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thomblake comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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Anecdotally, this seems wrong. Having observed some groups catcalling, they did not catcall every woman who walked by, only the more-conventionally-attractive ones. So there should be notably lower incidence of catcalling with unattractiveness.
This raises the uncomfortable question of "If you hate it so much, why do you try so hard to look hot?". Common escape routes are "It doesn't actually impact frequency", which is apparently false, and "I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me", which is pure should-universe thinking, and from people who avoid flaunting their wealth to avoid getting mugged.
This should be distinguished from questions like "Since the benefits of looking hot outweigh the costs of increased catcalling, why are you complaining that you can't have it both ways?".
"If you hate being bullied for being a nerd, why do you study physics and watch anime so much?"
"'I have a right to study physics and watch anime; they have no right to bully me' is pure should-universe thinking."
"Since the benefits of studying physics and watching anime outweigh the costs of being bullied, why are you complaining that you can't have it both ways?"
"If you hate being bullied for being a nerd, why do you study physics and watch anime so much?"
puts consequentialist jersey on
If I expect to be better off studying physics and watching anime, I should do so. Otherwise, I shouldn't.
puts acausal wristband on
Considering what I would want to have precommitted to wouldn't matter much -- I would likely be bullied even if I had precommitted to study physics and watch anime no matter how much I was bullied, as it's not likely that they bully me in order to deter me from studying physics and watching anime. (And it's extremely unlikely that a man catcalls a woman in order to deter her from dressing up.)
Considering that people sufficiently similar to me in sufficiently similar situations will make similar choices -- well, the world would be a worse place if more people had refrained from studying physics for fear of being bullied. OTOH watching anime doesn't have any important externalities (that, say, watching Hollywood sitcoms doesn't also have), as far as I can tell.
If I expect to be better off if I complain/have precommitted to complain (and so have people sufficiently similar to me in sufficiently similar situations), then I should complain, otherwise I shouldn't. ISTM that complaining gives visibility to the issue of people being bullied, which can't be bad. (Well, bullies might retaliate, but if I had precommitted to complain whether or not I fear they retaliate...)
"I have a right to X" translates into consequentialistese as "I had better not be deterred from X". Should we deter people from studying physics, so that they won't be bullied? Of course not -- they are already taking into account that they might be bullied when deciding whether to study physics; plus, if fewer people studied physics, bullies would likely just vent off their frustrations on someone else. (OTOH we should tell/remind people that unfortunately studying physics may lead to being bullied, in case they don't already know/have forgotten -- if we could find a way to put that whose drawbacks wouldn't outweigh the benefits.) Should we deter people from bullying nerds? Of course we should.
You're welcome. takes wristband and jersey off
Study whenever the benefits outweigh the risks, work to reduce the risks. Obviously.
Do you actually know anyone who could have avoided bullying and chose not to? (Not counting taking the fall for someone else.) Nerdiness is a deep-seated personality trait. Given that you can't change it in a couple years while you're busy surviving bullies, you might as well make the most of it. If you avoided physics and anime, they'd pick on you on some other pretext.
Internet feminists claim that avoiding looking attractive is like shunning physics and anime; it won't help, because they're after women and are just using attractiveness as a pretext. This appears not to be true in reality.
We need to get rid of the idea that should-universe thinking is bad. Should-universe thinking is a piss-poor way to make predictions, but it's the only way we've got for making goals.
Should-universe thinking is a necessity for engineers.
"I have a right to look hot, they have no right to catcall me, they do catcall me if I look hot, THEREFORE I should re-engineer the universe so that the process that leads from looking hot to catcalls is interrupted or replaced by a differentially preferred process."
Now you have a goal: Create a universe where a woman looking hot --/--> catcalls.
Now you need to form hypotheses and collect experimental evidence about the process you're attempting to effect (woo science!). Then, you need to work out strategies for effecting that process (woo engineering!). Then, you need to work out support systems to implement those strategies (woo economics!). Then, you need to implement those strategies (woo politics!).
This sounds remarkably like what's happening.
In the science phase, you have three-plus "waves" of feminist theory, each with their own ideas of why social processes tend to impact women differently than men. This makes sense; it models the tendencies in other science to build on, revise, and sometimes even completely overthrow earlier models.
