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Mentorship June 4, 2018
A man's perspective on a crude habit.
There are many types of cat calls. They can be shouts, they can be sounds, they can be whistles and sometimes they can even turn physical. What they all usually have in common is the mouths that let the degrading comments out–men.
I can’t utter anything with the potential to objectify any person (regardless of gender) in such an obscene manner. Unfortunately, I am no stranger to being around it.
One of my earliest experiences with this is from my youth. I remember walking with my mother when someone began to whistler at her. The display of crudeness came from a man in a black coat who stared at my mother with a wide grin on his face- disregarding to how his advances made her feel.
“Vamos,” my mother told me as she grabbed my hand and we crossed the street before the light indicated it was safe.
I looked back at the man in the black coat before looking up at my mother who told me to, “never be like him.” But even before my mother’s advice, I recognized the bad behavior, I knew the difference between right and wrong.
For ages men have filled a more dominant role in society and have placed women in the passive seat. There is no logic to this and the best excuse I can come up with is that men who believe they belong in a dominant role adapted this behavior from other men. And those men learned it from the men before them as well.
This bad habit goes back to ancient times. We can find traces of this idea when looking at Ovid, an ancient Roman poet who writes, around the first century CE, in his book “Amores”:
“I ripped her tunic off. The thin material hardly stood in my way but still, she kept struggling to cover herself with it. [15] Since she was fighting like she did not want to win, she was defeated easily, betraying herself.”
Already, Ovid suggests a fetish of males in antiquity—one that assumes a male-dominant role. In addition, he hints at an idea that women want to be overcome by their male partner sexually.
While I can’t speak on behalf of the women in antiquity, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this was not the shared opinion of women at the time. However, Ovid feels comfortable enough “incriminating” himself in his poems, as he tells the contemporary reader, a potential problem of the time.
Considering the popularity of his work (as a form of entertainment amongst elite men), it is only logical to believe that men, like Ovid, may have shared a similar view about women—that they should be dominated by men.
As a man, I live in a fairly safe world. But when I head my female peers discuss how men jeer at them on the streets, on their lunch breaks or even when they grocery shop, I am disturbed. Much like Ovid, these men seem to believe that if they showed their “superiority” by cat calling women, they would respond kindly to him as the passive counterpart. And much like Ovid, these men are wrong. The women I know pay no attention to inappropriate remarks and don’t let cat calls ruin their day.
I still have no single answer. Maybe some men may not understand the crudeness of their actions. Or perhaps nothing anyone could ever tell them would even make a difference anyway. However, as a man who doesn’t make crude remarks at women for fun, I can understand what prevents men from directing cat calls at women.
Growing up with three brothers, from a young age I admired all that my mother did. From the way she would wrestle with us to brush our teeth at night or yank us out of bed in the mornings so that we weren’t late for school, I knew she was a strong woman. I learned from my grandmother, who forced us to go to church every Saturday, to learn the value of leading a compassionate life.
A good person holds the door open for another person walking out behind them. They say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and they do not cat all.
Catcalling fuels the dominant-passive hierarchy that men believed was right. The meaning of a simple cat call is deeper than the forms it takes on. It suggests (from a man’s perspective) that the dominant role men have placed themselves into, above women, should remain. And from a woman’s perspective, I’m sure, cat calling can make men look like crude narcissists.
But as men, we have the power to enact change when it comes to matters of how we approach and interact with women.
We can melt down the molds of society that antiquated men created. We can promote equality by actively seeking to fight the inequalities that consume our daily lives.
For starters, we can stop with the cat calling.
