.
It’s not friendly. Actual chatty friendly people don’t go looking to be friendly and chatty with folk who are already walking away from them - why would you? You can’t have a friendly chat with someone who’s five yards away and heading in the other direction, it’s stupid. If on the other hand your objective is to make yourself feel validated and significant by interrupting someone going about her business and making her pay attention to you - well, the middle of the street is just perfect for that.
I’m not buying the “men can’t help it because visual stimuli!” excuse. Ya’ll know good and well if that woman had been walking hand-in-hand with her boyfriend, those men wouldn’t have uttered a word. Or if they were at the workplace and she was their boss and they were already on double-secret probation. Thoughts may be out of one’s control, but through some conscious effort, you can control what you say in response to those thoughts.
Yes, it could happen. But that doesn’t make it justifiable. It is something I as a decent person would feel bad about having done. It is not something I wouldn’t create a video showing those people as bad people. The idea that my feelings are more important than reality is just asinine.
(Please remove one “not” from the penultimate sentence in my previous post. Didn’t notice until the edit time was up.)
How is that a response to what I said?
First off, the guy you just described acted like an asshole. His reaction was not reasonable. He took out his own frustrations on others. He’s the one who should feel embarrassed. It might be understandable, in certain circumstances. But it’s still wrong, and should make a decent person feel bad for having said it. If not right afterward, at least after his emotions have settled down.
Second, you say there’s nothing wrong with making those types of jokes. Yet you personally stopped doing it, and your reasoning seems to be because you think those jokes are indeed wrong. You say it’s not how you treat everyone else, and you think it’s wrong not to treat people the same way as anyone else.
Third, it has nothing in common with the scenario I was discussing, which are people acting like a mere greeting is somehow horrible. That’s something we do to everyone, and no one thinks is wrong. It is, in fact, treating other people the way you want to be treated. It has more in common with the compliments I said I understood, as they aren’t something most people do to everyone.
And lest you think I was excusing the catcall-esque greetings in the video, I most certainly was not. As I said in a subsequent post, I wasn’t addressing the video at all. The vast majority of people in that video were being at the very least rude. And they don’t have an excuse, like your tall friend.
If it were staged, you’d think they’d have avoided the problem by hiring more white actors.
And judging from the two possibilities you presented, I gather that the third option— that white guys really are less likely to engage in this behavior than non-whites— is too toxic to consider, even if it should happen to be the truth?
Not if one of the goals was to have shots of Scary Black Men. It’s supposed to show men in the worst light possible, so they’d logically want to show the kind of men American society in general fears and hates most - lower class black men.
But reality is that these comments are perceived by women as obnoxious at best and threatening at worst. Maybe some guys need to remember that the need to vocalize what they’re feeling isn’t that important.
For those (mostly Bricker I think?) saying that’s it’s not uncommon to greet people on the street with a little “Hello” or “Good Evening”, I think there’s a culture difference between wherever you’re from and NYC. In NYC, it’s almost unheard of to greet people as you walk by them. There’s a scene in Crocodile Dundee where he tries to greet people while walking through Midtown Manhattan, to comedic effect. But, even in the quieter streets, it just doesn’t happen. When I’m back in the 'burbs, I see more of it, but walking around the city? Not at all.
So, every New Yorker who did that in the video was not acting like they would to other people walking down the street. They were assholes.
Anecdote alert! I had to pick up my sister from outside of a subway station. I see her standing there and I honk my horn. No response. Honk again. No response. Roll down the window and yell for her – she comes over. I ask, “Didn’t you hear me honking the horn?” She says that she’s learned to ignore men honking horns at her since it happens so often. It really opened my eyes. She gets honked at all day long. Yes, it’s rude and harassment. Guys who do that are assholes.
It never happens to me – it only happens to women. Guys should cut that shit right out.
It’s quite notable (and, unfortunately, not particularly surprising) that the majority of the attacks (including rape threats!) are being directed towards the actress that was hired to walk in NYC rather than the creator of the video, a male. How dare this woman walk the streets of NYC while being filmed? How dare she not behave in the way that the men catcalling her want her to?
Some of the comments and actions were very creepy. I could see a woman being scared to walk down the street with that going on. But quite a few of those encouters seemed to be normal bum encounters that everyone has.
Any time I walk down the street in DC I have strangers approach me, much like some of the strangers in the video. The attaction seems to be that I am an older white male who presumably has ‘spare change.’ I would bet that if I walked the streets of DC for 10 hours I could film at least 40 - 50 encounters like that, mostly bums, asking me about my day and challanging me when I ignored them. Is that harrassment? It’s not sexual harrassment, no, but a guy with spare change should be able to walk down the street without being harassed, right?
Sorry, but this is just total bullshit appologetics for bad behavior. Most men go through life, managing to meet and ask out women without calling out to random women on the street. This is not the “inevitable result” of anything. It’s not a biological or social imperative for me to walk down main street in my town calling to women, “hey, beautiful!”
Re: dominance . . . don’t be daft. Of course I’m not suggesting that guys are thinking, “gonna exert some dominance today.” However, cat calling and throwing “compliments” at strangers on the streets are actions done from positions of power. Men feel comfortable doing so because they feel dominant over the subjects, and those actions serve to reinforce that feeling/dynamic. If men didn’t feel they had a degree of power over and security from women, they would never do this. They are safe to be jerks, because really, what’s she gonna do?
While I can see how this dovetails with your Unified Theory of American Evil, even granting that the goal of the filmmaker was to “show men in the worst light possible” (–> ??? –> PROFIT!!) surely the best way to achieve this would be to show men of all stripes behaving badly, which would be trivially easy to do if it were staged.