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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.
I'm far from a Puritan, but there's a certain tenant who recently moved into a rental house we own. They have a teenage daughter, she's thing and reasonably good looking, and she dresses in ways that make me want to avoid standing too close to her. Gossamer thin tank tops worn without a bra, which barely cover her stomach, and shorts so short I'd be arrested for wearing them.
I'm not aroused by her in any way that's above normal or disturbs me, nor am I particularly ashamed by any feeling of arousal I might have. But in any conversation beyond a few minutes, I'm filled with a sense that I don't want to be seen talking to her. Perhaps this is an overactive superego, a feminist or Catholic panopticon living in my brain, but I don't want to be seen chatting with a girl who looks like that. I have an inner sense that the image of me talking to a teenage girl dressed like that is inappropriate, and I'd prefer not be near her.
She's perfectly pleasant, if essentially uninteresting, to talk to; but immediately after I tell her whatever it is I need to tell her I cut the conversation short if no one else is present and go about some other business until her parents arrive, even if I have to invent some pretext to be inspecting or doing something else. I simply don't want to be seen by anyone to be chatting with a teenage girl dressed in that way, call it an extension to the Pence Rule.
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An asymmetry, sure, but I'm not so sure we can definitively come down on either side. I find catcalling at best trashy and at worst threatening, and I like seeing semi-naked women on the street, but then I'm a guy who got laid when he was younger so I expect that affects it.
But for a lot of men I imagine seeing a semi-naked woman is like a homeless guy seeing me light a cigarette with a 20 dollar bill. Sure, I'm not hurting him, and he's not entitled to my money, but I can see how it would be painful for the homeless guy. In the same vein, rare is the woman who is relieved when she reaches middle age and men stop paying attention to her. Instead she desperately clings on to her youth and tries to stave off invisibility.
I think it's a mistake to see dressing in provactive clothing as a passive act, which is how a lot of women frame it. It's an act with plausible deniability, perhaps, but when a woman dresses like this she does so in the full knowledge of the effect it is going to have on men. All men, not just the ones she's interested in.
My suspicion is that a large part of the dislike of cat-calling (at least among adult women) is the offence that a trashy low-class man thinks he has a shot, as opposed to fear of violence, although certainly that's going to be common, particularly for teenage girls. What I really want is a truthful survey (probably impossible) on how many women feel like this.
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There 100% is. Women walking around in their underwear is an unfortunate commentary on the state of society; it’s not directly threatening.
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Well, some guy who is jogging stark naked through the city is also just going about their own business, and yet we treat it as actively getting into someone's space in most of the Western world.
I think that I can understand where the puritans would come from at least in theory. If I were in a business meeting and the woman across from me was sitting there bare-chested, I would be annoyed because her tits would be hijacking my attention. By contrast, if I go swimming in the lake and see some women tanning topless, I think 'yay boobs'.
I realize that this is totally dependent on culture. Some guy from Saudi Arabia who has never seen the hair of a woman who was not his wife or relative might get similarly distracted by seeing a woman without a headscarf. And some guy from a society where clothing was not a thing and people masturbated during social gatherings all the time might consider me a terminal prude, but would perhaps freak out when people were eating meat during a business dinner.
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.
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The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
(Fun fact: Australia used to require protruding labia to be removed from pornographic displays, so even in contexts where it was legal to display female genitalia, it was not legal to do so with complete anatomical accuracy! I have seen it argued that this may have contributed to the rise of cosmetic labiaplasties.)
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.
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.
("But you shouldn't think of something like exercise clothing as sexually provocative!" "No, you shouldn't think of something like catcalling as provocative!" Etc.)
I think it's more an active vs passive thing.
A cat-caller actively intrudes into the life of the random passerby. They do this intentionally by inserting (hah) themselves into the life of another.
The bikini clad ass may upset the Amish or Muslim man, but it doesn't force them to look. It's a passive object in their life they can choose to interact (hah) with or not.
I guess the counter is you have to first notice the bikini to then ignore it, but I again just have a very hard time not finding a someone deliberately taking action (making noise that is in 99% of cases unwanted and coded as threatening) to be anywhere near equivalent as someone getting annoyed as to what someone else is wearing.