In the engineering phase, you have all sorts of activists movements, advocating for change in various directions. As the science improves, some of those activists cling to outdated notions, while others move on or are replaced by better-informed activists, and the landscape of solutions changes.
In the socioeconomic phase, those activist movements rally their allies and gather resources until they're ready to affect behavior, through legislation and marketing and awareness and outreach campaigns.
Then, in the political phase, those legislative and marketing and outreach initiatives get launched, and have their effects, and the social landscape changes - hopefully towards universal justice and away from Pareto concentrations of privilege.
Sure, if they said "I could be spared catcalls by looking ugly, but I refuse to save my own neck until the problem is fixed for all my sisters", like straight couples refusing to marry until gay marriage is legal or something. But they appear to be rejecting the premise, either by denying it (which seems inaccurate) or claiming it's evil to say it.
I disagree with that statement.
Those who seem to be denying the premise, or claiming that it's evil to say it, are actually attempting to attack a social process, not a truth-finding process.
The problem is that the fact "agents who perform <X> tend to have higher incidences of <Y> happen to them", where <X> means "send signals that can be interpreted as sexual availability by a male audience" and <Y> means "sexual assault", is that it isn't simply a statement of fact - it's also an attempt at social norming. It's a direct process of rectifying is-ought, by saying "see? you sluts deserve it", without having to actually say "see? you sluts deserve it".
When facts gain sufficient social baggage that they tend to imply behavior associated with the people speaking them, those facts have become memetically corrupted. At that point, you can no longer deal with them as pure facts; you HAVE to deal with the meme. Engaging with the "pure fact" allows people with an agenda to slip in the meme like a trojan horse, in the guise of "just stating the facts".
Don't blame the people who appear to be fighting the facts in this case; blame the people who deliberately conflated the fact with the meme vector, because they deliberately corrupted the factual landscape in order to promote their agenda.
And yes, in these cases, concepts like "blame" are important, because we're talking about competing social agendas, and humans are notoriously bad at abstract consequentialism. If you must step back all the way, examine the kinds of worlds that both sides are supporting, and then evaluate whether speaking the truth is possible given the strategies employed by both sides - and if it isn't, encyst the truth and wait for the environment to shift to be more truth-favorable, THEN examine it in the light of that environment.
I tried to explicitly distinguish "this sounds like a sensible policy for the selfish individual, given that douchebags aren't yet under control" and "anyone who doesn't apply that policy deserves douchebags unleashed upon them". That went over everyone's heads. Is there any way to disclaim? It should at least be possible in theory - if someone chooses driving over flying because they get sick in planes, nobody will be less than sympathetic if their car crashes.
The problem is that we've had 50+ years of "dog whistle" politics applied explicitly to social justice discussions, so even if you try to explicitly distinguish your statement as the former and not the latter, it is more rational to assume that you are lying than that you are telling the truth. If you are telling the truth, then this is not your fault - but it is also not the fault of your audience, who are receiving your communication on a poisoned channel.
Luckily, there is an newish Overcoming Bias article about this very subject:
Can a Tiny Bit of Noise Destroy Communication?
EDIT: Note to whomever just systematically downvoted the last 25 articles and posts I made to this site over the course of 8 minutes: is that behavior actually in any way helpful? Does it, in fact, increase the probability that you, or I, or anyone else becomes more rational? If not, why do it?
Inorite! But I'd expect it to be possible for a politician, and, a fortiori, a Less Wronger, to say something along the lines of: "We have too much centralized legislation, and states should be more autonomous. And yes, I know the last time someone said that he was implying that segregation was okay. But I'm seriously talking about the denotation of 'states' rights' here, and obviously 'not being super racist' is part of the stuff I'm not proposing to leave up to states, like, duh. So about giving states more power...". Dog-whistles rest on, perhaps not subtlety, but at least subtext - explicitly disclaiming it looks sufficient in my model. What did I miss?
You missed the inevitable arms-race between mimics and legitimate signalers. We're in an evolutionary environment, and assuming that any communication can be taken at face value is a kind of naïveté.
