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lukeprog comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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From the final hyperlinked article:
I've never understood this, either. Any good guesses?
As a man who doesn't catcall, it seems really obvious to me: Whenever I see someone really attractive, I want to shout out that they are to them. I'm well aware that my well-meaning comment about how great someone's ass is or how I love their hair would be weird or uncomfortable, and so I don't do it. But it's very easy to imagine someone less aware who does.
If I notice someone has effortfully made one physical aspect of their superficial appearance (which only includes transient things - pretty much just hair and clothes, but sometimes eyes), I feel guilty for thinking a compliment without uttering it for that person's benefit. If it were me, I would like to hear if someone thought I was doing something especially right that day. To alleviate this guilt, and for other reasons as well, I've instituted a policy of conveying these compliments to the people in whom I notice an impressive display of personal style. I will not go far out of my way (greater than ten meters) to tell people these things, but if I am near them I will casually mention, "That's a really cool hat," or "That scarf's awesome."
I only pay particular attention to and am willed to compliment aspects of a person's appearance that are easily changed and not likely to be part of that person's identity. Maybe after I've known them for a month may I compliment their general style (dyed hair, cleverly matched outfits, always exuding a certain alluring or mystically compelling atmosphere, etcetera).
These compliments are uttered in passing, from an average of one to two meters distant, with eye contact and only a bit more than a hint of a smile. Would any here be off-put by such a compliment?
Part of the reason I like going to nightclubs or cons is that it's approved to tell people how awesome they look because part of the context is people deliberately going out of their way to be noticed looking awesome.
I guess we could understand catcalling better by seeing its equivalent in more primitive societies, or preferably at apes. Or perhaps by putting a hidden camera on a person who does it frequently, and examining the consequences.
My guesses:
1) Some women react positively to catcalling. Even if one in a hundred, then it would be enough, because the cost is low. As an analogy, receiving spam is also annoying, but a tiny fraction of humans react by sending their money, which rewards the spammers.
2) Catcalling may be a defection in a Prisonners' Dilemma of a group of men meeting a woman. A more polite group would be more likely to impress her positively. But even in the best case scenario, she would most likely choose only one of them as her sexual partner. By catcalling, a man positions himself as a "speaker" of the group, as the dominant male. He slightly increases his personal chance by decreasing the chances of the group as a whole.
3) In its most primitive form, catcalling could be an encouragement to a group rape. It is not a signal for the woman. It is a signal for the fellow men to join the action.
Additional hypothesis-- for some people, being disliked is preferred to being ignored.
Note that the catcallers only need to believe that it's worthwhile; it needn't actually be.
As for 1), the article linked to at the end of the post says:
(EDIT: But maybe there are women who respond positively, but not in large cities, and the men who catcall grew up somewhere where certain women did.)
As for 2), it's not clear to me which side of the evolutionary-cognitive boundary. Are you saying that men believe (or, at least, alieve) that nowadays by catcalling they make each other less likely to get laid but themselves more likely to get laid, or are you saying that their brain is wired to find catcalling fun, and the reason why it is is that their ancestor who did so had more children than those who didn't?
Six options:
1) Low rate of success is coupled with a very low investment level. 2) The behavior isn't to try to pick up the woman at all but rather to engage in shared bonding among the males. (Note how this behavior seems to generally occur when there is a group of males.) 3) Lack of self-restraint. The people in question who do this are typically low status and low income. There's a large body of evidence that people with lack of self-control have less life success. (The marshmallow studies and all that.) Some of these people may have little self-control or bother so little to exercise self-control that clearly unsuccessful behavior is still attempted. 4) Attempts to harass the people in question, possibly to blow off steam at one's own lack of sexual success. 5) A well-meaning attempt to actually complement people for being good looking and well-dressed. They may just be unaware of how uncomfortable this behavior often makes women feel. 6) Possibly combining with any combination of the above possibilities- cultural behavior. Once there's some small fraction doing something, how long does it take before the same behavior is imitated in the general group?
Take those with a grain of salt.
There's plenty of evidence (e.g.) of higher-income people engaging in similar behavior.
Yes. The take-away point is that the children's patience with marshmallow promises and their long-term life success may be correlated because they're mutually determined by whether adults and peers in their life are trustworthy and reliable, more so than by a variable of Intrinsic Self-Discipline.
Seems obvious to me: it's fun. People enjoy teasing and flirting, and catcalling is both. The main reason people avoid both of those behaviors is the risk of rejection/social punishment. Catcalling is overwhelmingly done to strangers, unlike most types of flirting, you don't lose face if rejected. Catcalling as teasing is also low-risk, since you aren't offending someone you know, possibly making new enemies. There's a reason catcalling is usually done by guys on public streets, somewhat isolated from their targets. At my college, guys like to sit in their dorm windows (3rd floor or higher) in groups and yell stuff like "HEY CUTIE I LIKE UR BOOBS." Girls occasionally yell stuff back, which the guys seem to love.
Also, since it's usually a male(s)-on-female occurrence, there's the superior physical strength of the harassers, often backed by strength in numbers. Suppose the conflict escalates; what could the victim possibly do to the harasser, that the harasser can't return with even greater force? Suppose she has a strong, visible negative reaction; you know what the catcallers will do? Laugh, ridicule and humiliate her. From their point of view, the behavior has all the benefits it could have, and none of the drawbacks. It's as low-risk an offense as you can possibly get.
Maybe that's where one can act to reduce instances of the behavior. Increase expected associated risk by a significant amount. Make it so that it no longer pays off. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to actually enforce a law or norm against street harassment, or to take any action that is both 1) a sufficiently strong deterrent and 2) within the bounds of legality and legitimate self-defense.
I thought there were websites for uploading catcalling to embarrass the people doing it, but I haven't found them. I did find Hollaback.
The trouble with "Increase expected associated risk" is that catcalling is normalized in this culture as a thing men are allowed to do to women against their will - a response that treats it as an assault (pepper spray to the eyes, for example) would be considered an over-reaction.
It's rather obnoxious of guys at your college to misspell "your" even while talking.
It's actually plausible that they pronounce it "ər" instead of "jɔr," given the amount of internet-related slang that has made it into the speech of the youth.
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?
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.
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.)
My guess is that it's some kind of corrupted form of compliment often combined with peer-pressure and/or signalling about virility.