I think you're definitely supposed to think about it this way, in connection with women's dress at minimum, but I also think this simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Catcalling is no more active a choice than wearing a bikini, especially with the intent to wear it somewhere conspicuous (i.e. not at the beach, although even at the beach a bikini can be pretty damn conspicuous). You are no more forced to listen to catcalls than you are forced to look at someone in a bikini--though you may not be able to initially prevent yourself from hearing the first or seeing the second, you can always respond to either by plugging your ears or closing your eyes. The idea that catcalling is somehow more "intrusive" doesn't make any sense; we're talking about people sharing public spaces, and finding the proper balance allowing that space to be used by everyone for the activities they prefer. Why does a man's preference for catcalling rank below a woman's preference against it? The answer can't be "intrusiveness" because we actually often want intrusiveness to be a feature of shared public spaces--for example, political protests are deliberately intrusive, and lose their effect when they are not at least somewhat intrusive.
(I think the most likely answer, as others have noted, is probably just "public hetero male horniness is a low class signal," and nobody wants to speak for the interests of horny low class males, who are also often criminal elements, undesired immigrants, the uneducated, the antisocial, etc. Plus I suspect that many men who can keep their mouths shut would like the catcallers to stop, simply because living in a culture where women regularly go out in public half naked is something many heterosexual men prefer, and quietly enjoy.)
Part of this may be a "noncentral fallacy" problem, too--honking your car's horn at a pedestrian when there's no actual danger is a very obnoxious thing to do quite regardless of whether it is part of "catcalling" someone. Whereas wolf whistling is not coded as threatening (though some women take it that way, and seem to think every woman should, even though this is actually fairly paranoid on their part). To use some other examples of obnoxious public behavior, carrying around a protest sign with graphic imagery of aborted babies is gross. It's surely as "intrusive" as someone yelling sloppy compliments in your direction. "Well you don't have to look at it" doesn't really acknowledge the depth of discomfort many people experience when seeing such imagery.
While I agree with a lot of what you say, I do wonder if maybe my active/passive definition didn't work.
Catcalling is a specific act, targeted/focused at a specific person. One that is in the overwhelming super-majority of cases is not desired. I would also posit that many a cat-caller does it not just because they think someone is hot, but because they enjoy the fact they get to flex "power" over someone by making them uncomfortable with no recourse against them (dovetails nicely with everyone's discussion about lower class men, they don't get to flex power often).
Having ones ass out is an unfocused act, it is not targeted at anyone. While it may make some uncomfortable, it does so at a much lower rate (and makes people happy at a much higher rate). There is no intent to cause distress.
Finally, while I agree that society is teaching and reinforcing women to be far more paranoid than is warranted, the Venn diagram between "is willing to break social norms by cat calling" and "is willing to go for a cheeky bottom pinch or other form of personal assault" has overlap, there is a small but credible possibility of violence from that person. The Venn diagram of "has ass out in Lululemon" and "will grab your dick through your shorts" is 0, unfortunately.
I'm unconvinced cat calling should be an indictable offense, but comparing it to skimpy clothing is ridiculous.
I'm not especially sympathetic to the "sex as a power trip" narrative, but assuming it is basically correct--isn't women dressing in revealing clothing also often an opportunity for them to enjoy flexing their power over men? I think maybe part of what leads you here--
--is a background Western assumption that men have power, and that power is what men have. I occasionally see feminists (especially, "sex positive" feminists) move past this decidedly mid-20th century "Second Sex" narrative into a more postmodern, Foucaultian "women's power is different" narrative. Men may dominate physically, but women dominate socially; men may gatekeep the levers of action, but women gatekeep the levers of status. Occasionally in these "catcalling debates" women will decide to flip the script and start catcalling men; this never works out because men love this shit. Not the truly aggressive and negative stuff--honking at pedestrians, shouting insults--that might well get you punched in the face! But "CHECK THE GUNS ON THIS GUY" is going to put a smile on his face for days.
Putting on a skimpy swimsuit is the psychologically female equivalent of a man looming over someone and saying, "hey, you wanna feel my muscles?"
And sure, you might not find this totally persuasive, but I think it's a long way from ridiculous. Except in the sense that ridicule itself is a way of socially signaling; countenancing the idea that women may have just as much power over men, as men have over women--just in different ways and contexts--is very low status, at present! It's the kind of thing you might expect to hear some "beta cucks huffing as copium," in the parlance of the iPad youths.
