If it was really a compliment, you’d be complimenting unknown men on the street as frequently. How many men have you asked to smile for you? Told they look lovely today?
I’m in my early 60s. Now and then guys yell things at me out of car windows or honk as I go down the street. It’s demeaning and upsetting. I’ve never had a man I didn’t know comment that my shoes match my purse. That’d be a different brand of creepy.
And let me say this for those who were raised when I was and who insist catcalls were compliments back then: If a man wolf-whistled as Mom walked down the street, she pretended to ignore it, just as almost all women did, and raised us girls to do the same. Every young woman I knew was raised the same way. If catcalls were merely compliments, why were women raised not to say, “Thank you”? The polite thing, the safe thing was not to acknowledge them at all and hope the man left you alone.
Some “compliment.”
Most guys who catcall know that this behavior is not really okay. They’re less likely to do it when there are other men around to observe, men they would perceive as not being on the same page as them regarding catcalling strangers. There’s definitely a power element in play here, and they lose their power if there are “normal” men around to set the tone. It’s when they’re the only men around that their social restraints drop and they feel free to openly annoy their lesser social members.
Catcalling is a very specific subcategory of “Speaking” to strange women. “Hey, Baby, if you’re on your way to lunch, you can come suck my dick,” “Excuse me, is this the bus to the blue line station?” and “LOVE that skirt; I had one like it when I was doing Stevie Nicks, but I couldn’t get mine to drape that well,”* are all examples of men speaking to strange women. Can you spot the inappropriate on?
Now, to try to explain how women feel trying to navigate a world where men say such things: how many dogs that have growled, bared their teeth, and held up their shackles at someone have actually bitten?
Does that mean it’s perfectly acceptable for dogs to go around baring their teeth at people?
It’s fricking frightening when they do that, and when a dog does anything that could remotely precede an attack, you get the hell away from it.
It’s the same with men. No, not every catcaller is a rapist or beater, but you have no idea which ones will escalate, and which ones will not, so you get the hell away from them all of them.
Catcalls are frightening to women, because they may be different by degree from rape, but they still objectify us, and make us locum for we don’t even know what. Seriously, some men look at women and see a thing, not a person. That’s what rapists and catcallers have in common, and so since catcallers are operating under the same paradigm as rapists (and SO abusers), you have to assume for the sake of your own safety that they are dangerous.
*All three are actually things strange men have said to me apropos of nothing.
Never catcalled, but, when I was a kid, I did compliment girls sometimes. I was taught it was a good way to start a conversation. At the time, it seemed to go well–though it may have been because I did it in places where talking was more expected, like at choir camp, school, etc. And it always had to be legitimate and non-sexual.
But full on catcalling never made sense to me. I saw that, even in media, it never got anyone to actually talk to you, and the women seemed put out. So why would I do it?
And for every survivor of serious sexual assault, (of which there are absolutely staggering numbers), it is absolutely terrorizing. Yeah, they remain silent, stare fixed, like it’s nothing! But their hearts are pounding and their minds whirring out of control as their body pumps adrenaline into their system in a deeply coded DNA level fight and flight response that they can’t possibly hope to control.
AND half a block later they have to step into an elevator or subway car with many male strangers. Like it’s nothing.
I have two guesses:
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Boys/men who catcall are doing it to impress women. They are doing it stroke their sense of manhood/masculinity. So they catcall to impress either themselves or the buddy they are hanging out with.
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There are women who respond positively to catcalling. A guy may never get a girlfriend with his catcalling. But if 1 out of 10 girls smiles and playfully catcalls back, then he’ll probably feel compelled to keep doing it.
To answer the posed question: just reading the question is triggering for all the reasons other posters have stated much more eloquently than I could. I’m still sputtering. It is not unlike if a person tells you that they experience what you are doing towards them as racism-believe them, change your behavior, don’t argue that you aren’t a racist or your ‘well-meaning XYZ’ isn’t intendedto be racism. Racism and misogyny are in the eye of the beholder. Both are all about power over. Power taken from. Demeaning. That is what catcalling is also, never doubt.
Had the question been posed “People (not only women), do you find that catcalls happen? How do you experience them if they occur?’“, we would be having an entirely different conversation. The original wording is voyeuristic, the second intellectual curiosity, perhaps even curiosity from someone open to evolving as an egalitarian human being and open to self-reflection.
And I agree, I’m tired of having to explain all this sh*t over and over again, ad nauseam, for at least the last 50 years.
My wife is from South America where this stuff is common. She still hears it in Latino neighborhood and establishments in the US (probably elsewhere as well but she knows she’ll get it there). She deals with it as she’s dealt with it all her life and likely isn’t shocking or outright disturbing but I’ve never had any impression that she actually enjoys it. It doesn’t make her feel attractive or desirable, it just ranges from “background noise” to “yet other shit she has to deal with”.
monstro:
Boys/men who catcall are doing it to impress women. They are doing it stroke their sense of manhood/masculinity. So they catcall to impress either themselves or the buddy they are hanging out with.
