I recently wrote a post to explain the difference between street harassment and sincere flirtation. Unthinkingly, I wrote it to an audience of women. I guess I unconsciously assumed any man who would yell sexual remarks at strange women would not come to this site in an attempt to figure out why “that uptight bitch” glared at him, told him off or called his boss and damn near got him fired!

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write that version all the same, so here it is. If you’re a man who has been rebuffed more than once by women you thought you were flattering, this article is for you. (I say “more than once” because misunderstandings could account for the occasional incident.)

It’s not up to you what I find flattering

The first problem with thinking a woman should be flattered by your behavior and getting irritated when she’s not is that flattery is subjective. Some people are flattered by comments about how smart they are. Others want to hear how good they look. And some of us react warily whenever someone seems to be attempting to flatter us because we assume they’re buttering us up for a favor.

If a woman doesn’t take what you intended as a compliment the way you expect, the correct response is to recognize you’ve had a communication problem, and it might be that she misunderstood you but it might also be that you don’t sound like you think you do. To think of her, call her, or later describe her to your friends as an “uptight bitch” is an attempt to feel superior to her - to label her as defective. Because that is the real reason you’re yelling at her - to, in some way, make yourself feel superior. If that weren’t true - if you really just found her appealing and were hoping for her phone number - you’d be anxious to correct the communication problem and, with any luck, actually get that number.

Approaching women in packs isn’t flattering. In fact, it’s threatening.

Being approached by a group of strangers rather than one lone stranger is always intimidating, no matter your gender, the context, or how big and strong you are. Being outnumbered by people you don’t know well enough to trust gets your guard up. You know this because you are alive on Earth and you’ve ever been approached by a group of strangers at some point in your existence. You know what that feels like. And you can’t seriously think that when the strangers are commenting flatteringly on her body (which is most likely less physically imposing than any one of theirs) this mitigates the effect. It’s often quite the opposite, in fact, as it calls attention to her vulnerability.

You know deep down it’s not flattering; that’s just your excuse.

If you’re honest with yourself, you know it’s not really about how attractive she is. It’s about one of two things:

• The men. Most often, catcalling at a woman is a way men socialize with each other. You’re trying to impress each other with who can say the most outrageous things, or who can get a smile or glance from the most passing women. The woman is just part of the scenery, so it’s no surprise you’re oblivious to her feelings. Her responses don’t represent a person with sensitivities to you; they represent a finish line, and tell you whether or not your verbal volleys are scoring.
• Intimidating women. For every bunch of guys who thinks catcalling is harmless because they know their own motives aren’t hateful, there’s one guy who really hates women and revels in feeling that a woman is afraid of him. He thinks his buddies feel the same way, and when they engage in the same behavior, they are (perhaps unwittingly) encouraging him.

Whether you’re merely insensitive to what strange women feel or actually hate them doesn’t really matter. The behavior was invented by men who hate women, and by participating in it - in fact, by not calling on other men to stop doing it - you’re encouraging misogynistic attitudes whether you mean to or not, whether you share them or not.

It’s not so much what you say as how you say it

Flirtation can be edgy, even with strangers. People often think the whole “politically correct” movement is about a list of words and gestures you can or can’t use, and all you have to do is follow the “good” list (which leads to eye-rolling logic like this: “Okay, guys, we can’t yell Suck me! at them anymore, so I guess we’ll yell Come sit in my lap! instead”), but it’s not that simple. It’s mostly about listening and paying attention to the signals the person you’re talking to gives off in response to you. This is something everyone has to do in flirting - even women. Even really gorgeous or rich people. Communication is a tricky thing, and we all make mistakes in it, but listening is the most important tool. (In fact, listening is probably the top skill that enables people who aren’t gorgeous, rich, or witty to attract those who are.)