If you want to construct an argument where state's rights (or women sensibly protecting themselves) is important, you have to spend extra effort in your signaling. You need to START by explicitly acknowledging all of the things you might be accused of, BEFORE you present your actual point. You then have to specifically display all of the ways in which your point differs from the false (dog-whistle) signal. For example:
This is the wrong order, and expends insufficient effort in its signaling process to demonstrate that it is not a false signal. This works better:
"A. Most state's rights arguments are, in fact, racist dog-whistles. Unfortunately, some actual, legitimate situations in which states' rights are being trampled upon are swept under the rug, due in part to the poisoning of the discourse by those very dog-whistles.
B. Here is why states should be more autonomous...
C. Here is how we prevent the abuses of state autonomy that happened in the past, while rescuing the needed autonomy that I'm advocating..."
Your system starts with B, then inserts a weak form of A, then jumps back to B - while nearly-completely ignoring C. This is insufficient to distinguish you from a false signaller. By providing a good A, B, and C, you establish that you are willing to expend effort to not be seen as a false signaller (A), clearly present your position (B), and indicate that you recognize the dangers of the false signalers' agenda and are willing to help fight against it as a concession to getting the things you want (C).
Does all that make sense?
As far as I can tell the idea that catcalling and rape are unrelated to the way girls dress is stupid, and it's as useless to pay attention to the arguments of stupid feminists as it is to the arguments of stupid liberals, conservatives, christians, atheists, etc.
I would expect a reasonable feminist to argue that yes, clothes and makeup have an effect, but that the blame still lies fully on the shoulders of the men.
Taking this line to the extreme:
Even if the way they dress and instances of catcalling and rape were 100% correlated (that is, their odds of getting catcalled/raped depend only and always on how 'hot'/'slutty'/whatever they are dressed), the blame still would lie fully with the rapists.
It's like asserting that it's your fault you were victim of theft, because you owned things, and the more things you own the more likely you are to be a victim of theft, so you shouldn't ever have anything to steal; having things means you deserve to be stolen from.
To rephrase, perhaps more clearly, if X increases the odds that (Amoral Agent) K does Y to you instead of to someone else (i.e. K selects for X as targets to do Y upon), where Ks are some subset of the population, are you morally obligated to not-X, else you deserve Y?
How much is rape displaced vs reduced, when a potential rapist decides not to target a potential victim? You're sort of assuming 100% displacement here.
As "blame" goes, of course you jail rapists and support victims and only then collect "what were you wearing?" data for statistical research. "How do my clothing choices influence my likelihood to get raped?" is a rather salient question for many people, and girls at my school certainly avoid some actions they (usually mistakenly) believe increase risk.
Very much worth looking into more, IMO, but I'm not sure I assumed this that explicitly. If you change "to someone else" to "to someone else or not at all" in the last part of the grandparent, it counters the 100%-displacement notion more explicitly, but "K selects for X as targets to do Y" doesn't necessarily imply displacement.
Nevertheless, it's something worth distinguishing when trying to do utility estimations.
You seem to be confusing "you did X, which is a risk factor for Y" with "you did X, therefore you deserve Y".
That confusion exists strongly within the social landscape; perhaps what is needed is a more rigorous distinction between "views that have to be constantly defended against" and "facts which happen to be true", whenever the two happen to be bound together by some form of social assumption.
The problem is "well, I don't think that way" has turned into a poor signaling mechanism, so stronger (and more expensive) signals need to be developed.
EDIT: In the past 5 minutes, every post and comment I have ever made on this site has been downvoted, including ones made weeks ago, and including posts and comments which have nothing to do with this topic.
Can we please try to have a discussion, rather than engage in petty anonymous retribution?
Since you were replying to me, I'd like to take this opportunity to condemn this. Seriously, people, this defeats the whole purpose of the karma system. Play by the rules.
This sort of thing happens from time to time. It means you're posting the kind of thing that petty abusers don't like.
Similar thing happened to me earlier today after a post on this same topic. C'mon lesswrong.
Okay then. I'm submitting a bug report, requesting that the karma system be updated to prevent mass-downvoting. Ideally, if a single user downvotes multiple comments or articles by a specific other user within a short timespan, and the downvoted posts are spread across multiple articles, then some sort of flag should be raised to review the downvoter's actions.
Is there a sort of meta-lesswrong discussion where we can discuss stuff like this? I feel like it's something of a derail of the current topic.
