this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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It's such a dichotomy. Women get catcalled every day and feel uncomfortable and harassed. Understandable. The average man gets catcalled a handful of times in his life and cherishes those moments almost as much as their children's births.
Doesn't even have to be catcalling; even a normal compliment is something we remember for a long time. I don't think I've been catcalled at all, though I'm not very attractive so I wouldn't expect to be.
Hey there sugar dick.
Oh. That made me uncomfortable. 😬
That's not how you should call someone with diabetes and you know that.
Hello aspartame wiener.
One time, when I was in 6th grade, an 8th grade girl called me cute. I don't think I'll ever forget it
I was a sophomore in high school. A senior girl I vaguely knew but wasn't friends with, apropos of nothing, leans over to me and goes, "You're nice. I like nervous, twitchy virgins."
I don't know if I've ever been more baffled in my life. I don't even remember if I responded or what I did after that. I just remember thinking, "what the heck just happened?"
I might have been catcalled once. I was riding my bike on the road when I was in college; at the time I had super long messy hair that went down past my shoulders (I'm a guy). A car drove past and this girl put her head out the passenger window and shouted something at me. She might have said "looking good, hippie!" She might have also said, "fuck you, hippie!" I'll never know haha.
Eh being 14 and having an adult woman shouting out of a car at me to get my cock out I feel is about as gross and threatening as it would be if the genders were reversed.
Kind of gross and threatening even as an adult TBH. But yeah, definitely worse as a child.
Women drown in the ocean whereas men die of thirst in the desert.
This is obviously an overgeneralization, but it matches the experience of many.
I heard a similar analogy, men are in a desert, women in a swamp. In both cases they struggle to find drinkable water.
Oh that's good. It highlights the quality of available water.
Catcalling ≠ Complimenting
Catcalling is about letting the other know, that you want to fuck or harass them.
Complimenting is about verbalising beauty without any other expectations towards the other person.
There is an old idiom that goes "everything is about sex except sex. That's about power."
Catcalling is about expressing power over someone else body and life. It's a veiled threat, coached in sexual terms. No one doing it actually expects to have sex afterwards. Its about saying "i can force sex on you. I can take control of you. Your life belongs to me."
A lot of the men engaging in it above are doing it because of peer pressure, normalized misogyny and the "thrill" of getting an acknowledgement of that power by scaring women. I dont think most of them want to attack women outright to begin with, but it normalizes mixing sex with violence and dehumanizing woman.
I think the difference is that this isn't catcalling. If women's compliments towards men were the same as men's compliments towards women, I think men would also dislike it. Don't get me wrong, I recognize that men don't get compliments often, and often they stick with them, but generally those are complements and not catcalls.
Nah.
Every time I've ever heard of an experiment where indignant women do/say to men the exact same things that they hate getting from men, they're always astonished to see the men's reactions as practically universally positive:
Lol
Yeah 99% of dudes I know would be ecstatic to hear a woman whisper that to them on the street.
I'd just be so fucking confused.
Forgive me if I don't think two comedians making a skit counts as a study. The camera is clearly visible and the women don't seem to be credible at all and are clearly playing it for laughs. Often, catcalling happens to women who are alone and by men who could physically overpower them with no sense of it being funny or a joke. I mean, it's kinda gross that they did this regardless, but I don't really see it as a one to one. It's hard to explain the feeling of concern that women are raised to have when it comes to being targeted by men, and it would be hard to put a man in a situation that mimicked that considering they have not been bombarded by stories of women stalking/raping/murdering men who they only saw in passing. Here's women being "politely catcalled": https://youtube.com/shorts/LNxf74FXyAs
Again, played for laughs with a visible camera and similar reactions from women as the men in your video.
The guys doing catcalling get upset when called out and admit they wouldn't want it to happen to their family: https://youtu.be/jDoVckC6NhA
Do I think men don't get as many compliments? Yes. But men can solve that themselves. Give each other compliments. https://youtube.com/shorts/aWLr03PJiuA
If these guys were catcalled by each other I have a feeling they wouldn't like it.
Man that article was insufferable to read lol
I hate to say it, but I think that might be one of those differences that actually is inherent due to biology. Ultimately, women can only benefit reproductively from one partner at a time, whereas men can benefit reproductively from as many as will have them. Therefore, women are only interested in compliments from a prospective partner they might actually choose, while men are happy to receive any expression of interest.
I appreciate your take, but that's not really the case. Women are open and receptive to compliments. Even from strangers, but the tone and context matter more since women have been socialized to fear unknown, especially aggressive men. Someone yelling their feelings about your body at you does not generally signal someone is a safe person. Here's my response to the above comment: https://reddthat.com/comment/17768408
It has a link to women being politely catcalled and they seem ok with that. I know that I have personally received compliments from men that I was not interested in or with whom there was no real possibility of connection, and that's been fine. Generally the problem is tone and context.
As someone who's been catcalled many many times while presenting female and once while presenting male (by women). Yeah tbh it felt similarly threatening. When you're walking alone in the dark all big burly and bearded and just hear a voice calling out sexualizing you it's scary. Like in retrospect now I can recognize that it was probably a drunk/high/low inhibitioned young woman displaying the confidence of youth when surrounded by friends. But I was scared because if she's comfortable doing this she probably knows something I don't if she chooses to escalate.
The fear is from the group dynamics more than anything else. Gender almost plays no part in it. Age plays almost no part in it. There are several stories about a group of teens attacking a lone adult, and it goes just about as you'd expect. Anyone who is alone and suddenly becomes the focus of attention by a group will (and probably should) become worried, whereas if you're in a group the (that is, your) reaction can be anything from ignoring to playing along because you have less to fear. All of us can imagine the difference between walking in a group or by yourself when getting catcalled. Most of us have probably seen the difference.
women get so much attention its like theyre drowning. men get so little its like theyre starving in the desert.
truly ironic
My god if I could just get one compliment I could die happy.
I like your username, and you have great taste in Lemmy instances.
Live long you absolute potato