But harassment isn’t communication

The best definition of “harassment” (of any sort) I can give you is one-way communication. It’s that simple. It doesn’t even have to involve an ugly motive; it’s just someone talking at you instead of with you. While everyone has a different tolerance for that sort of behavior, no one likes it and that’s why you need to stop when someone tells you to back off. The man who yells at a woman about her boobs isn’t engaging with her; he’s talking at her. The religious zealot co-worker who lectures you about your evil ways every day at work isn’t engaging with you; she sees you only as a potential point on her score card of godliness. When someone’s engaging with you, they stop to listen. That’s how you know the difference.

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Typically, I get three responses from men to whom I express my feminism.

A) “Well, don’t worry, as far as I’m concerned you are equal with me.” My response to this is something along the lines of “Thanks, but no thanks.” The fact that you think it is necessary to tell me that I am equal with you shows that we have a problem; equality is not granted, it should be understood as a basic premise. Feeling virtuous for having allowed that I am, in philosophy but perhaps not reality, equal with you is just wanting a Klondike bar for being a reasonable human being.

B) “But you’re not a feminazi…right?” I have tried not bristling and pointing out that whatever extremists there are are not really what defines feminism nor what it is about. My reward for trying to be reasonable and address their fears? An argument a priori that feminism is made worthless or unreasonable by the (assumed to be accepted) “fact” that some feminists are feminazi man-haters.

C) Insisting that we discuss whether women are physically capable of performing all jobs that men are, or that we discuss whether women are physically identical to men in strength, etc. I suppose this is the “gender essentialism” that we have banned from our comments and discussions here. This is the one that really annoys me the most; I am continually frustrated that a person who is boring me by insisting we talk about how evil rape is (it is, I just don’t always want to talk about it) can turn around insist the only useful conversation about feminism is whether or not women are always as physically strong as men. My personal experience is that most guys are stronger than me, and most women are not, so I don’t care to argue the point - who cares? I don’t find that most men and women that I know make a living based on their physical prowess; I live in a high-tech civilisation where it is possible (gasp) to make a living based on mental acuity, social skills, and computer use.

Perhaps it is because I place a high value on listening and understanding a person’s perspective before I start talking, and perhaps it is because I have enhanced sensibilities due to my frustrations with my own activism being downplayed, but I firmly believe that if I met someone who held a viewpoint I was prejudiced to think was silly, and if I believed that person to be an otherwise reasonable and interesting thinker, I would listen carefully and ask questions to understand their viewpoints. It is patently absurd to assume that a reasonable person will bring up a belief that millions of people hold and have no reasons for holding that belief themselves; it is ridiculous to dismiss another’s viewpoints out of hand if you have any intention of actually convincing them of your point of view. After all, even if you think their position to be absurd or irredeemably flawed, rational discussion is the way to show them that, is it not?

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From CNN: Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?

Naturally, in the above linked article, the woman who argues it’s flattering to be catcalled and looked up and down when she walks on the street is from… wait for it… you can guess this… Los Angeles. (If I start a “help Beta escape from Los Angeles” fund, would any of you make donations? I’m, like, totally serious.)

I just want to take a moment to expound on something that came up in the comments on this post.

Strange men do not hoot at, yell at, or leer at you because they think you’re hot. They do those things because they think you’re vulnerable and needy. If you think they want you sexually, you need some serious education on power psychology. They want to feel like they’re on top of you, but not in the way you imagine.

When you see someone attractive, it’s natural to look. But not to stare - there are rules against staring throughout the animal kingdom. And you don’t talk unless the person you’re looking at says something to you first, because when you get caught looking, it would be aggressive to follow that up with verbalization. This is something your cat understands, for pete’s sake. Stop reading Cosmopolitan and get in touch with your animal instincts. Discrete looks are flattering because they reflect only a natural aesthetic reaction. Leering - staring overtly at someone who’s watching you stare - signals aggression. Uninvited verbalizations are also aggressive - that’s why when the salesman at the kiosk leaps out to ask you if you ever get split ends, you feel pressured and cornered (until you realize you’re entitled to tell them to back off and leave you alone because they started the hostility and you’re only responding in kind).

