Well, both of these, actually. The obnoxious catcallers refrain from shouting when you’re with a guy, not out of “respect”, but out of fear of an actual physical confrontation.
The harmless, non-leery “Hey beautiful” guys refrain out of “respect” for the guy, but their actions when you’re guyless aren’t necessarily disrespectful of you as a woman, IMO.
Well at least they’ve been supplied with Radio Flyers. Having my skin and clothing dragged along the pavement sounds unpleasant.
Yes, and frankly we find it difficult to copulate with a woman who keeps complaining about road rash.
Well, that’s what you get for liking them conscious, and abandoning the head-clubbing ways of your forefathers. 
It’s all in context. I’m not a woman but this doesn’t sound at all bad to me. Telling a coworker they look nice in a dress is completely different than leering at a stranger on the street and going “oooooweeeee, nice dress” while staring at her chest.
I’m answering before reading the rest of the thread. I’ve 43, live in central Washington, and wear t-shirts and jeans/sweats almost exclusively. I am not exceptionally attractive but I do have long red hair. I am confident and have positive interactions with folks of the opposite gender on a regular basis. I do not act like a perpetual victim.
Amount of pestering: Mild - average weekly. Lewd - average twice monthly. Harassing - couple of times a year.
Harassing for me has included: being followed for blocks by a car crawler; having someone back me up against a building wall because I didn’t respond to his milder taunts; being groped by a stranger because obviously a woman in sweats and a grubby t-shirt doesn’t care if you grab her ass.
I have lived in Washington State my whole life, and it has happened everywhere I have lived or gone - westside and eastside of the state, “big” cities and small towns. More bad behavior in the city that I work in, which at 150K people is the largest in the county, less bad behavior in the small town I live in. Generally speaking–and like all generalizations this will be a bad one because I can’t tell what economic class a guy is by what he’s wearing–I’d say it appears to be mostly laborer class folks, with the white collar guys representing about 20% of the time. Assholes come in all types and stripes.
Off to read the thread!
I already posted in this thread but I also wanted to say that I consider groping pretty separate from catcalling/harassing. I’ve only been groped once and I don’t really consider that just an off shoot of harassment–I considered it a sexual assault.
I live in New York City, downtown Manhattan, am a reasonably attractive asian woman, 30 years old. I tend to be wearing either a suit for court, or jeans and a hoodie or t-shirt. I think it’s because I’m asian, but I get a LOT of comments, regardless of what I am wearing.
I’d say I get more lewd comments than mild ones, and I can expect about a lewd comment a day, usually of the “sidle-up and whisper it” variety. When I get a mild comment (like, I dunno, “you look pretty,” I either ignore it or smile politely and keep walking). The lewd stuff usually pertains to my, uh, speculations about my asian features.
If I get followed, it’s usually when I’m on my way home from work / class, at night, when the streets are a little emptier. I’d say I get followed home once or twice a month. Usually, I’m followed regardless of how I reacted to the harassment - I can ignore it, or I can shout and scream, no matter, I get followed. The guys who run the bodega on the corner of my block are used to my stopping in and hanging out there on those nights, until the harasser goes away. Sometimes the bodega guys threaten to call the police and scare him off that way. More often the harasser, seeing me in a place of safety, leaves on his own.
I was reading the other thread and sympathizing with the woman who get harassed more often. I know that it may seem unbelievable to some of you, how often it happens to some of us, but it does. I walk with confidence, head up, a carefully neutral expression on my face.
Thank god for ipods and noise-cancelling earbuds. I don’t know how much more I would hear if I didn’t keep those on 90% of the time. I no longer wear skirts or tank-tops, because then it feels like the lewd comments never end. This is also why my business wear consists entirely of pantsuits.
I could just give a big ol’ “yep” to everything everyone else has already said, but I may as well add specifics:
In the town where I went to college, I got catcalls pretty regularly, maybe a couple of times a week, from people in cars, on porches, and occasionally passersby. If I was walking alone after, say, 10pm, it was pretty much a given. These were anywhere from “You’re beautiful” with a creepy stare to “I wanna suck those titties!” I had my ass grabbed a few times, mostly in the bars where I was a server. I got followed a few times, once on foot.
In Chicago, it was similar, but more frequent - probably daily. I also got a lot more actual invitations (“Hey sexy, come home with me.”) and insulted reactions if I ignored them or turned them down (“Fuck you, cunt, you think you’re too good for me?”), neither of which really happened in the college town. I got invitations maybe once a week or so, and insulted reactions about half the time. The catcalls were also more lewd overall. One highlight there was the guy in the dance club who kept trying to rub against me, and finally grabbed my hand from behind me and put it on his dick, which he had taken out of his pants for my convenience. Classy.
For a little while, I commuted in from a far Chicago suburb, and the train station was always empty in the mornings. A guy started showing up when I was alone there, and would sit directly across from me and stare at me. If I got up and stood outside, he would get up and stand facing me, and stare. This happened two or three days in a row, and after that, I always took an earlier or train, or waited a block or so from the station until the train showed up.
In DC, I got seriously lewd comments (“Mmm, pussy, pussy”) and kissy noises a few times a week, because I had to walk past a social club of some kind to get to and from the train, and there was usually a cluster of guys on the sidewalk there. I also got the more mild catcalls pretty much daily.
When I traveled, I found it was most frequent in Spain, about equally lewd in Spain and Prague, and surprisingly rare in Paris. In London I was always with other people, so I can’t really say.
Now that I’m in the suburbs, work in an office, and don’t go out to bars anymore, the worst I get is the occasional “Good MORning!”.
No, it never seemed to matter what I was wearing, be it a cocktail dress or winter coat with hood and scarf.
