By David Futrelle
Women complain a lot about catcalling, but do they really understand how important it is for young men to be able to hoot, whistle, and make gross smoochy sounds with their lips whenever an attractive woman crosses their path?
Yes, I’ve been reading the Jordan Peterson fan subreddit again, and this is one of the important really stupid questions raised in a recent discussion subject of catcalling — which, in the judgement of some of the lobsterboys, is a critical part of the “the boyhood transition to manhood” that evil feminists are trying to eliminate just because they don’t like dudes sexually harassing them all day long.
According to one JBP fan called sand313man, women
don’t even realise that all that cat calling, was just shy non confident men learning how to approach females and just failing miserably, but learning all the same.
Yes, “shy” is definitely the first word I think of when I think of men yelling “dat ass!” or “I want to lick you” at a passing woman.
Now many men are scared and Unconfident of being labelled some sort of predator.
COUNTERPOINT: If your favorite way to, er, court women is by hurling sexual remarks at them on the street, maybe you should worry about being labeled a predator.
Women now wonder why so of them are single and having a mid life crises of career without family or meaningful relationships.
Clearly it’s because they weren’t catcalled enough when they were younger.
Every man they meet is pussified by their own doing.. as they desperately look for real men, which often times they have killed.
Uh, so women out there are regularly murdering good men? I’d like to see the statistics on this.
They destroyed the boyhood transition to manhood. People need to fail to learn to be confident.
A catcall is simply a miserable attempt at approaching women. But back in the day, we were allowed to miserably fail, in order to learn.
In a followup comment, sand313man adds that:
The majority of people aren’t born as a natural Casanova. You must fail again and again to get anything right.
It’s a slow progression. Maybe starts with what some might call a ‘cat call’… to cheesy pick up lines.. to saying stupid things.. to saying even reasonable things but still not being confident.
A man always had to face the consequence of rejection over and over, and one day he actually gets good at even getting with hot beautiful girls.. one day he might even find the perfect one to marry that he clicks with.
Because most women would be thrilled to marry a man who spent years yelling sexual innuendo at other women on the street before he realized that he’d do better saying “you seem really cool, do you want to get coffee sometime?”
But how are people of today supposed to even attempt failing when they are automatically labeled a predator because they might lack game …
Woman have the right to say no. But this notion of cancelling and labelling someone predatory is a sickness. I mean really grow up, and be happy that you were even worth someone’s attention. Sometimes I think it’s the ugliest wenches who first complained about cat calling for being ignored.
Someone called RossFrom Britain wholeheartedly agrees:
its definitely the ugly ones who complain the most, probably because catcalling is a rating system which places them lower than hot women
i do sympathise with women on this though, because being approached all the time and by guys who quite often turn out to be creepers and stalkers, or people who flip out if they are rejected, must be pretty shitty. not to mention scary if the guy is physically intimidating
but as you say – how will men learn to court women?? with population density as it is, all men are now competing with like X million other men… how on earth will the inexperienced/less attractive men ever get a chance to learn?
So suck it up ladies, men need to be able to sexually harass you in order to learn how not to sexually harass you!
The idea that catcalling, however stupid and ineffective it is as a means of courtship, is simply the best idea that some dumb men have come up with to meet women may have provided the basis for an old Jerry Seinfeld routine, but it’s not actually, you know, true.
Catcalling isn’t about courtship; it’s about aggrieved entitlement — and asserting power over women. According to one of the authors of a recent study on catcalling in the Middle East and North Africa, street harassers
have high aspirations for themselves and aren’t able to meet them … So they [harass women] to put them in their place. They feel like the world owes them.
Others who have studied the subject note that harassment is, well, fun — at least for the harassers, if not their victims. Catcallers aren’t looking to learn anything; they do what they do because it makes them happy, and allows them to feel better about their lives.
The idea that the catcallers themselves are somehow the victims here, the hapless targets of mean old feminists trying to derail their transition to adulthood, is not only absurd but perverse.
So par for the course on the Jordan Peterson subreddit, I guess.
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“Men need to catcall to learn how to approach women properly” might make a teeny modicum of sense if catcallers were actually willing to learn. Instead, they get angry and possibly even violent when confronted.
Almost like it really is about exercising power over women.
Or, you know, young men could learn from other people’s failures and skip over the harassment part. SMH
Sounds more like they’re just trying to justify being assholes.
It’s all about making sure women know that they don’t belong in public spaces.
The last time i got cat called a guy followed me in the parking lot of the mall while I was alone and parked away from everyone else and when I didn’t respond or look at him because i was scared I might get kidnapped he threw an ice coffee all over me and the nice outfit I had put on so I had to cry while i went home to change and go to class.
He was also in a large pickup and i was on foot if anyone was wondering. Trying to get to my tiny two door bug to have some sort of safty
Somehow, I doubt any woman will have a midlife crisis over not having married a Jordan Peterson fan.
I recall an MRA positing a similar theory regarding feminism and rape.
They act as though there’s some massive disparity in numbers between men and women, like millions of men for every woman. In reality, there are many women but you’re unlikely to attract many by being a misogynist.
@Lainy
I am so sorry and I hope that never happens to you again.
I once had a coworker who, despite being an African-American with a single mother, suffered extremely from head-up-assitis due to having an extremely wealthy father who paid for everything from his expensive college to his cars. He was a popular kid, played football, the whole shebang.
