On catcalling

I grew up in a suburb of New York City, about 15 minutes from uptown and 45 from Midtown, factoring in a plausible amount of traffic. My childhood was punctuated by dinners on the Lower East Side with my family or field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my class, but I didn’t start going into the city by myself until high school when I had to trek up to Columbia University for classes or coffee shops downtown for interviews.

I don’t think I was prepared for what walking alone in New York as a female is like. I was 15 or 16 — still passably a kid — but, all of a sudden, much older men were leering down at me, making kissing noises, whistling. I’d hold my bag tighter to my body and keep walking, eyes trained down on the cement, but I’d still hear a “Hey, baby” growled under their breath. This had never happened before; when I was with my family, New York was idyllic and exotic. Alone, I felt suddenly like prey.

Even nowadays, I forget what catcalling is like in the city until I’m there again. Hollaback, an organization committed to ending street harassment, recently posted a video of a woman silently walking in New York City for 10 hours. Over the course of the video, the woman receives countless catcalls from dozens of men though she isn’t doing anything particularly evocative. At first glance, it might seem absurd that a woman could warrant so much lascivious attention for doing nothing, but the video actually accurately reflects the extent of street harassment in New York. Almost any woman familiar with the area would feel it hit home.

Unsurprisingly, many men were not pleased with the portrayal of catcalling as predatory. A notable example was Steve Santagati, self-proclaimed guru for women’s thoughts and desires, who defended catcallers in a CNN segment aired about the video. “There’s nothing more that a woman loves to hear than how pretty she is,” Santagati maintained.

His statements, though misguided, reflect the rationale behind most men who catcall. Most men don’t mean to be lecherous creeps. They think they’re being nice. What isn’t nice, after all, about being told that you’re beautiful by a stranger?

The problem is really twofold. The first is straightforward. A city street isn’t a museum, and women aren’t pieces. Women aren’t on display, asking to be evaluated. A man’s opinion on a woman’s aesthetic on any particular day is unwanted and unwarranted. It’s arrogant to think that a woman needs to hear what a man thinks about something she’s not offering for public consumption. Further, even benign complements aren’t benign — if they were, there would be more heterosexual men approaching other men with, “Let me see that smile,” or “Nice jeans.”

The second follows from the first. The problem with catcalling isn’t the what so much as the where. It’s not that all women hate being complemented. After all, flirting is the basis for any romantic relationship. At a bar or a party, it is socially acceptable to say many things that would be unacceptable on the corner of 42ndand Broadway. That’s because, at a bar or party, there is an opportunity for repartee. A woman can respond and signal whether she is interested or not. There is a purpose — the potential to further an interpersonal relationship.

A crass comment — or even a relatively benign comment — hurled at a woman from a car window or bench as she’s walking along is offensive because she has no time to respond. In fact, a response is often not even desired. The man isn’t trying to pursue further interaction with the woman; he’s just passing judgment on her appearance without her having the ability to turn him down. And it’s this reason that catcalls are more gritty and vulgar than a pickup line that would be used in a different context: There are no repercussions for the catcaller and no risk of rejection.

A lot of this ties back to the way society has ordered heterosexual interactions: Men pursue women, and women doll themselves up to be pursued. The problem with this is that it gives men a sense of entitlement. Because of the way society is structured, men feel as if it’s their right to catcall women. This explains the more violent responses to the video, wherein men threatened to kill or rape the woman for daring to pass social commentary on the trend. Hopefully with changing times, the seemingly pressing need for men to catcall will subside as well. But, in the mean time, there’s a shockingly easy fix: If you’re a man, and you’re compelled at any point to hit on a woman walking down the street, just don’t.

Shruthi Deivasigamani is a molecular biology major from Cresskill, N.J. She can be reached at shruthid@princeton.edu.