If you don’t know the difference between aggression and honest appreciation, you’ve bought into civilization too much for your own good. Ask yourself: why do men typically leer and catcall in packs? Rarely will one man by himself with no buddies around look you over and say something about your appearance. Because they know deep down it’s aggressive, not merely appreciative. Ask yourself: why do they continue to yell daily at women who’ve told them clearly to back off? Because they’re so concerned she understand how sexy they find her? Or is it maybe a little more likely they like pissing her off because it’s a power struggle, not a sex game.

I’ll grant that there can be some disagreement over precisely where the line between appreciation and aggression gets drawn, but my point is: if you don’t draw one anywhere, you have been completely brainwashed by your culture into thinking your meaty deliciousness is something these men give a shit about. It’s not. Especially here in L.A., where beautiful women are in extreme surplus. Men who want to be with beautiful women devote their energy to winning dates with beautiful women. Men who devote their energy to aggression toward strange women enjoy winning fights with women. That’s why they’ve set up a context where she feels cornered and pressured and where their male buddies back them up.

And when you find that flattering, they think you’re pathetic. They think you like having a big strong man be forcible with you. They think you’re a vain, selfish ass who ought to be brought down a peg. They start talking behind your back about the things they’d like to do to you, and those things revolve around humiliation, not simple sexual enjoyment.

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One of the most vile phrases I have ever heard is “high maintenance” in reference to a woman. Not just because it’s a term better suited to automobiles (something else hetero men like to climb into and control). Not just because it puts a value on the amount of work men have to do to gain sexual access to a piece of talking meat. And not just because it seems like a good 90% of men insist on having a “high maintenance” woman when they don’t have to, just so they have something to complain about. (More on some of this later.)

But mainly because you know who’s high maintenance? MEN. And you know why they don’t get called on it? Because our society has deemed the amount of maintenance hetero women expend on men and relationships with men to be “normal duty.”

An expensive piece of tail

The image I have of a “high maintenance” woman (from the perspective of men who complain about them) is a heterosexual woman who accepts that her sexuality is a commodity and attempts to “charge” men the highest prices possible for access to it. She makes them take her out to more dates before giving them sex, compared to other women. She waits for them to impress her with gifts and fancy dinners. Is she even attracted to men, or sexually alive? Who knows? It doesn’t matter to the men who complain about her. She can lie back and think of diamonds when she finally decides they’ve earned a throw.

This is a pure transaction, nothing more, nothing less. The man’s attitude is that of a shopper, looking at inanimate objects and trying to decide if it’s worth paying extra for the model that comes with the huge boobs.

The expense of a piece of male tail

But while men who buy into the idea of women as sex meat for sale to the highest bidder complain about having to work to earn tail, no one ever talks about the expense of hooking up with a man. Please note that not all of these “expenses” are the direct fault of the man in question: we have such a sick and twisted double standard that even in a relationship with a really progressive, feminist man, a woman can still carry a lot of extra, useless burdens.

