I’ve seen it at places like frat parties, beaches packed with women strutting their stuff, mardi gra parades with women strutting their stuff, wild bar parties…places where I suspect the majority of the women are actually looking for it. And even then its relatively polite stuff like “woohoo” or “yeah babie” or “hot stuff”…not crude and not stalkerish (thats been so rare I can’t even say I’ve seen it…I certainly dont remember it).
As for day to day parking lots, sidewalks, parks, shopping centers, businesses, whatevers where adult folks are going about their day to day business I cant recall ever seeing it. I wont say I’ve never seen it, but for me its been a damn rare sight.
Of course maybe its just that in the deep south everybody is polite or all the women are butt ugly unlike NEW YORK CITY where everybody is crude and all the women are super models.
I wish I could give you some good news. I’d have to see it happening right in front of me, which is very unlikely, to see if I could figure it out. Even then I probably couldn’t.
You could try some different things out, though. If you always walk around with a scowl on your face, try a smile. If you’re always smiling, try a scowl. If you’re always averting your gaze, try strong eye contact, or vice versa. If you seriously try to avoid these guys, trying saying hello before they get a chance to talk first. Of course, keep your safely a priority. But it may be something so completely counterintuitive that it would never occur to you.
Of course I can’t cite it as I am going from anecdotal evidence. However, I think people are LESS likely to harass someone who is in their league. Maybe she gets harassed more because they think she is so out of their league that it has embittered them and they are angry about it. If a guy has a shot with a girl he usually approaches her very differently.
If they are following her and saying, “What you think you’re too good for us?”, odds are they decided that she was before making the catcalls.
How men bully women doesn’t follow the same rules as men bullying other men.
Really? You asked them and this is what they told you, or you assume because they don’t complain about it? If it’s true, your friends are very lucky. Many of my friends are models and they do complain about it. So do the non-models. So do obese women and recent immigrants and underdeveloped 13-year-olds – or at least those who actually acknowledge that they have a right not to be harassed on the street and that it wasn’t their own fault for existing/having a vagina/forgetting their nun’s habit that day.
I’m not sure how tuned into this some guys are, ignorance is bliss and all that. I was riding my bike with my SO the other week and a guy yelled from his car that he’d love for me to ride him. At the next light I joked that the guy had been talking to my partner and the words were meant for him, and he had no idea what I was even talking about. There are also the whisperers. Again, within hearing distance of my partner in the park I got a lovely little ‘Nice tits’ from a man walking past (white, clean-shaven, 40-something, in a business suit) who didn’t even attempt eye contact. If I’d yelled at him I don’t doubt at least a few people would have thought ‘Wow, crazy lady in the park!’
Oddly, I find New York, or at least Manhattan, not so bad on the street harassment scale (but then I am caucasian). Paris is one of the worst.
I think that’s fine and we were already agreed about your general point. But what you said the first time was not the same.
The general public wasn’t voting at all 5,000 years ago anywhere. If you want to go from 1848 to something like full equality, I’d say you have to go to… well, let’s make it a nice round number and say 120 years, to 1968. Still very swift, sure, but twice as long.
…eventually.
I don’t have a problem with that position. I disagreed with the way you said it the first time.
He has daily meetings with throngs of beautiful women, where the women say things like, “You know, I am never harassed by men in public at all.” It’s true.
Ok, well then we agree. I have no attachment to poor word choice on my part.
This is a theme I post about a lot actually. A lot of stuff that has changed in modernity I see as just sort of an avalanche. So many things were changing that they just couldn’t change them all at the same time.
I’d say inevitably, but yeah.
Then we agree, and I take full responsibility for phrasing it in a clunky way.
Um, yeah, yeah it was really fucking stupid. :eek: Not to mention really, REALLY fucked up. Are you trying to get yourself killed? :rolleyes:
The only time I have EVER really enjoyed being catcalled at was by some friends from school, when my best friend and I were walking back to her house after school. A bunch of guys we knew from class drove by and whistled and yelled at us. We just waved and yelled back. Other than that, like I said, it’s either middle finger, or insults, or both.
Isn’t there a middle ground here, folks? Somewhere between being, “boys will be boys” and “cut their balls off!!!”?
Lucky you. I get this shit regularly. I don’t find it mildly complimentary to be screamed at by some guy: “Hey, Baby!; Suck My Dick!; Does the carpet match the curtains?” None of these are compliments. But I can mostly ignore that shit. It’s the escalation. I don’t consider having someone following me down the street in his car asking me if I want a ride to be innocuous.
I’m not MOL, but there’s a tone and escalation that creeps use. I know people are going to hit on me and I’m okay with that. But screaming at me from a car, following me down the street, getting upset and extra creepy when I ignore you or tell you to leave me alone? Those things are not okay.
Self-defense when faced with threatening behavior is okay by me. What the woment in the link did was wrong. What some other woman does to a heckling guy may be okay with me, depending on the context.
And the fact that some of us get this shit more than others should not be surprising. In my case, in addition to being stupid enough to have been born female, I have the nerve to have long red hair. I must be asking for all this attention–if I didn’t want attention I would obviously cut if all off and dye it mousy brown. And wear a fucking bhurka too, because some men can’t help themselves when they see a woman and apparently I have to accomodate that. :rolleyes:
As to the being nice to the guy long enough to get a free drink…addressing that would take a whole thread that I’m not up to starting right now.
But, where did they get off doing this? Because they happen to work outside where people walk by, it’s OK to yell at people during your work day? Of course it’s sexual harassment to make comments at someone based on their gender, and it would be in any other setting. But somehow it’s OK for construction workers (stereotypically the worst offenders). :mad:
Yes, I know that. I’m sorry for taking my analogy too far. However, I know various women who aren’t traditionally attractive who get catcalled regularly. As Cat Fight said, it doesn’t only happen to supermodels.