At one point, conversation turned to how feminists are just so sensitive and touchy about everything, and he complained about people complaining about being catcalled because “we’re just trying to compliment them” and how it was preventing men from approaching women to flirt. I told him that catcalling wasn’t about romance or interaction, but was instead about men expressing power over women. He disagreed. I stopped him and asked him how many women he had dated whom he had first catcalled. He paused and thought, then said that he hadn’t catcalled since he was a young teen, but some of his friends did. I asked him how many of those interactions had ever led to a relationship of any kind. He admitted that they never had. Then I asked him to think about how he would respond to someone shouting at him from a passing car or following him down the street. He got even quieter. “I guess I never really thought about it before,” he said.
(This was a pattern with him until he finally got fired for spending several hours of each shift just napping instead of working. I later had to explain why the Redskins’ mascot and name was upsetting to Native Americans when he was angry about “politics getting in the way of football.”)
Do we? Do women wonder about this thing that you made up? I’d say I spend about as much time wondering about why so many women are single and having a mid-life crisis of career without family or meaningful relationships as I do wondering why the moon is made of cheese, which is to say no time at all because that is not actually a thing.
And also what Naglfar said.
If catcalling was really about learning better ways to have a conversation with women especially but not only so that they can have conversations that lead to sex, then these lobstermen should be fucking THRILLED that feminists efforts to educate guys not to catcall girls and women are going to fast forward them through years of not getting laid.
This should be the JP thread where they all say, “Yay, feminists! They’re really helping out men and boys on this one!”
Is it – and hear me out on this – is it just barely possible that these lobsters are … lying? To justify bad behavior? To justify continuing to hate on women? Because their goal was never to find better ways to have satisfying relationships with women?
Is that…? Nahhhhhhh.
If your learning is causing someone else to feel distressed and unsafe, then you need to find somewhere else to learn.
Of course, the feelings of the women they’re harassing are never a consideration for these dudes. So they’re obviously not interested in learning how to interact with women, because then they’d have to treat women like they’re humans. Interacting with humans means caring about their feelings.
And several English teachers just twitched for no apparent reason.
I assume from context that what he thought he meant was:
but he really needed that explicit break in there. What was written could just as easily be read as
which is actually somewhat more appropriate for a lot of these guys.
As others have said, if catcalling was just inept courtship, men should be grateful we’re willing to save them from ineptitude by helping them with what not to do.
Talking to women like we’re actually human is a do. Street harassment is a don’t. You’re welcome, boys!
Plus, I really don’t think that all the adult men who catcalled me back when I was visibly a minor were actually trying to learn to date.
@Jenora Feuer
I read that sentence the first time through as saying that men have to fail at learning to be confident. Then again, alt-rightists were never known for having a firm grasp on grammar.
@WWTH
Right? That’s my primary experience of catcalling too. Just a bunch of shy, unconfident 50-year-old men learning how to court women by yelling scary things at a 14-year-old.
Fellas, fellas, are you capable of speaking to another man without first announcing your admiration for his ass? If so, then congrats, you also know how to speak to women. The fact that you choose not to makes your reasoning highly suspect. You are not shy or inept, you are a jerk.
Try this exercise, next time you see a beautiful woman and feel the urge to catcall rise within you, imagine she is Jordan Petersen, a man you obviously greatly admire and whose presence not two feet from you would presumably be intimidating to your shy and starstruck soul. How difficult do you find it to fight the urge to follow this man while blurting out “gah, your words, sir, give me boners!”
@dashapants
This reminds me of one conversation I had when I was in high school. One of my male classmates asked me how to talk to girls because he was having a hard time getting a date. I told him to talk to girls like he would talk to other boys. He seemed rather stunned by this advice, but to me it seemed rather obvious.
If only it were true, then people would cut this crap out at the age of 16.
Now, stereotypes are not universally true, but isn’t the age old (by which I mean “at least since the mid 70’s”) stereotype scene of catcalling a bunch of paunchy, middle aged construction workers whooping at a hot young thing as she drives past the construction site?
They may be 38 year old cement casting contractors but, deep down they’re tender budding flowers of boyhood just learning the mystery that is woman, LOL.
@Naglfar
In high school the awkwardness, at least back in my day, was caused by the fact that right before puberty boys and girls become somewhat estranged, so that by the time they get interested in each other again, they’ve sort of been self-segregating to some degree for some time, and now if a guy starts talking to a girl of his own volition the immediate assumption is that he’s at least romantically curious, which destroys any plausible deniability and creates pressure and fear of rejection and ridicule. This, in my experience is not as strong for girls, so a girl can talk to a guy without setting off these social alarms provided they’re not from diametrically opposite ends of the social ladder (which wouldn’t even be a gender problem so much as social class problem). In any case, this is obviously not an insurmountable obstacle and doesn’t even come up in less polarized social circles, so your advice was correct and obvious, but it is not surprising that your classmate was stunned. I suspect that the real question young men are asking when they ask how to talk to girls is how to talk to girls without succumbing to stage fright. And the advice is basically be casual and have some kind of point.
@ naglfar
It’s okay I just wish the idea of it being okay would die already.
Honestly even if this was a step men took into finding partners then ever man deserves to die a lonely virgin then because that’s unacceptable. I don’t care about men who cat call feeling on that subject. I am a living person not a peice of meat for you to train your pick up skills on and to harass
This being 2020 , there are willing and able tutors available for learning just such things; they are called sex cams. Of course, most cam workers would t put up with being harassed or verbally abused, and will hang up in abusive clients (so I’m told),
Which is ideal;
Lesson learned!
Maybe we should ask the guy who’s basically comparing them to literal carnivorous predator cubs why that might be
If this were true, gay teenage boys and gay men would either a) be catcalling other boys and men all the time or b) never getting boyfriends. You’d notice. But it turns out that, amazingly, it’s possible to for men to learn how to ask people out without a catcalling stage.
Hey, let’s not wish this kind of scum on sex workers. They don’t need to deal with this crap.