Women - how often do you experience catcalls?

In My Humble Opinion
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Oh, and FWIW, Guy I was Avoiding had already been told to his face to leave me alone, I did not want to go out with him, and had his number blocked on my phone, and this had been going on more than a month. And he insisted on touching me a lot every time he saw me, in ways that could or could not be interpreted as intimate, but were upsetting me so much I was trying to put anything I could-- chairs, other people-- between us-- every time I saw him. I had even asked the rabbi of the Hillel if we could have a meeting with the three of us, but he couldn’t pin the guy down to a date.

The fake boyfriend actually seemed to work, albeit, I think he latched onto someone else. I felt guilty about that, but I wasn’t sure what to do with those feelings. I mean, it wasn’t really my fault.

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It’s typical that he views you as property. Once he thought you were the property of another man, he would respect that man and leave his property alone. Respecting you was out of the question.

Men tipped their hat to your mom? I wonder how fearless mom would have responded to someone yelling “Nice tits!”

224

Yup. It’s also typical that he left me alone after seeing me with a guy who was a lot bigger than he was. I knew that, and played into it, but I was desperate, and also only 20 years old.

I didn’t have a lot of resources, practical, or emotional.

I would deal with this differently today.

225

I’ve been thinking more about this. And a mod may want to take this to a new thread, but I think we’ve opened something here.

I think one factor is the idea that persistence will have its reward, but another is the idea that women never really mean “No,” no matter how vociferously they may say it. This is embedded in our culture, and there’s a reason it is.

I participated in a long discussion about this, one of the other participants of who was Susie Bright, aka “Susie Sexpert,” who wrote a fairly explicit column on advice about sex techniques, meant initially for lesbians, but she got letters from straight people too, and sometimes answered them.

Most of the women (it was all women) in the discussion were bitching about “No” not being taken seriously by men. One of them mentioned the slogan “Yes means Yes, and No means No,” then somebody else mentioned “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?” People mentioned some more slogans all focusing on women meaning No when they said it. Susie said she was having trouble getting her slogan together, but she wanted something to the effect that if you listen to the No, you’ll start the hear Yes as well.

She said (bear in mind, this was the early 1990s) that she perceived a major problem in society that we never allowed girls to say “Yes,” and happily mean it. Until girls could say Yes when they wanted to, their No didn’t carry the proper conviction.

I think there’s truth in that. I think a lot of women do say No when they’d like to say Yes (which is not an excuse to violate them-- they can want to do something on one level, and not on another, and whichever feeling they choose to go with needs to be respected). But a lot of women have been taught “No” is the only acceptable answer, and so they give it, and in some sense, may not mean it. It’s true then, that if we can empower our daughters to say Yes, when that’s what they mean, their Nos will probably be said with more conviction and resolve, and taken more seriously.

I hope this isn’t coming across as “No” means “Maybe.” That isn’t what I’m getting at, at all. Whatever a woman says shouldn’t be second guessed, because even if her hormones are screaming “YES!” but the voice of her parents in the back of her head comes to the fore, and she says “No,” then “No” it is. If she said “Yes,” yesterday, but today she wants to sleep because she has a meeting in the morning, and she says “No,” then “No” it is. I’m just saying I want women to truly make their own choices, not echo the ones society makes for them, and if women have that power, maybe men will be less inclined to try to overpower them.

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It doesn’t help that an infinite parade of movies and TV shows have used the “persistent guy finally wins over the girl” schtick ad nauseam.

I have a mental image of John Cusack standing in the pouring rain, holding a boom box over his head. It’s meant to be this romantic scene (he loves her faithfully! for-evah!) but in real life, you’d call the fucking cops and get a restraining order.

227

I can’t bear to read all this thread, I know the misogyny on the Dope far too well, and the futile attempts of women to GET THEM TO UNDERSTAND. But I will relate one anecdote that I think is quite relevant.

I was nineteen, and my grandmother asked me to be her traveling companion to the Galapagos. So we were in Guayaquil for one afternoon, waiting for our little plane out to the islands in the morning. We went for a walk from our hotel to the open air market. I had lived in Mexico for a few months in high school, and the men there were perfectly horrid. Let them get close to you and they’d run their hand up your skirt. But in Guayaquil nobody bothered me at all, it was so nice. I wondered why the culture was so different.

Then later I took a short walk by myself. I could barely get around the block for all the hooting and crotch rubbing etc. It was because before, I was with my abuela, which is how all respectable younger women must travel in public. Being alone made me a gringa whore.

You think that they were complimenting me? Fuck no. They were threatening me, while impressing their friends. Frightening women in public is the exact reason for catcalls. A great many men find sexually intimidating women to be the best entertainment ever. Every woman and apparently, no men, know this.

228

You’re overlooking one persistent objective. To garner female attention and thereby stroke their male ego that they are truly alpha!

It’s why 16 yr olds yell from cars and also why men ‘compliment’ random women on the street, etc.

At its very base, is the entitlement to command female attention/interaction, as and whenever their ego feels the need.

It’s never about complimenting the women and ALWAYS about the male ego’s need for reinforcement. I am alpha, I can command female attention, at my whim.