The Venn diagram between "is willing to ask you out" and "is willing to rape you at the first opportunity" has overlap, too. Women are wise to be cautious of men! That's clearly true, and surely of importance in this discussion. One of the reasons I started it is because, like other posters have more explicitly suggested, I think there is a kind of person who will feel unsure about the Surrey stings until they see the color of the perpetrator's skin! Or two kinds, if we want to separate them out--people who will only be mad if this is enforced against non-whites and immigrants, and people who will only be mad if it is enforced against native whites outside otherwise-criminally-problematic neighborhoods. As an anti-identitarian I think both of these perspectives are avoiding a real substantive issue, namely, the regulation of interpersonal behaviors in public spaces shared between individuals with diverse and not entirely compatible interests. Likewise, treating women's interests in public space interaction as weightier than men's interests in the same, is identitarian rather than appropriately considerate of all the issues involved.
(One solution some cultures implement is to simply segregate the disparate interests; men from women, white from black, whatever. That is a workable solution in many cases but the West has rejected it, and as a liberal myself I think it is both possible and desirable for people with disparate interests to share public spaces without significant conflict. So I set this solution aside, but I know not everyone does.)
Somewhere downstream from catcalling is a slightly different thing: the cold open. Most people here are not old enough to remember the Clinton years, but a phrase that got kicked around a lot (with direct reference to Clinton's own behavior) was, "it doesn't hurt to ask!" Meaning: the First Amendment protects men asking women if they'd like to go out on a date--or even have sex! Even if those women are strangers! Even if 99.995% of women are going to say no!
We don't seem to actually live in that world anymore; we punish men for even asking, in almost any setting, and so they have in many cases just stopped asking. Norms are forcing these conversations out of almost every environment, onto dating apps that optimize for something other than flourishing. All in the interest of preventing women from ever being put in an uncomfortable position in public--while allowing them to put men into uncomfortable positions through comparable, albeit not identical, practices, like dressing provocatively* while immune from any kind of interpersonal or societal response.
*I here leave aside the tiresome conversations about what counts as provocative, as of course different cultures will have inculcated different views on the matter; as a rule, people know what "sexy" clothing is for people in their sociocultural environment, even if they try to ignore the actual biological implications of the word "sexy."
That was an interesting link. I often wonder about all the variables that are leading young people to date less — of course, “no woman wants to date me” seems to be a plurality answer from men, and I’m well aware of male friends of mine for whom that’s the entire reason they’re single. I have a friend who’s gone from social and engaged to depressed, suicidal, and medicated as his 20s have flown by without a wink of intimacy. Nicest and most prosocial guy you’d ever meet — maybe that’s the problem.
I do wonder sometimes how I’d feel romantically if I hadn’t had some formative positive experiences with dating as a teenager. It certainly wasn’t all roses, but I can trace my own strong drive for intimacy to a before/after with my high school sweetheart. If I hadn’t fallen into a relationship with her… would I be dating now? Would I feel as strongly about dating as I do now?
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This is a really well thought out comment, thank you for writing it.
I think I agree with most of it. I still think the "mechanism of action" for a cat-call vs skimpy shorts (or whatever) is far enough apart that they don't compare well, but I'll concede they're on the same spectrum of human behaviour/motivations.
I'm gonna read this again later when I'm not in motion, thanks again.
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I'm pretty sure there was a post here by a frustrated man who didn't appreciate seeing tight gymwear constantly in public. I can't find it now unfortunately but I believe it was well-received or even AAQC.
So apparently not just a Muslim thing.
This forum also has seen some Aella-inspired discussion of this phenomenon.
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Women shouldn’t be allowed to wear bikinis in public, but neither that nor speedos nor the Borat swimsuit justify potential violence the way a particularly forwards/lewd catcall would.
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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.
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.