• She’s supposed to make him feel good about himself; he’s supposed to make her feel pretty. We’ve all been programmed for who knows how many centuries to think that “Honey, you’re so smart” and “Honey, you look so pretty” are equivalent. They’re not. The sad fact is, neither boys nor girls are trained to expect men to dig deeper and express what really makes them care about a woman. And some men really aren’t looking for anything deeper than beauty. As a woman who would like to receive compliments on her impressive intellect, sense of humor or strength of character, I find it extremely disheartening to instead get fumbling reassurances about my not-so-impressive looks. And men seem to be deeply confused by me because when I honestly acknowledge I’m not the best-looking woman around, they interpret that as low self-esteem (what has a woman to esteem but her looks), and yet my frank talk about my intelligence is interpreted as obnoxiously arrogant (interesting, considering I pattern that talk after the talk of men who are not considered to be arrogant).
• Their needs come first. Now, there are a lot of men who don’t operate this way - who, for example, don’t think twice about relocating to where the wife or long-term girlfriend has gotten a great job offer… but their families and friends are almost sure to ring in with opinions of what a manipulative spell-casting witch she must be to make him relocate like that. Conversely, if he got a great job offer elsewhere but she wanted to stay near the grandparents so the family has trustworthy baby-sitters available, she is a selfish, demanding “high-maintenance” woman. While this is not the man’s fault (unless he buys into that double standard himself, of course), it is one of the stresses and therefore “costs” of being a woman who forms relationships with men.
• They don’t initiate relationship maintenance. This is a very, very “invisible” problem because we’ve all been trained from birth that women initiate communication and want to discuss problems while men avoid communication and hope for the best. We’ve all been taught this is innate monkey behavior - to be fair, I don’t think men even feel it’s permitted for them to initiate talks when they feel a relationship slipping away (and I’m not sure most women would react positively, either - that’s how skewed the whole mess is). If she doesn’t initiate talks, she must not really care. If he doesn’t, well, that’s just because he’s male. If you’re a woman like me who somehow missed all this programming and tends to wait for him to initiate the talks to prove he really cares, you’ll find you’re in for a shockingly long wait.

Those are just the costs of entering a relationship with a man who respects and values women. If the man has inherited any degree of the sexism of his culture - and let’s face it, most men and women have, and don’t even realize it - a woman has additional burdens:

• She’s expected to accede to his desires. When he wants to have sex, buy something or go out, she must accede to his demands or else he will receive sympathy from everyone around about her “henpecking” and encouragement to dump her ass or find a nice cozy piece on the side. If she wants to have sex, buy something or go out, there are no penalties for him to refuse her. In fact, if she’s always asking him for things he doesn’t want, that too gives him material to gain sympathy from friends and family.
• She’s expected to be more forgiving. Women are counseled to give second chances and overlook misdeeds more often than men are. We need to understand that men are inferior when it comes to being moral, sensible or sensitive, even though they are our superiors in all other ways and naturally better suited to running the world. (This is a neat bit of doublethink I never mastered.)
• She’s expected to make sacrifices and do more than half the housework/child rearing even while working full time. A lot of men still think they’re making a Great Noble Sacrifice if they “babysit” or do the dishes once a week. As Eames on L&O: Criminal Intent once said: “Newsflash: it’s not baby-sitting if they’re your kids.” Many men still receive accolades and sympathy for doing even a quarter of the tasks for the whole couple.
• Her requests/demands are seen as frivolous tests of the man’s love rather than genuine needs or wants. Whether she’s asking for a working dishwasher, help at home that would allow her to work overtime and earn more/get a promotion, or a ludicrous collection of diamonds, a man who’s inherited the culture’s sexism tends to interpret her desires as a test she’s made up just to annoy him. She’s not fully human like he is, and therefore can’t really have passions or dreams. She’s just faking it to see how high she can make him jump.

And so on, and so forth. Please: never, ever tolerate someone using the term “high maintenance” to describe a woman. Please at the very least look appalled (like you would if someone offered to tell you a good racist joke) and instruct them never to use that term around you again.

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Culture teaches us to look at the world with a skewed perspective. As an American kid, I was taught that this is the easiest country in the world and everyone, bar none, wants to immigrate here. I was also taught that white, heterosexual men like Ben Franklin were responsible for, oh, everything humanity had achieved or ever would achieve.

Somewhere around second grade, I realized the US wasn’t perfect and people in a lot of other countries thought their country was the best. I also realized that white straight men stood on the shoulders of everyone else, and from that vantage point achievement wasn’t remarkable. It was almost unavoidable. White Straight Man had a wife to look after all his mundane animal needs and comforts, a mistress to supplement that (the wife understood, of course), kids to extend his ego, the right to knock his family around when he was frustrated so he wouldn’t show that frustration to someone important, and the law on his side in everything.

Remember this was the 80’s. The idea that it could be rape if a woman went on a date with the guy was a new concept. A lot of significant strides were made in that decade to inch white women toward something like parity with white men, but that’s the atmosphere I grew up in.

