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MugaSofer comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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To the woman (this one, at least), it is neither. It is humiliating and frightening, and no fun at all. And I'm sure that is just what the catcallers find fun. It's a dominance thing.
If I may; why do you assume malicious intent?
Well, because they can see - despite my best attempts at hiding it - that it makes me feel very uncomfortable, and yet they go on doing it. (I'm writing 'me' here, but I bet I'm speaking for the vast majority of women here.) Reading further along, I see that you were thinking that maybe I was assuming bad intent about all men, but that wasn't what I meant at all. But those jerks who shout things about ones breasts or legs, or crude invitations - yes, I have a hard time believing they think it's fun for the woman that is directed at.
Moreover, no woman is ever going to be drawn to that, at least that I've ever heard. So it doesn't make sense as a grossly misguided pick-up strategy. Thinking about it and reading the thread, the more I think something along the lines of the Berne Games People Play dynamic is at work. It's the most charitable reading you can give to the behavior at least; the jerks taking part in this are getting some kind of attention from the woman they're targeting, even though it's negative attention. Still extremely hurtful behavior, but I can believe (or at least kid myself into believing) that men can gain insight into the behavior, realize what's going on, and stop doing it.
One of the more humiliating moments of my adult life was when two guys were making lewd comments to a female friend of mine across a parking lot. I felt absolutely helpless (I'll be blunt, they were far away and it was obvious they would kick my a__), and I can only imagine what my friend went through. She weathered it, but I'm sure that came at some cost to her psyche that women spend to much time and effort bearing. I can only say it's in the best interests of men and women if this was all curtailed.
My theory is that there are behaviors which build alliances within one sex to the detriment of individual relationships with the other sex.
I have no strong opinion about whether this contributes to individual reproductive chances, though I can make up some theories about why it might.
People don't just need to produce babies, they need to support themselves and their children-- alliances within one's own gender can quite useful. It's also conceivable that intra gender alliances are good tools for limiting the mating opportunities of low-status competitors of one's own gender.
A female example might be women who spend a lot of time commiserating with each other about how awful men in general and their husbands in particular are. This is not to deny that sometimes men are a problem for women, but putting a strong availability bias on their negative traits can push somewhat bad situations towards worse.
For both sexes, a fair amount of work is put into convincing low status members of one's own sex to not even try to attract someone. I don't know how much this is in play in societies where people aren't as expected to get their own mates.
It's also conceivable that catcalling is a spandrel-- it's a side effect of homophobia, with men trying to prove to other men (who can be quite dangerous) that they are attracted to women. Doing something low-cost to prove that one is attracted to women is easier than than doing something which might actually attract women.
You may be on to something, there. The times it happened to me, there always (IIRC) were at least 2 of them.
In feminist circles, its called Street Harassment, there are movements to stop it, and for those males like me who never experienced it personally, there are videos- but what worked best for me was talking to female friends. Street Harassment happens a lot less to women in mixed groups, so I was unaware of the consistency with which it happened to females without male companionship.
I'm just not sure what you think their motivation in this is, if not some sort of instinctual male delight in humiliating women.
No offense, here, I'm genuinely asking. I'm sure it's unpleasant to suffer this sort of BS, and I certainly don't condone it. I just doubt the perpetrators are actually motivated by your discomfort.
I'm not sure that it's instinctual-- the amount of catcalling has a lot of local variation.
Well, yes. I'm arguing against that.
I don't know about instinctual male delight. But yes, some people do like to make others suffer, probably because it makes them feel powerful and in control. Catcalling is just a male way of doing that. I'm shy and timid, and used to be even more so back when I was in school, and there I was more often bothered by the girls, who used to surround me and say nasty hurtful things about/to me (that I fortunately don't remember).
Oh, I see. Sorry, it's just that such assumptions about men are relatively common in our society, and can actually be more common in otherwise progressive communities.
While, again, I can't claim to direct knowledge of these people's motivations, have you considered that they may have been motivated by status concerns rather than pure evil? Not that such motivations are impossible, of course, it just seems unlikely that all such actions are rooted in pure schadenfreude.
One way of increasing one's (felt?) status is by proving that one can get away with making other people feel bad.
Good point.
... but that's a rather different explanation to "some people do like to make others suffer [...] Catcalling is just a male way of doing that", isn't it?
Yes, I think you are right, it probably is more about status.
The situation is complicated by the fact that a lot of women try to ignore being catcalled. I have no idea whether men who catcall believe they're being
Why do you think they know how uncomfortable you are?
Because I suck at hiding my emotions, especially strong ones like that. OTOH, I've never thought about that before, but suppose I'm better at it than I thought. That would be really neat. And them persisting with it would be less bad too, if they didn't know I hated it but just thought I was indifferent or just didn't hear them.
That just screams illusion of transparency to me.
You may be right there, I might not have been as easy to read as I though I was.
I agree.
Women usually try to conceal how much they dislike it-- for fairly good reasons. They assume that the purpose of street harassment is to cause discomfort, so they want to deny reinforcement to the harassers.