Right, so, one of the things I allude to in my original post is that this bit is really vague in UK law, as best I can tell. Sometimes it seems like "harassment" under UK law requires specific and directed intent, but sometimes not. And even when intent is required, the kind of intent is usually something like "intent to cause distress or shame." But of course screaming "NICE GAMS," while it might very well cause embarrassment to the admiree, is perfectly consistent with intending to make a woman feel good about herself, rather than to cause distress or shame. So when you say--
--this seems at least half mistaken. The catcaller wants to get someone's attention to pay her a compliment, albeit perhaps a compliment she'd rather not receive. (Is it also "catcalling" to yell putative insults at a woman, e.g. "whore" or "slut?" I think maybe this also would qualify as catcalling, but then the vulgarity and more aggressively threatening content of the speech seems to more clearly establish hostile intent.) Disturbing her "business" does not seem to be a necessary (or indeed generally intended) aspect of catcalling.
Likewise, UK law seems to think that you can direct harmful intent without a specific target in mind--for example, using PSPOs to forbid people from protesting near abortion clinics. Merely holding a sign that says "abortion is murder" near an abortion clinic need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual. Likewise, wearing a diaphanous string bikini to walk around a busy pedestrian area need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual, and yet a reasonable person might well find it an alarming sight--and doubt that it was done with anything less than mischievous intent.
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'.
I think this is probably close to correct (obviously from these articles, there is a meaningful percentage of British society that presumably hasn't reached this point, as they still engage in catcalling), but is rather my point about being in psyop territory. Convincing everyone to believe that catcalling should be perceived as negative seems to be the actual goal of these "stings," not because it was democratically decided that catcalling is in fact negative, but because certain people genuinely don't like it and they don't want anyone else to like it, either, or be subjected to it as a result of others liking it.
As I suggest in my original post, I don't really understand catcalling and regard it as at best inconsiderate. But I also don't like it when the government and news media collude to nudge people's values around instead of having an honest conversation about controversial-but-not-to-everyone behaviors.
I guess I just never understood the appeal of catcalling — what do you think is gonna happen, she’s gonna decide that random horny construction worker #25 is so hot he deserves a handjob? It just seems like pointless horniness.
But then again, I also don’t see the appeal of a strip club so maybe there’s a whole psychology of looking but not touching I don’t share.
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.
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I mean, you’ve never tried to flirt with a woman you just ran into? Imagine that but….
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Yeah, I don't know. But to try to steelman it, maybe--imagine you're an audience member at a beauty pageant or a fashion show. (Yeah, I don't get beauty pageants or fashion shows, either, but they're definitely a thing!) You see all the work these models have put into their poise, their dress, their movements, their facial expressions... so you cheer! Cheering is surely a thing at beauty pageants (I admit I'm assuming here). You're expressing your appreciation and admiration. Indeed, isn't it perfectly natural, even polite, to express your appreciation and admiration for someone like that?
Well, some people just... aren't that smooth with their cheering!
Or to take it up another level, have you ever deliberately tried to provoke a smile from someone? Maybe an angry child, or a grumpy friend? Maybe you took it as a kind of personal test, a self-imposed challenge of sorts... so maybe catcallers are thinking, maybe unrealistically, "I bet I can get a smile out of that girl." And in some cases, should they fail, they might feel ashamed by that, and lash out instead--"oh, too stuck up for a smile, girl?"
These are surely not the most artful approaches, I'm trying to steelman and I'm still not coming up with highly sympathetic actors, here, but I think there are many analogous behaviors out there. I don't really understand catcalling but there's a lot of irrational human behavior I don't understand (professional sports!) and most of it doesn't get you a dressing down from your local Bobby.
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Society is not uniform. For instance the incident that naraburns alluded to when most of the catcallers weren't white. I wouldn't be surprised if there are sections of society where catcalling is acceptable. They just don't overlap with friends of Internet geeks very much.
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.
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Well, maybe you're not but here is an appeal to authority that the devout Amish, at least, should acknowledge.
Yes, looking at women(other than your wife) in bikinis is sinful… but Jesus also says that those who lead others to sin are more sinful- he specifically says it would be better for them if they were killed.
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I was raised christian (though I'm not anymore) and traditional teaching is very clear that avoiding sin is a communal project, i.e. you're supposed neither to directly sin, nor to make someone else sin. See the literal Enemy, Satan, whos' most dangerous attribute is making humans sin, not the fact that he himself sins.
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I'm not sure whether this is your point, but if I were the kind of person to take that particular Biblical edict seriously, I would likely be in favor of laws that discouraged other people from behaving in ways that might tend to inspire rebelliousness in my extremities.
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