To think that wolf whistling wasn't such a bad thing?

[NovemberMorn]

Joanna Lumley has just given an interview in which she says..."I never minded wolf whistling, I always thought it was tremendous".

She also said... "I think we were a little bit tougher then. Somebody put their hand on your leg, you didn’t feel affronted and report it. You’d give them a slap.”

Do you think she is right?

It's absolutely normal for predatory men to target children and teenagers. Everyone knows this, not sure why anyone on this thread is pretending not to know this.

2015 USA study showed 85% of girls experience street harassment before age 17 https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/news/faculty/street-harassment-statistics

Research shows that 35% of girls wearing school uniforms have been sexually harassed in public spaces in the United Kingdom

https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/63332-'i-started-walking-the-long-way'many-young-women-first-experience-street-harassment-in-their-school-uniforms

Some UK school girls hated it so much and were so distressed by it they wanted it to be made illegal

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/street-harassment-girls-crime-debate-parliament-house-of-lords-plan-international-uk-a8664381.html

According to this source 97 percent of women have experienced street harassment.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/misogyny-research-pioneers-hail-new-police-action-to-record-harassment-of-women

So, back to the original question.

If you enjoyed street harassment, I think you are extremely weird, since having strange creepy men making noises at you is at best very unsettling to me. I always loathed it, found it embarrassing, disgusting and distressing.

However, you can continue to enjoy having creepy, weird men making noises at you if you wish.

What you cannot do is pretend that all women agree with you that it's a bit of a larf when strange predatory men make noises at women as they try to simply exist and go about their lives.

And you cannot pretend that this was ever the case at any time in history as comon sense as well as documented history proves that women always loathed street harassment.

Sadly, for as long as women have been begging for men to simply leave them alone and stop harrassing them, let them exist and go about their day in safety and peace, there have been people trying to pretend it's normal and stick up for these men.

"In 1887, after covering the issue of harassment for some time, the Pall Mall Gazette ran a column of responses entitled “What the ‘Male Pests’ Have to Say for Themselves.” Some insisted on their freedom to follow and speak to women. As one wrote, unless England were to follow the practice of “locking up women as they do in the East, there is nothing [left] but to leave men perfectly free to gaze at and even follow women as they please.” Others criticized the “respectable” women who wrote in for assuming that no morally upright woman would want to be “spoken to”—with at least one suggesting that they were misunderstanding courtship practices among working-class men and women who hold their “evening parties in the street.”

https://daily.jstor.org/street-harassment-in-victorian-london/

All this information is widely available, but more than that we all know it anyway, even the ones pretending not to.

In conclusion, perhaps "you" enjoy street harassment.

Many, clearly, do not.

Why not call women hysterics? Because of the history behind the word. Woman as hysteric has a long misogynist history resulting in women being institutionalised and dismissed.

Hysteric is 'wandering womb', it's a word specifically about women rendered irrational because of their biology.

Even now women find getting treatment much more difficult than men because they're treated as irrational.

Finished with another snide comment, thanks for proving my point.😏

Sorry my facts upset you.

Yes, your comment is very snide, and you did indeed prove your point about snide commenters.

Thank you for the laugh react @Rewindpresse - although I don't really find it all that amusing that a commenter was snide because they were upset by facts, but each to their own as I always say.

What's snide is appearing to care more about the feelings of catcalling male strangers than the feelings of young girls and women experiencing harassment

I actually enjoyed you handling yourself with elegant wit throwing the snide accusation back as nothing you said was snide. I wasn’t laughing at you!

I thought your original post was excellent.

@Rewindpresse Ah, sorry for being a cow about it then, I am feeling a bit prickly at the moment, reading through this thread.

Mine arrived aged 10 and I have the same memories. Also that winking with a clicking of the tongue.

I found it so distressing when they started on my daughter, in her school uniform aged 12 or 13, and she told me about it and all I could offer her were my commiserations and reminders about her personal safety, could not protect her from this grim shit and these predatory shitheads without keeping her inside forever.

It may not be as widely accepted now in many places, but it still happens regulary and to little girls and teens just as much if not more than grown women.

I'd muzzle men who catcall children, make them wear a scold's bridle out in public for a month.

The racism thing was akin to the sexism thing, where it’s acceptable as everyday or “that’s how it is/was”

I don’t think it’s swung too far, no man has the right to sexualise women by cat calling someone they don’t even know, like it’s an affirmation that she’s got it “right”, in terms of looks/dress.

