Rosencrantz2
5d ago
What can I say, I just want to starve on a dying planet in the arms of my loved ones, instead of having to eat or be eaten by them.
(In reality most of the time I am personally extremely unconfident about whether AI, low fertility or climate change will in the long-run hasten or put off the demise of our species, so actual existential continuity tends to fade into the background of my thinking on most issues.)
Also, yes, you are right, heat death is not actually certain.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Classically, catcalling is a builder who is with his mates, not by himself. It's done for the mates to strengthen the group and give them the small stroke of pointing out a hot woman to look at or whose reaction to be amused by.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Well the jogging stark naked guy is probably crazy. Even if not though, streaking is way more wholesome than flashing!
As you say though all this is quite culture relative and I often think about how a woman willing to ditch the head scarf in a very repressive country is doing something that must feel brazen to her and read as overtly sexual to men around her.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
Yeah, this might be true and if they could keep their cat calling within their section of society maybe that would be okay? But not very practicable if we're talking about whistling at strangers.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
The interesting thing about social norms and equilibria though is that they interact strongly with intentions. In other words, whereas in the past catcallers may well have reasonably intended flattery, nowadays (arguably), they can't possibly think that because it's been made so clear to them that their attention is unwelcome.
Rosencrantz2
5d ago
As you allude to, there's a 'reasonable person' standard. Someone could flash a woman hoping the woman would be excited by the sight of some random unexpected genitals in their eyeline. But that's unreasonable. A reasonable person would understand that they are more likely to cause upset, so the only reasonable intention we can impute is a malign one.
With catcalling, it seems to me pretty unreasonable in 2025 to imagine catcalling might be welcome, so even if a given catcaller wishfully thinks it will be taken as flattery, British society has (arguably) reached a point where the only response to this is 'Give me a break, pal'. Among my own male friends, certainly, I would flatly disbelieve one of them who said they thought catcalled women liked it and they were doing it to flatter them. I'd tell them, 'Really? Or do you get off on upsetting them, because that's what you're mostly doing.'
With the walking in a string bikini example, depending on the location I think this would very possibly be done with mischievous intent. Except at a beach though I think that's a pretty strong example. Tight leggings or bare midriff is more likely the disputed case and I think a woman dressed thus would be within her rights to say to someone offended, 'I wasn't thinking of you at all'.
Rosencrantz2
6d ago
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
Perhaps but we are talking about UK culture, which I am part of, and so I do feel fairly comfortable telling a British religious person this. Moreover there's a gradient of feelings where some religious people will be upset about even having to see parts of a woman's face or hair, and in this extreme case I don't feel too many qualms about telling them they need to get over their feelings. Perhaps that's the same in reverse as a catcaller telling a woman she needs to get over her objections to catcalling, but so be it.
I'm not sure I see how catcalling "actively get[s] into someone's space," which is why I noted that provided the 18 arrests were made for actual assault rather than mere catcalling, there's less to complain about here. The realm of "offensive speech" and unwilling audiences is a fascinating one for legal theorists precisely because what counts as "invading" someone's "space" in public is really tricky. Our bodies are an easy place to draw a line: unwanted physical contact is bad! Our senses are much more complicated. How is dressing provocatively any different from speaking provocatively, from the perspective of the unwilling audience? Are our ears more important than our eyes, somehow? "You can just look away!"--or--"you can just plug your ears!" There seem to be a lot of unstated assumptions in the assertion that there is a "significant" difference between catcalling and parading around in provocative clothing.
For sure there's a theoretical debate to be had which I think is perhaps too laborious to really get into here, but part of that debate would need to get into questions of intent. The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed. The skimpily dressed woman may also be trying to distract a given man. But we actually don't know, and most of the time cannot know, if she is or not merely from the fact of her dress. It's just harder to establish an intent to impinge on a specific individual to the woman in this case than the man. If she actively flashes a body part at a specific man, we would have established an intent towards that particular person, and in that case, the woman's act is similarly invasive as catcalling – maybe even if another woman is showing a similar amount of skin as a matter of course, but not pushing it specifically towards a given unconsenting man. Innocence is not merely in what is shown but how it's shown.
Rosencrantz2
6d ago
Women dressing in form-fitting or revealing clothing and parading themselves in full view of the public is something that some men find "alarming" or "distressing." You can see the result of laws that seek to minimize that distress.
Can you elaborate on this bit? I guess I can imagine being of a puritan mindset where I would want to suppress feelings of being attracted out of shame, or out of a strong moral view on female virtue, and therefore would prefer form-fitting clothing be kept away from me wherever possible. Is that where you're going with this, or something else?
Setting the legal debate aside (I find myself not too sure of my views on what the laws should be in this area), I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass, and a fairly significant difference between actively getting into someone's space by catcalling them and just being seen by them as you go about your own business.
It does work but I think to do proper proofreading on an important document, you're going to need to supervise it, feed it your house style etc, and then check all its suggestions, or have someone competent who understands the subject matter do the same. Then you'll probably need to feed all the changes manually into InDesign (an LLM might be integrated into Adobe suite to be fair, I haven't used it lately).
By the time you've done that, maybe you'll have saved some time but I don't see it as that big a deal.
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