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I know that several Mottizens are American attorneys--have we got any solicitors or barristers about?
This week I've seen a couple of articles about Surrey policewomen posing as joggers to catch men harassing women out exercising. This is ostensibly to combat "violence against women," and this particular article's subheading reads:
As an American, my instinct was that this had to be sloppy (or deliberately misleading) reporting. For an expressive act like catcalling to rise to the level of unlawful harassment in the United States would require either a severe single incident, or (more often) a pattern of unwanted behavior and either actual or constructive ("a reasonable person would know") knowledge on the part of the harasser that the behavior was in fact unwanted. I know the UK lacks anything like the protection afforded to Americans by the First Amendment, but they aren't entirely without speech protections. Sure enough, the article seems to suggest that most men do just get "educated" (I assume a stern talking-to, maybe a pamphlet?) while the 18 arrests are for something more like actual assault. But attempting to ascertain the state of "catcalling" law in the UK sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
According to one article, the "first London fine for catcalling [was] dished out after undercover operation" in 2022. This was an application of a "Public Space Protection Order" (PSPO), which makes "certain anti social activities within a mapped area prosecutable"--including such diverse things as noisy supercars, protesting near abortion clinics, and "kerb crawling." Anyway this fine (£100) was issued to a man for making a "sexually suggestive remark to a woman in a late-night takeaway."
So, neither apparently severe nor an established pattern of unwanted behavior! With specific regard to harassment, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (PDF) suggests that any "unwanted behaviour directed at an individual with the purpose or intent of humiliating, disrespecting, intimidation [sic], hurting or offending them" qualifies, even if it is a single incident. The laws I was able to find use slightly different language, suggesting that harassment is anything a reasonable person thinks harassment is, plus "alarming the person or causing the person distress"--but also suggests that a "course of conduct" must include "at least two occasions in relation to that person" or "on at least one occasion in relation to each of" two or more persons in a group. But all of that may be moot, if these PSPOs are not specifically dealing in harassment law, but instead are more general mandates against whatever "antisocial" behavior local politicians can be convinced to be concerned about.
This is of course related to a common hack in "Common Law" jurisdictions with "reasonable person" standards: if you conduct a successful campaign to shift people's attitudes, you can actually change the law without ever changing the law. And people's attitudes are apparently changing! After the 2022 London fine, other parts of the UK took up the cause and expanded the penalties; the £100 fine was presumably deemed insufficiently punitive, and in 2024 the city of Bradford boasted of seizing four cars in a "catcalling crackdown."
Not everyone is impressed with this use of police resources. But what brought me up short, personally, was the asymmetry of it all.
I don't really understand catcalling, in approximately the same way I don't understand smoking, or aggressive driving--that is, I know that some people's preferences run that way, but I'm pretty sure it's because those people are to that degree some combination of stupid and inconsiderate. Particularly when a woman is on foot and her, uh, admirers are in a car, it is unequivocally terrifying to be abruptly shouted (or worse, honked) at from a moving vehicle. Wolf whistles from men on foot are less immediately terrifying but can portend a different sort of danger, and England has certainly had its share of sex assault scandals. So I rather see the objection to such behavior!
But in drawing the line between "inconsiderate" and "criminal offense," it feels like the UK has opted for an approach that caters primarily to outrage merchants and the terminally online, rather than to their own community norms. If you were a culture warrior back in 2014, you might remember "10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman," which generated pushback from diverse angles (most of the men in the video were not white, a repeat of the experiment in hijab showed reduced harassment, a similar video taken in Mumbai recorded no instances of overt harassment, etc.). There seem to be cultural, demographic, and/or geographical contexts in which catcalling happens or does not happen, and "when women are exercising in public" seems to be the currently contested context, at least in the UK.
So where I find myself uncomfortable is in the way that the press and, presumably, the police PR are clearly tying catcalling, wolf whistles, and even sexual comments together with simple and sexual assault. The articles often admit, somewhere on page 3, that a lot of the objectionable behavior isn't (maybe can't be) prosecuted, but instead met with "education" efforts. "Did you know this frightens women?" Well, hashtag-not-all-women, surely? Rather like the epidemic of "dick pics" on dating apps, actually--"if today I catcall a hundred women and one of them flashes me her boobs, tomorrow I'll catcall a thousand women?"
In other words, "male sexual strategy," such as it is, is understandably disconcerting to women (especially when the men don't know the rules), but the reverse is also true. 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. Is this just down to "women in the West were oppressed in the past, therefore it's fine to flip the script?"
My own personal position is that these are things that should not be decided by law, but by norms. If the 18 men arrested in Surrey were all arrested for touching a woman without clear invitation to do so, then I have no particular objection to their arrest (beyond the slight stench of entrapment that all "sting" operations inevitably report to my senses). But (if indeed this is happening) law enforcement officers dressing people down for a wolf whistle, much less fining them, much less throwing them in prison, seems excessively aggressive given the interest on the other side. To be overtly sexually attractive, in public, and never have anyone comment on this in any way might be nice, but it hardly seems like the sort of thing one can reasonably demand be enforced by law. And using the media to disingenuously suggest to men that they are under real risk of serious punishment, not for sexual assault alone but even for comparatively innocuous, annoyingly antisocial behaviors like catcalling, has us wandering out into "actual psyop" territory.
Everything about the UK is a cautionary tale at this point. It's a conquered country.
They had two policewomen jog around with their camel toe's out (not joking, look at the photos). They do this for the same reason police in the US write tickets for people going 45 in a 30 instead of 90 in a 55. It's safer, easier, the person going a measly 45 is more likely to comply, and they just don't give a fuck.
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown. Honestly I doubt that, unless you start seeing it at scale.
Personally, I think these two badged Karens had an idea, and nobody up the chain of command had the right IDPOL cards to shut it down. Or maybe it was a way to keep them busy and out of the way of people doing actual work.
I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Jess Philips have no problem talking about misogyny or condemning the more gender egalitarian Western societies but generally but shy away from specifically targeting minority communities (I don't see how this can fit @TwiceHuman's model: if the point is for high status men and women to tamp down on low status behavior why give low status minorities a pass?). The (apparently correct) assumption is that they're the ones that will take it.
It really does seem like a weird displacement thing where you go after the easy cases. The charitable stance is that they go after both in the background but it's rhetorically easier to not get into migrant/brown crime. I don't know how many people in the UK believe that though.
I think men and women are quite different.
I'd like to conclude something like "Women are more interested in rock stars and movie stars than in politicians", but I can't find any studies on the attractiveness of politicians. You know how some murderers in prison get fanmail from women? I don't think that happens as much to politicans. I have no evidence of this, but the game of politics is rather gross to me, and I can't imagine why a women would be attracted to a man who is playing a game which won't even allow him to be genuine for a moment.
As for that woman - it looks like a shit test to me. Women want to be targeted by high-value bold men while avoiding low-value bold men. Somebody who can break the rules because they're powerful awnd because they understand the rules well. So they speak nonsense, being brats, hoping that some high-value man comes around and puts them in their place. I think the whole "You can't handle a woman like me" thing is a taunt, they want to be handled. That said, this could also just be agreeableness/conformity, or the kind of mental illness which makes them side with everything weak on principle (except their own in-group, which is superior because it sides with the weak. Broken maternal instinct perhaps?). Politics has too many layers of deception, I'm afraid that a model which makes too much sense might actually be wrong. I stick to the evopsych view of "high value" since it doesn't have all these distorted layers
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