Those teenage boys keep doing it because their ego reads; ‘She’s PURPOSELY ignoring you, bro! It’s because she views you as a threat! You’re so alpha!’ That’s why it need never actually pay off, for them to continue doing it!

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I think this may well apply to the creep who kept after you. But I don’t think that’s the same issue as catcalling.

Catcalling isn’t intended to get the women catcalled to have sex with the men doing it. (Even the occasional woman who’s flattered by it isn’t going to turn around and say ‘sure, honey, have you got a room nearby?’) It’s intended to show off to other men, and/or to intimidate the woman, and/or to enforce/reinforce the idea of the public streets (or the hotel bar) as being male space.

230

Yeah-- I got way off topic there. Someone mentioned that women may act oddly familiar because they’re avoiding a creep, so I told a real story, which then it turned out I needed to defend.

I need to get a mod to take that all to a new thread, maybe, but regardless, let’s get back to the original topic.

I got catcalled when I was young. The several summers I wasn’t shaving my legs, I got men I did not know shouting at me to shave my legs. I still occasionally get things shouted at me, both “good” (but still generally disrespectful), and bad, so it seems that you don’t even ever outgrow this completely.

I have never stopped to analyze why men do it, other than I think the ones that do it are assholes, and quite honestly, I lose a little respect for all men in general each time it happens-- except for the maybe two times in my life that a man has come to my defense.

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RivkahChaya, this brings up an infuriating experience I had. I’m a man, and in '87 I was dating a woman who said “No”. Some time later, she said she was disappointed in me because I immediately stopped. She said, “Sometimes no means yes.” This absolutely and totally pisses me off.

I am always going to treat “no” as “no”. I’m not a mind reader. I think this kind of game does something awful, messing with people. I think anybody who wants their own “no” to be read as a “yes” should have to learn a different way of saying “yes”.

By the way, I’ve had 5 serious romantic relationships in my life, and of the 4 that have ended, I have a warm spot in my heart for everybody but this person. All I can think about her is, thank og I got away.

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The corollary to this is the notion that the only way male people ever experience sex with women is by successfully pushing the agenda, i.e. “getting to her”. Male people taunt other male people with this, especially the younger ones, the ones most likely to be virginal or relatively inexperienced, “You gotta man up and make it happen”. I suppose if a male were fortunate enough to be cute, confident, and popular, it would be easy to reject these notions, but for the rest of us it’s the same kind of threat to our insecurities as it is for some girls to be told at similar ages “You can’t let him know you’re smarter than him, you can’t take away their masculinity by initiating, you have to let him be in charge or at least think he is, or you’ll a) be left out and not get a boyfriend and/or b) get called names: slut, prude, lesbo”.

Any person for whom social-sexual-romantic early success doesn’t arrive ends up worrying that they aren’t normative enough for their sex/gender, and that if they don’t want to be left out they need to start emulating the norm, obeying the imperative instructions. And for the male folks it means having to contemplate “You need to push yourself onto them while acting all confident, and make it happen, whether that feels right to you or not”.

233

I understand your frustration, really, but this was probably a woman who grew up in a family (and religious tradition) where sex outside of marriage was just something “good” women did not do. Women raised this way, unless they can break free of it, can never plan for sex-- it’s how they end up getting pregnant and HIV, BTW-- because the only way to get to sex is to either convince themselves they were so caught up in the moment they didn’t really have a choice, or they were in some way doing it “for him.” And yes, someone I knew in high school did phrase it that way once. I heard she was pregnant and married by 19. Not making that up.

We need a whole different paradigm, where women can have sex because they want to have sex-- and it’s perfectly fine for nice, good women to want to have sex, and then “Yes” and “No” will always mean what they are supposed to mean.

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Yes, the “sex positive” paradigm, where women can say “yes” and men can understand what the woman wants, is a much happier place for all parties.

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When I say “No,” that’s what I mean. Every time. But I also grew up in an environment where I was empowered to say “Yes,” when I wanted to.

There are lots of reasons for “No.” It’s not always “I’m not attracted to you.” Sometimes it’s just “Not tonight, I’m tired.” Sometimes it’s “My current method of birth control is not an option at this particular moment, and I’m not risking pregnancy, but there’s other stuff we can do.”

However, there’s sort of something like herd immunity going on. If there is even a small percentage of women who are not empowered to say “Yes,” plainly; and resort to No = maybe, keep at me; then all women are not going to be taken seriously when they say “No.”

I’m making a formal request that a mod sort out the posts that are not on the topic of catcalls, but rather on this topic-- the current paradigm where some women actually do pull the yes/no/maybe confusion, because of the messages they have gotten from society, and how that hurts all women, and is not good for men either, and start a new thread.

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Have you flagged it for the mods?

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No, because I don’t know how to do that in the new forum.

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Three little gray dots, left hand side, to right of links symbol. Click, three choices appear, click on flag symbol.

Just don’t use this knowledge against me :wink: :wink:

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I flagged you.

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May appear on right side. I’m seeing it next to “Reply”.

(And I am now suddenly seeing “reply” as meaning “add yet another layer.” Re-ply. Probably it’s past time to go to bed.)

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I flagged you back. /idle threat/ /sarcastic idle threat/ /retribution/