As Emile said, I was attempting to stress the point that people do confuse these, but it does not follow logically by any means (and isn't even remotely implied by any reasonable moral theory I've ever read about other than "Obey The Bible" (If you accept that moral theory as reasonable)).
The second paragraph compares my distinction with "what this confusion would look like if it were about theft"; a reductio ad absurdum attempt of the conflation of risk-factors with moral deservingness.
Edit: On that note, I apologize if my use of the ";" punctuation is nonstandard. I'll try to be more careful in my use of it in the future.
... oops. Guess I misread that.
Is he actually confusing those? It seems to me that he's taking pains to stress the difference!
... oops.
Except in the real world it's not a "risk factor" because if anything the causation works the other way around. People treat it like "asking for it" -> therefore nobody looks further than her to assign blame -> therefore she won't even bother to report it because the police would laugh at her -> therefore I will get away with it, again and again and again.
Once again, the fact that clothing can influence whether a rapist will choose you is not the same as the claim that this somehow shifts the blame to you if he does choose you. As it were.
I'm claiming he chooses women who have attributes that shift blame onto the victim. There is correlation, but the causation goes the other way from what you're thinking.
...if they had f-ing evidence to back that up. Otherwise "opinionated" is the label you want, not "reasonable". Before advancing an opinion, a reasonable person would go look for data.
True, my use of "stupid" and "reasonable" may have been a bit careless, my main point wasn't that believing that was stupid, but rather that one shouldn't pay too much attention to stupid arguments - in this context, MixedNuts was saying that feminist claimed X, though none in the thread who seem to identify as feminists agree with X.
But I still think that dressing in a "sexy" way does increase the chances of catcalling (for rape, probably too, but that covers a wider range of things than catcalling does). I'm not aware of any rigorous studies (your link seems like weak evidence in that favor, and most anecdotes in this thread and outside are in the same direction).
(I agree with the core of your criticism; even if my main point wasn't about stupidity in practice I was still sneaking in connotations)
That's not really the point, though. If clothes and makeup have no effect, then the blame is on the men by default, so the reasonable feminist only needs to consider the other case.
Or, of course, one could find data proving that the clothes and makeup definitely have no effect. But that's harder when you consider all the related issues: e.g. are women walking alone at night more likely to get raped? Our reasonable feminist might therefore be more interested in arguing that in all such cases the blame lies on the rapist (if for some reason this is being questioned) as opposed to nitpicking the concrete details.
???
Keep in mind which way the arguments are going. The feminist position is Y. One objection is that X isn't true and therefore Y can't be true either. However, Emile's reasonable feminists argue that even though X isn't true, Y is still true for unrelated reasons. So it's less relevant to bring up the possibility that X might be true after all.
I don't see why this merited such wide-target downvoting of my comments, but I'll bite: why didn't you direct your complaints to Emile for bringing up the apparently irrelevant tangent, rather than Morendil for correcting Emile's assumption?
Catcalling you can know through observations. It's hard to get data on rape. The studies in Morendil's conflict, though they seem to show that the effect depends on context. There's also the confounding factor that rapists select victims who will be blamed for their rape, and that clothing is related to that.
I don't think there's one identical motivation for all rapes, but I expect through enormous extrapolation and intuitive hand-waving that power is more often a motivation than sexual attraction.
I think we need to taboo "looking hot", as opposed to "looking nice", because of the cultural baggage that comes with the idea of "hot". If you describe a woman as "hot" people assume more sexual clothes, and an effort to be "sexy" looking. "Hotness" does not effect levels of catcalling as much as "looking decent-ness". For example, I would still get catcalled almost as much while wearing generic nice-looking clothes, as while wearing something "hot".
To avoid catcalling, the level of "looking good" has to be extremely low. As in, lower than I would want to go out in public in. For example if I don't shower, wear baggy sweatpants and stained sweater, and have lanky uncombed hair in my face, then yeah, I can avoid catcalling, probably. If I am at all dressed decently (not necessarily "hot"), street harassment will occur.
Regarding "flaunting" how "hot" you are: I can think of some middle eastern cultures that have solved the problem this way. "Let's blame the women for making men feel lustful, so have the women all walk around in big black tents that only show their eyes!" This is not my preferred solution.