At least some men who do street harassment have a belief that women secretly like street harassment, which mean that they (the men) discount such indications of dislike as they might notice.
I believe that people in general are much less clueful about other people's emotions than it feels like they should be from the inside. Now that I think about it, I've only known one person who could read me accurately when I was shielding (some of the time), or at least only one who talked about what he was seeing.
When I was going through a very bad spell, I was interested to notice that the way I was treated didn't seem to change at all. Now it's plausible that I was missing some subtleties in other people's reactions and/or that they could see something was wrong but didn't know how to address it, but I concluded that people generally don't see very much.
Why are you assuming she's assuming it?
I think it's fair to describe that as assuming malicious intent.
My guess is that some catcallers assume that what they're saying is a compliment even if women don't admit it, and others know it's at least somewhat unpleasant for women but underestimate the total negative effect or believe that women deserve it.
I'd say that's pretty clearly what I meant by "malicious intent".
For the record, I think it's a membership thing. "Look at me, I'm one of the boys, I'm so heterosexual, see how I am attracted to this woman". But then, I've never catcalled (or discussed it with someone who has.)
EDIT: Ninja'd by NancyLebovitz.
Of course. What I meant was, why are you assuming she's assuming it rather than speaking from personal experience and the experience of others?
Oh, that ... makes a lot more sense, actually.
Honestly, it's because it conforms to a stereotype of male psychology that is common, almost certainly wrong, and rarely challenged. More generally, the notion that men find humiliating and frightening women "fun" seems like calling them Evil Mutants, which is almost always an assumption (and wrong.)
I think it's pretty clear that some fraction of people enjoy upsetting other people, though it would surprise me if most of them wildly underestimate how much damage they do.
ETA: That should have been "That wouldn't surprise me. (Can a small amount of noise destroy a message? Yes, if it's leaving out a negation.)
Is there any information about what proportion of men catcall?
How do we want to define catcalling? I haven't run into any of the worst stuff that I know of. (My hearing is not spectacularly good, so I may have failed to make out the words in some cases.) However, I've had a lot of guys just say "How are you doing?", which is a pain in the ass even though they weren't remotely threatening. It took me a while to figure out a good strategy, such just ignoring them was hard on me-- it's an effort to break social rules.
Saying "Fine. And you?" works well enough. They smile and answer briefly. However, my feeling is "Keep moving. This isn't a conversation I want to be in."
It took me longer to figure out what I didn't like about it-- "how are you doing?" is a mildly intrusive greeting which assumes at least a minor connection.
ETA: I run into more and worse harassment for being a middle-aged woman riding a bike with sidebaskets. And when I say more and worse, I mean one instance when I was shoved and one or two more when I was frightened by people demanding a ride in my baskets.
Oh, I know there are people who would probably deliberately catcall just to annoy - I just assumed it was related to the idea that men enjoy humiliating and denigrating women just ... because we're men. It's surprisingly common once you start noticing it, and almost never challenged, so I make a point of speaking up about these things whenever possible. "Men's Rights" may attract misogynists, but that doesn't mean we should ignore stereotypes of men (not saying you're saying we should - it's just a common assumption and a pet peeve of mine.)
As for the catcalling thing ... I think everyone gets random people saying, basically, "hi". It can be weird when you don't know them, but I think it's distinct from catcalling - which seems to vary geographically, judging by other comments here.
When people I don't recognize greet me, I assume that either they mistook me for somebody else, or I met them but I don't remember them. (The fact that I'm not very good at recognizing faces of people I haven't spent a nontrivial amount of time with does not help.) I usually just greet them back and walk on, or ask "have I met you before?" if I'm not in a hurry and they look interesting.
I get it all the time, and have all my life. I always put it down to people I don't know but who recognize me; I'm fairly recognizable and tend to end up doing high-profile things (speeches etc.)
There's an element of "claiming ownership" in cat calling and in "how are you doing" and "smile baby" too. It means "I have the right to your time, I have the right to your attention, I have the right to have you be pretty for me by smiling" Replying politely only confirms that, they think they have you trapped in a conversation now. And witness how this "right" is backed by indignation "bitch, think you're all that" and gendered tear-down-confidence insults "slut" and "fat ugly cow" as soon as the man is refused. Which is why women learn counter strategies that don't throw back his claim in his face (as he rightly deserves).
I've heard that argument (in a thread on a feminist blog about a particular xkcd issue), but it triggers my "not the true rejection" warning light. If Alice was asked for directions by another woman, I wouldn't anticipate Alice to resent that.
Source please.
So ... male passersby are "claiming ownership" of me? Great, now I'll be even more uncomfortable. (I'm male & het, if that wasn't clear.)
Why would this surprise you? As I understand it, most of the damage is caused by the pattern, not by any single instance, and the inferential distance in such a case is extremely high. (I find it fairly high personally, as a man who is trying to be sympathetic and has read discussion about this more than once. I'm having trouble estimating how high it would be among the sort of person who would actually engage in the behavior.)
See the edit-- I'd accidentally left out a negation. I think most people who tease, harass, and/or abuse have no idea how much damage they cause.