I meant to say they AREN’T doing it to impress women.
In my experience, when somebody says, “I’ve never seen that happen” without elaboration, they’re implying that it doesn’t happen at all, or is vanishingly rare. It’s a backhanded way of saying “You’re making shit up.”
Of course, it’s possible that Surreal was simply adding a data point to the discussion and wasn’t implying anything at all. 
Last time I checked, tipping one’s hat is not the same as yelling, “yeah, work that booty, mama!” as you drive by in your car.
(Or yelled at 15-year-old girls when they’re standing in the yard with their 8-year-old sisters. You really think that’s appropriate?)
I’ll admit to wolf whistling at my gf in response to how great she looks inside our home in private. Unfortunately, our bird picked the whistle up and does it regardless of who is around.
I haven’t done anything like cat calling since my teens and I didn’t do it much then but one story is notable. This would have been when I was seventeen in the early 80s. A friend of mine got to borrow his Dad’s huge 70’s convertible Cadillac. We and one other friend drove around Westwood Village (UCLA college town) being asses and yelling at women our age.
At one point there were three high school girls our age that we saw when we were stopped at a light. One of us yelled, “Hey, want to take a ride with us.” To our shock, they jumped in the car. They tried to talk to us but we were so surprised and tongue tied and dorky that we barely answered them. They jumped out of the car shortly afterwards.
Are catcalls any less offensive if they are done over Mr. Microphone? (Need answer soon.)
Here is the previous thread I referred to early, the link should point at my post where I stated what I had learned in the thread. In subsequent threads it is stated clearly that using a whistle to compliment a woman you have a relationship with can be appropriate.
You can go through the thread to see all the back and forth, and you can see my words there, but what I don’t see much more is any kind of back and forth or the attempts for people with opposing views to understand each other. That thread is a case where it worked for me. You can see this remarkable post from InternetLegend that shows discussions or that sort don’t happen often in the world, but it was the Dope was supposed to be about. There will always be people who argue vigorously but do so as part of a process to learn, and sometimes some of us go a little too far, but if we can’t back up and discuss it reasonably nothing will be achieved. Some people are jerks and will never change their mind about anything or admit they are ever wrong, and we have plenty of those here too, but there is no point focusing on those attitudes because then reasonable discussion and the possibility of mutual understanding disappear.
Does that mean the ‘catcall’ turned into a ‘birdcall’? 
It’s not expected to have a success rate.
There is never or almost never any intention or expectation that the woman being catcalled will respond by offering sexual or even other social relations. The only way this behavior is likely to result in any sort of sex happening is if it escalates to rape.
Here’s a story from the other end of that interaction:
Years ago, when I was a still mostly socially clueless twentysomething (well before anybody said “twentysomething”), I walked into a bar on the main, and only major business street, of the village I was living in; bar of the only hotel, on the block with the library and the grocery and the drugstore.
There weren’t many people in there; there was a table with several young men sitting around it. They called to me ‘Hey! Come over and sit with us!’
It’s relevant here that I’m partly faceblind. I didn’t know at the time that this is an actual condition, but I knew that I was terrible at recognizing people and often didn’t recognize people who everyone thought that I should. I assumed that these were people who’d met me at a party or something. I went over and sat down with them – and got pretty much exactly the reaction hajario described. I was socially clueless but by then not absolutely so; it sunk through to me pretty quickly that they didn’t know me and had not remotely expected me to take them up on it.
They weren’t trying to get me to sit with them – if that had been the intention, they’d have reacted entirely differently. They were trying to harrass me.
Yes indeed. You were not supposed to answer; you were supposed to ignore them. This was partly because the catcallers were presumed to be being rude; it was also because it was considered dangerous to “encourage them” by providing any response whatsoever.
Starting a conversation in circumstances such as you’re describing is not remotely the same thing as catcalling. There are plenty of social circumstances in which one is expected to talk with other people, and plenty of entirely reasonable things one can say in them.
Yeah. It gets wearing. People ought to learn this as part of ordinary manners growing up. And you know what? Quite a lot of them do. Even in the 1960’s, most of the men I ran into didn’t catcall and most of them didn’t otherwise harrass.
But it doesn’t have to be 90% of one’s interactions, or even 9%, or even 1%, to screw up one’s whole attitude towards walking out the door. And that’s what it’s intended to do, really – to impress upon women that the minute we walk out the door, we’re supposed to be fair game.
I’m an even older guy, from the era when remarking on a woman’s appearance was done all the time. And even then, I knew something was wrong with it. I just didn’t have the self-awareness (or an analysis from a woman friend) to be able to articulate it.
So, thanks, Napier.
There’s a famous picture you may have seen called “An American Girl in Italy”:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/30/europe/tbt-ruth-orkin-american-girl-in-italy/index.html
An girl is walking down the street as about a dozen men are looking, leering and calling to her. The unexpected thing about the photo is that the girl didn’t mind. In the above interview with Ninalee Craig, she says:
I certainly wouldn’t draw too many universal conclusions from her story, but it’s one case of catcalling not necessarily being unwanted.