Yes, I do think the benefits of looking decent/ not looking like a homeless person outweigh the negatives of street harassment. However, this does not make street harassment an acceptable thing that shouldn't be complained about.
For example, say that people with blue eyes (and only people with blue eyes) had to get punched in the face every time they went on a date. Now, if they continue going on dates, they obviously find it a worth the punching, but that doesn't make the punching acceptable.
You're the second commenter who didn't get that I'm saying that "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter" might be reasonable, but that "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining" is stupid assholery. I thought my second paragraph was quite clear!
We have a Problem with the immense overlap in female fashion between "flattering" and "sexy". Do you think that's related? I can't see a woman in a men's business suit getting catcalled (though I'm no expert), whereas women's business attire is all "LOOK, LEGS AND BOOBS!".
There's definitely a tragedy of the commons going on here. If women all decide to dress more conservatively to be left alone, the standard just drops until just being out of the house is immodest. And any women who don't follow suit might as well wear a "victim-blame me!" sign. So you can't fix harassment that way. But an individual woman acting selfishly would apparently benefit from it.
Stop! Bayesian time! does stupid dance in baggy pants
An environment exists. In that environment, creatures called Oogs often say things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' might be reasonable". Many of them also often say things that aggregate to "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining". When called on it, many of them attempt to argue that they did not actually mean "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining" (by saying things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' is stupid assholery"), but later go immediately back to saying things that aggregate to "Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, you shouldn't want to, stop complaining".
In this same environment, there are other creatures called Arghs who say things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' might be reasonable". They also say things that aggregate to "'Since you can't both be hot and not get catcalled, better pick the latter' is stupid assholery".
Oogs utilize aggressive mimicry to appear to be Arghs. Someone shows up who begins saying Argh-like things. Should a smart Bayesian who does not want to get eaten by an Oog assume it is dealing with an Oog, or an Argh?
Conversely, this is, to me, an EXCELLENT point. It would be nice if women weren't punished for wearing men's business clothes (which they often are - in college-level debate competitions, for example, there are strong norming pressures for women to show leg).
To stick to your metaphor, Arghs have the right to complain about being treated like Oogs, especially if they suspect that Oogs-pretended-to-be-Arghs may not exist, and that the Oog-hunter caste seems to be gaining suspicious amounts of power and influence from how it gets to boss people around.
Though I'm not a huge fan of that phrasing either, the whole thing begins to turn into an oppression contest.
Also, this is a theoretically valid concern. I hope I have not implied at any point that people who disagree with me deserve to be bossed around, only that what they perceive of as 'bare facts' have teleological and deontological implications within the social environment, and those need to be examined with the eye of an engineer before addressing the facts as 'bare facts'.
:( Welcome to primate politics. It's... nasty.
The best I can suggest is to look at the people on each side, and say "what does the world look like if they are in charge?"
Because if the discourse has become so polluted that you can't tell who's oppressing who, at a certain point it's time to just pick a side and hope for the best.
Dear lord no I don't want to pick a side! That's the road to brain damage! And I don't care much about who's oppressing who, it's not a very useful frame for looking at things (as if being oppressed made anybody more likely to be right!).
A more interesting question is determining what a disagreement is about, and on what points disagreeing sides can agree. Often loud advocates on either side of a disagreement couldn't even describe accurately what their opponents think!
This is important and valid. Thank you for saying it. I will reexamine the processes that led to that statement and report back, but this may take a bit of time. Is that acceptable?
Sure! These threads are getting kinda tentacular, and I don't think anybody will be very offended by a lack of answer.
(I'm constantly surprised at how many threads here don't degenerate into shouting matches)
What evidence is there for this position?
In this community? You don't need a lot of evidence that something "may not exist", if it hasn't been observed so far. What's your evidence that Jews plotting the downfall of Western Civilization may not exist?
If you're talking about the world and general then yeah, they exist, sure.
If you're talking about imaginary Oog and Argh-land, then I'm not sure what kind of evidence you're expecting.
So, X% of the world is sexists willing to assert quasi-reasonable arguments that are either fully general counter-arguments or not-true-rejection behavior. And we seem to agree that X > 30.
The LW community is drawn from that world. I'm not aware of anything in the selection process that selects against the attitudes described. Even if there is some selection pressure, the assertion that literally no one with the problematic attitudes makes in through that process is an extraordinary claim.
