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Viliam_Bur comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Knowing this, forget about the "appreciated behavior" and simply do what you believe is the right thing.
Well, as a utilitarian my idea of the right thing depends on what I expect the results to be.
One part of the result will be someone criticizing you, either for speaking up, or for not speaking up. You already know this.
Now what about the other parts? Are there any other reasons to either speak up or not speak up, besides avoiding someone's critique?
(Possibly related.)
It's not the criticism I care about so much as the feelings that incite it.
I don't expect it to affect the catcaller's behavior much, because the rate of negative reinforcement relative to the frequency with which they engage in the behavior is so low (not counting that which they receive from the women they do it to, which obviously hasn't stopped them so far.) I think that explaining to them why the behavior is rude and hurtful is less likely to make them reevaluate their actions than it is to make them think "Some dick got all up on my case today." If it doesn't make the woman feel less like all the men in the world are aligned against her, and just reinforces that feeling, then I wouldn't want to bother.
When I was in high school there was a guy who was in the habit of catcalling who moved in to our school. It wasn't typical behavior in our peer group. When he called at a women from the car, or similar, people would react with laughter and a derisive "what the fuck are you doing Louis?". He stopped quickly enough.
You might not be able to implement that if you are in the minority, but I could imagine it working.
It depends substantially on the cat-callers' motivation. If he thought the behavior was high status, how should others indicate the behavior is low status?
As you say, some proportion of cat-callers will code your intervention as low status and therefore not worth listening to. But some people really don't have a good sense of what the appropriate behavior is, and it is hard to classify three distinction with only behavioral data.
I try to helplessly flail in the general direction of that empirical cluster in another post, but in general I would advise that if you value other people's long term emotional well-being, my best guess says you really should use a strategy of speaking up rather than not, wherever not disproportionately dangerous.