Totally different to a housemate speaking to someone they know, not sure why that particular student was so concerned. But that’s his issue, I don’t believe that saying someone you know looked nice in their prom outfit would lead to any issues.

Don’t be ridiculous, they only whistled at girls 18+, did they ask for ID.

You”re talking nonsense and just trying to make the men right….. just why?

And they shouldn’t have been doing it to any age woman!

Right. In the context of this thread we are specifically talking only about street harassment, we haven't even touched on the sexual abuse that sometimes follows street harassment, or the fact that street harassment makes predatory men braver about other types of harassment and abuse.

If no man ever - like literally never ever again - whistled at or called at or made weird noises to a woman or girl they don't know nothing whatsoever would be lost.

Tolerating street harassment has no positives for the women and children who want to escape it, and women who crave male attention can get it elsewhere. So if it dies completely (which seems sadly unlikely) it's still a win/win.

I'd tell her this is the time when it is absolutely fine to swear. "I'm fucking 12 you pervert"

I was sent to an RC girls' school. Men seemed to see that as a label that said I wanted to be sexually assaulted.

@Bbq1 do you live under a stone. was still wearing school uniform when I was 18.

Oh I definitely tried to empower her to defend herself when safe and run when not, told both my kids too to make a fuss, make a noise, smash things, embarrass themselves, perverts and predators don't like attention. It just made me sad and furious that there's so little I could do to protect her from this completely unnecessary male behaviour. They could just stop doing it today and make the world a much better place.

This comment says it all about how you think and it's appalling. You have zero insight into what others have been through. A culture that normalises wolf whistling at girls in school uniforms is never ok, and you can say what you want but it absolutely did normalise this. I had a friend who was desperate for a breast reduction at 12 because of this sort of thing, but sure she just couldn't handle herself, if only she'd been more robust and not seen herself as a victim. Fuck that for a joke.

@meh2025

your posts nail the issue 🙏

I agree with the RC “label”, even today many years on, I get the comments “of convent school girls, they’re the worst” snigger snigger. Saying that they believe that we were more sexually promiscuous somehow? So that justified more heckling.

I can't imagine being so desperate for male attention and approval that I would interpret being sexually harassed as a "compliment."

@Bbq1

Saying not all areas have/had men harassing teens is crazy!

There is only one possible way that could be true and that is if there was a ring fence preventing men from entering the area.

750000 women in the UK were sexually assaulted or raped in the UK in 2023. This figure doesn’t include street harassment!

1 in 4 women are raped by men in their lifetime.

Look at the stats @meh2025 shared.

This isn’t opinion, it’s factual that men catcall young girls everywhere. It is ridiculous and insulting to pretend they don’t “in some areas”

@EliflurtleAndTheInfiniteMadness I had a few years where I really wished I was a boy around the same age and one of the reasons was because I thought it would keep me "safe".

You're wasting your time. People who value wolf whistles so much they defend it are never going to accept the idea that those whistles were also directed at children. They need to see them as a personal compliment from a man whos compliments are worth having. So always young, good looking, discerning men who have singled them out as gorgeous women. The idea of a creepy perv who whistles at children is never going to land well.

@Bbq1

I'm sorry that you lived in an area where men apparently whistled at kids.

This sentence minus the 'apparently' would have been a display of empathy and maturity.

With the 'apparently' it's just another example of women and girls not being believed and an if it didn't happen to me, it didn't happen at all attitude.

Your mask slipped.

This is the thread that keeps on giving.
First we have the narrative that women who are offended or upset by sexual harassment are just not tough enough or don't have enough self worth.

Now there's a suggestion that in the cat calling and harassment of young girls only happens in certain areas. Which is absolute bollocks.
I grew up in a very deprived area and it was rife, particularly for girls in school uniform.
I now live in a very nice area and it's no different. In fact, I commented to my DH the other day that I have experienced more overt sexual harassment where we live now than any other place I've lived.

I think this is what some of us are getting at.

There is a suggestion that ALL builders in the 80s and 90s whistled at children ( which means that ALL of them are paedophiles) and that we must revisit our memories to reshape them that actually the wolf whistle from the 20 something guy on the scaffold wasn’t an innocent bit of flirting, but actually quite sinister, because that 20 something guy was actually a real pervert.

Clearly this can’t be statistically true otherwise anyone in their 50s married to a builder needs to get the hell out!!

But those who did experience this will not allow anyone to have a different experience.