Consider that LW strongly selects for people who want to think about the problems inherent in hard-takeoff AGI. Yet there is a substantial component in this community that is skeptical that hard-takeoff AGI is possible.
From an object level point of view, I think that some of the motivation for discussing whether short skirts increase stranger rape risk is not-true-rejection behavior to avoid discussing acquaintance rape - a far more frequent kind of rape that requires very different responses.
Or it requires the same response but it is much harder and less likely for people as individuals and as a community to actually perform in practice. That response obviously being "lock the @#%@ up then when the term expires take whatever rehabiliation and recurrence prevention measures research finds to be most effective with criminals for ensuring the safety of others."
I'm not certain how different the responses actually are in this particular context. We might expect effective risk-minimization behavior to look different overall, but if there's anything to the theory that victims' social presentation styles are a risk factor for rape in general, I'd expect them to be a risk factor for acquaintance rapes unless we have some particularly good reason to think that rapists of strangers have unique psychology in this respect.
Indeed, the only empirical data I remember being linked in this thread found its strongest links for date and spousal rape, though the association looks to be on the weak side either way.
What does it tell about me that the first thing I thought was “Why don't they just wear brown contact lenses”?
Yes. It would be oh-so-convenient if "It doesn't actually impact frequency" were true, but I suspect we don't live in such a convenient world. And made more uncomfortable if the calculation were made explicitly ahead of time, and benefits-plus-catcalling was a conscious choice.
To increase the squick factor of this discussion by orders of magnitude, substitute "catcalling" with "rape".
Yeah, that's the fairly heavy subtext here. But here the Internet feminists seem correct in saying that looking like easy prey - pressure not to fight back or not to report rape, plausible deniability for the rapist, physical weakness or incapacitation, circumstances favoring victim-blaming - is a much stronger factor than attractiveness. Never heard of anyone getting catcalled in a nursing home.
My mind immediately called up non-specific instances of the "dirty old man" trope catcalling anyone and everyone. I don't know if I've heard of that actually happening.
I'm pretty sure what MixedNuts is referring to is the phenomenon of nursing home residents being raped by staff/family, not nursing home residents raping people - I don't actually know how common the former actually is, but when I worked in a nursing home we were specifically trained to be on the lookout for it and told that it is indeed a thing that happens, mostly (according to the training) because the victims are, as MixedNuts mentioned, easy targets - they have limited access to people who they can report abuse to and are often written off as confused, among other issues. (Also, I never saw any instances of catcalling in the four years I worked in a home, and I mostly wouldn't expect to given the dynamic of seeing the same people all the time - main exception would be someone who got hit particularly hard by the disinhibition effect that dementia sometimes has, in which case catcalling from that person would be the least of your worries and they probably wouldn't be kept with the general population of residents. (My home sent such people to a facility that specialized in such things, which on one hand sucked but on the other let us keep our non-dangerous dementia patients integrated with the facility, which was pretty awesome for them.))
I've seen claims that the way women dress doesn't affect their risk of getting raped, but I haven't seen any cites on the subject, nor do I have any strong intuitions. I've seen enough evidence to be sure that there's no way of dressing which drives the risk down to zero.
This seemed too obvious to mention to me. But to put in context of inferential distance, I've seen enough evidence to be sure that there's no way to eat or even act which drives the risk down lower than 1%, let alone getting near zero using only superficial changes in appearance like clothing.
This comes partially from groundbreaking-sounding study results like "overweight women don't actually have statistically-significant lower chances of being abused, even sexually!"¹, which isn't nearly as surprising when you approached the question from "How do rapists select their victims?" or more generally "Who rapes who and why?" instead of the default internal model that translates to "Which women would I (men) want to have sex with?".
¹. Read two studies to that effect years ago, do not remember sources. Strong possibility of cherry-picking / other biases.
It should be, but people give advice in such absolute terms that I'm not sure it's generally known.
I notice several cases: ONe is that there is succiciently unattractive looking women don't get catcalled but that is REAALY unattractive. Second is that unattractive women and women who react negatively to catcalling are then attacked with derogatory catcalling along the lines of 'you are lucky that even I would be attracted to you'