Yes, it was more frequent in poorer areas, and I’d say very generally speaking, catcalls came largely from white and hispanic guys, while black guys tended more toward propositions.
No, it never happened with guys around. I never made a point of telling guys (or anyone)about it, though, because it never occurred to me they didn’t know. It did come up with my (now) husband one day when I had just gotten some lewd comment before I walked in the door. I looked annoyed, and he asked what was up, and I told him whatever it was the guy had said. He was appalled, and was really surprised to hear that this was just a normal thing for women.
I felt threatened when I was followed, sometimes when I was groped, and when the guy stared me down at the train station. By “threatened” I mean I had the clear impression that the person intended to do something to me and was prepared for me to fight back.
Everthing else, I’d consider harassment, except maybe the milder compliments. If it’s “Hey pretty lady”, that’s merely annoying. If it’s “You’ve got such a cheery smile!” I like it, or at least, usually don’t mind it.
Oh, and I’m 34.
It sounds like he has some degree of dementia. Sexual disinhibition is pretty common. If they aren’t joining in, they probably realize something is wrong with him.
He probably described himself as considerate in his personal ad. 
Heart of Dorkness, please tell me you shredded that thing. Or at *least * gave it a real painful twist.
That’s not harassment. That’s polite conversation with a compliment tossed in.
I live in small town Alabama, and this never happens to me. If it happens to other girls, I don’t hear about it. Incidentally, last Tuesday I was standing out in my yard with my dog, and a random van turned into the intersection beside us and a girl stuck her head out and screamed “HOOKER!” I don’t think it was a catcall though, I think it was just some kids being asses.
No offense, but I used to teach self-defense.
Given the level of harassment you seem to be experiencing, are you sure you want to reduce your ability to hear that much?
Maybe I am over-reacting, and I don’t live in NY, but my daughter is Asian, and if she encounters anything like what you describe, I need to get her more Mace and have her call home every half-hour. Your experience just sounds appalling.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for the concern! I realized after posting that the iPod thing could be clarified. I only have my earphones in when I am in crowded areas, walking around in daylight, lots of people around. When night falls, or when the streets empty (it happens, even in Soho), the earbuds disappear.
And I have taken a few self-defense classes, and am a fairly accomplished boxer, and a decent kickboxer. I was just thinking today that it’s time to take a refresher self-defense course - your reminder is all the more reason I should.
You know, it’s interesting. My partner, who is not asian, does not get harassed nearly as often as I do. And I think I get harassed more so than most asian females. I’ve been told I look a lot younger than I am and that I look really “innocent” (hah!), so maybe my looking assertive simply doesn’t come across.
I don’t carry pepper spray or mace, mainly because I once sprayed myself in the face accidentally when trying to figure out how the damn thing worked. I have this fear that I’ll whip it out, and get all panicky and shoot myself in the face.
Once, I was walking down the stairs at the train station, and a man who was walking up the stairs approached and grabbed my breast, quick as you please. I punched him in the nose and ran like hell. Know what’s great? Knowing how to throw a punch.
I’d become rather anxious reading this thread that perhaps the rare compliments that I did pay were being heard (as Swallowed My Cellphone puts it so succinctly in this thread) through a “rat-bastard filter”, and while I guess that will always be the case with some people (no matter how innocent the motive) I’m feeling rather reassured that I’m being polite and observing reasonable boundaries. 
I’m 28 and currently live in a small town in the South. I previously lived for a number of years in a mid-sized Midwestern city, home to a major university. I don’t do as much walking as I used to since I now commute to work in another city, but I used to walk alone fairly often during the daytime in the downtown areas of both Southern Town and Midwestern City. I don’t believe I’ve ever been catcalled when walking with someone else, male or female.
**Mild: **Fairly common. Maybe 1/5 to 1/3 of the time I’m walking alone. It’s hard to say because I don’t really pay attention to the mildest stuff.
**Lewd: **A few times a year. This was more common when I lived in a bigger city, and if I recall correctly was more common when I was a teenager. (Like many others in this thread, I first started attracting this kind of attention when I was about 12.)
**Harassing: **Thankfully rare. I’ve never had an experience as extreme as those described by some of the other women in this thread, but there have been several times where I was frightened and making mental escape plans like “if he follows me off the bus I can cross the street and go into that restaurant and ask them to call the police…”
In my experience catcallers are usually either young men in groups or older men by themselves. The younger men could be of any socioeconomic class, but the older men tend to be pretty shabby looking. It’s my impression that catcallers tend to me more aggressive towards women not of their own race, although I am white and most of my catcallers have likewise been white.
This kind of thing usually happens in downtown areas where there are a lot of people on the street. I’ve never really thought about this before, but it may be that the catcallers want an audience.
It seems to me that this kind of thing doesn’t happen much on college campuses, not during the day at least. In the evening when there are no professors around and people have been drinking then it can be a different story, but I did my undergrad at a women’s college and haven’t spent a lot of time on co-ed college campuses at night.
As long as you aren’t grabbing your dick through your pants and making thrusting motions while you say it, you should be ok 
Mid-thirties Dallas. I get unwanted catcalls fairly often. Milder forms are from mostly Mexican work crews that say things to me in Spanish assuming I don’t speak it.
The next level is not so much as a catcall as it is assault. My parking garage for work is slow. About once every two weeks I’ll get one other guy in it with me and he’ll try to back me into a corner to cop a feel with whatever part of his body he can push at me.
Then I just get the guys hollaring for a date, but I tell them to “fuck off.”
Last elevator guy got his shin kicked. Next one gets to see my 38 special as I am renewing my carry permit. No, I won’t shoot him. Just show him my pretty new toy.