Getting Catcalled... As A Guy

How does that song go? "Til it happens to you, you don't know how I feel." Being a straight white male, I never really imagined that I'd get catcalled by some middle-aged wankface driving by with something as crude as "Hey sexy mama!" (And yes, I checked, there was no one else around me; he was, for whatever reason, calling me a 'sexy mama'. Thankfully, I'm not a single parent.)

At first I was obviously confused, but then I started to think about a girl I had seen on a train back from work a week or so ago. A guy, taking some generous swigs from a bottle of $3 whiskey, kept reaching out and touching her while she stood and he sat. She warned him not to and eventually took an open seat out of his reach. And then, I thought about how, every so often while walking to work, I'll hear a guy say something to a girl passing by, usually some come-on or something equally frivolous.

It just becomes so obvious: it's not flattering; it's threatening.

Something similar happened to me before, but in a much more subdued way. It was the middle of summer and I was carrying what was likely two giant boulders in Shop Rite bags back to my apartment. A large man, about the size of the average football linebacker, walked by and muttered "You's cute." It took me a few moments to process the remark while I hauled the rock of Gibraltar up the stairs to my door, but it still made me feel damned threatened when I settled down.

And girls go through this every single day. It's ludicrous. I'm probably not qualified in the least to talk about this at length, but no one should feel like they might be in danger from a pair of eyes following them, let alone someone voicing their priapic opinion about someone else.

Besides that, who wants to only be valued as a thing to be coveted or an object for pleasure? It's an empty feeling because our physical appearance isn't, largely, our choice. We can't pick and choose our genes (yet) to make us better looking, taller, more athletic, etc. We're stuck with how we look, and to only be judged by that quality lends a superficiality to whatever words a catcaller might decide to use next, because no matter what, the first thing that attracted the person was the sex appeal.

And then there's a matter of intention: it's sex, pure and simple, and this might come as a shock to most people, but 90% of the people you see around you (of your preferred gender) likely wouldn't have sex with you unless you were Idris Elba or Zach Efron or Marion Cotillard or Kerry Washington or anyone in between. So when someone decides to catcall, it's basically the peacock showing his rumpled feathers off to a potential mate: they likely won't be all that impressed, and will probably run away or peck or do whatever it is peacocks do to defend themselves. Or maybe naked mole rats would be a better analogy. Whatever, I'm not a biologist.

The point is, stop it.