10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman – YouTube.
Yikes.
I wrote recently about being occasionally catcalled. Of course, in my case it doesn’t happen 10 times per hour of walking in public.
I guarantee you that every guy commenting on this video, saying he wouldn’t mind all these “compliments”, is imagining himself surrounded by attractive women yelling and trying to give him their number from street corners. He is not imagining a bunch of sketchy dudes shadowing him, looking down at him, demanding he “smile”.
This is a depressing fact about the culture we live in.
I prefer to be friendly with people as I am walking about, saying “hi” or “good {morning,day,evening}”, etc. Just standard greetings to both sexes. But I specifically avoid casually greeting women under 40 because I don’t want to be just tick in their mental checkbox of “creepy guys” talking to them (I have a beard and am overweight, ergo I qualify as creepy for many people).
Women under 40, that is not saying anything bad about you, it is entirely about the culture us guys have created that makes it necessary that I censor my otherwise benign behavior. I apologize on behalf of all the creeps.
Word.
One thought experiment that I sometimes use–despite the problematic gender/orientation dynamics–is to ask if guys would like this in reverse–if it were a bunch of heavily muscled gay bears doing this to them all day long everywhere they went. Sometimes in vaguely threatening/stalkerish ways.
Of course–that has the problematic aspect of possibly increasing homophobia.. but in terms of setting up the analogy–it’s more like what is going on here..