It only got worse when we moved to the south. The white men and boys there were… something else. Whiny and weak, they fell into infantile rage at the first sign of adversity. They took pride in their inability to look after themselves, which caused them to require a woman to do it. They spoke in high, oxygen-thin pitches when they got excited or angry, yet expected everyone to be amazed at how butch they were (not that I care if a guy’s “butch” or not, but you’d think if it’s his central identity he’d at least learn to talk the talk?). And don’t forget the violence. Every once in a while, White Straight Man would beat up someone of color or a gay man. We all knew he was often abusive to his family, physically or emotionally - he often bragged in the 80’s about hiding assets so his ex-wife hag and no-longer-cute kids couldn’t get any support, which freed him up to spend all his money on his new hot wife and their new hot kids. (I marvel that my generation hasn’t produced a big crop of serial killers.)

“Sigh,” my girlfriends started saying in our teenage years. “Isn’t he awesome? He was even nice to me on our date!”

Ugh! They had to be kidding - only they weren’t. And if that’s what girls thought, then women were loathsome, too. That was the beginning of my misanthropy. But not the end. More on this in a minute.

I just couldn’t bring myself to be impressed by the accomplishments of creatures who, from birth, had an entire staff to cater to them. And when they did something nice or thoughtful… well, geez, who wouldn’t be nice if they didn’t have to do anything for themselves?

The only guys I counted as friends were either not white or white boys from “dysfunctional families” who didn’t have women catering to their every need. It wasn’t a conscious choice I made, but once I noticed the pattern the reasons were immediately apparent: I had overcome a fair amount of adversity in my life, coming from a long line of abusive freaks and relative poverty (and being female). How could I be impressed with someone who had overcome one or two other posh, spoiled little boys to achieve a position of authority? In an emergency situation, those were the very sort of boys and men who freaked out and deferred to me, instantly becoming my little army to order around.

Some women and girls who have that power are turned on by it. Not me. No, unfortunately, I wanted to date someone I could hope to respect someday. And what killed me was that I was supposed to respect these ones. The Emperor was naked, and everyone else was going on about his splendid new robes.

In my 20’s, I began to realize two important things. Remember the song “Airhead” by Thomas Dolby? No. Geez, you guys make me feel old (but smart). It’s about a woman who’s an airhead, and it’s all cute and funny and not as insulting as you might expect, and at the end it exhorts us to remember, “It was us made her that way.” Our culture advises people to conform to demographic stereotypes. We’re programmed from birth, and those of us (like me) who start to overcome that programming early only do so because something introduced us to the Wizard of Oz really early in life. White straight men were privileged, and because of that - sadly - very few of them would ever manage to impress me for reasons other than sex appeal. It wasn’t their fault they started out the race 30 yards from the finish line while everyone else had a 60 yard starting line and… not the best view in the pack. Just like it wasn’t women’s fault that life is so much easier if you can convince yourself to be a walking female stereotype.

It was everyone’s fault and no one’s. And now it’s everyone’s responsibility to fix. And no, we’re not there yet. We are still enthralled when our white boys find their toesies and start to count, and meanwhile our daughters and our little boys of color could build a functioning airplane in the backyard and a lot of parents and teachers just wouldn’t even notice. Or they’d order them to clean up that mess so we can get back to watching little Whitey try to master three letters of the alphabet, oh, isn’t he clever!

That’s the cultural lens I’m talking about - the one that makes us maximize the slightest accomplishment of white men and minimize the accomplishments of everyone else.

Why am I telling you this personal history that led to my current conclusions? Because some of you are more impressed by Warren Buffet or Bill Gates than you are by Martha Stewart or Oprah, and whether you like either of those women or not, I think you have to admit they accomplished more than either of those guys. I’m telling you because some of you think things are all equal now. And because some of you are white straight men who can’t understand why things are changing and why women are starting to expect “nice” rather than swoon in delirium when you dole a bit of it out.

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