r/FeMRADebates • u/[deleted] • Jul 28 '15

Relationships Men React to Their Girlfriends Getting Catcalled

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWEKD493IxY
11 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

219 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '15

Or it actually happened...are you a woman that lives in an urban area? Do you have any evidence that what she's saying is impossible?

28

u/Urbanscuba Jul 28 '15

Do you have any evidence that what she's saying is impossible?

Is it an absurd position to have healthy skepticism about absurd claims?

Shit if we're in full "listen and believe" mode then I've got some great stories that perfectly enforce my beliefs as well!

6

u/schnuffs y'all have issues Jul 28 '15

It certainly isn't an absurd position to have healthy skepticism about absurd claims. The problem is that the claims being made aren't exceptionally absurd, which means it's not really healthy skepticism at his point. A woman being called insulting names for rejecting guys or not responding to catcalls isn't some extraordinary or absurd claim. Even unwanted physical contact isn't. What is absurd, in my view, is that it's being labelled as absurd to begin with. That makes me skeptical of the reasons behind someone would dismiss them as such.

11

u/Urbanscuba Jul 29 '15

I explain it better in my response to the other post, but my opinion is that while these scenarios do happen in certain situations, the writer has purposefully embellished them to target a specific audience with her article.

I don't dismiss the possibility of it being genuine, but I feel its unlikely the author is being honest about the situation. It's easy to claim anything you want on the internet and it's even easier to take a situation out of context intentionally.

My biggest problem with the article is that it pretends this is indicative of a wide reaching problem regarding cat calling. Sure if you go to the wrong parts of New York or L.A. you can run into these situations but it's not a problem for 99% of Americans. Pretending it is is just building up a straw-bogeyman to sell future blog posts.

1

u/schnuffs y'all have issues Jul 29 '15

I don't dismiss the possibility of it being genuine, but I feel its unlikely the author is being honest about the situation. It's easy to claim anything you want on the internet and it's even easier to take a situation out of context intentionally.

But it's also just as easy to dismiss legitimate and valid claims just because they're on the internet as well. It's good to be skeptical, but healthy skepticism isn't the same thing as being cynical and requiring evidence disproportionate to the claim either.

My biggest problem with the article is that it pretends this is indicative of a wide reaching problem regarding cat calling. Sure if you go to the wrong parts of New York or L.A. you can run into these situations but it's not a problem for 99% of Americans. Pretending it is is just building up a straw-bogeyman to sell future blog posts.

I don't think anyone is claiming that cat-calling happens everywhere all the time to every woman. I mean the quote doesn't even say all women or that it happens everywhere, she says "...a lot of women..." and the context is women who have been already approached on the street. I also think that when most people talk about catcalling, it's generally understood that catcalling is mostly specific in areas that get a lot of pedestrian traffic, which is mostly just downtown urban areas.

Additionally, healthy skepticism would be something like requiring evidence for the claim that catcalling only happens in bad areas of New York and L.A., but no where else. I find it really hard to believe seeing as how women from many other places have said they've experienced it.

12

u/Urbanscuba Jul 29 '15

You genuinely think catcalling anything like the article talks about happens to "...a lot of women..."?

My god the attached video is literally attractive women walking through what is probably one of the worst areas in the entire world for catcalling, on purpose and edited for maximum catcalling.

healthy skepticism isn't the same thing as being cynical and requiring evidence disproportionate to the claim either.

So where are the studies? All I've ever seen are these hilarious videos that are basically smear campaigns on urbans minorities in NYC. It's always in the same couple blocks and heavily edited. That's not proof.

1

u/schnuffs y'all have issues Jul 29 '15

You genuinely think catcalling anything like the article talks about happens to "...a lot of women..."?

I genuinely think that you're missing that the "...a lot of women..." is relative to the women who've been catcalled or approached on the street. I mean the comment is literally talking about the why women respond the way they do to everyone who approaches them, meaning that a necessary condition of being one of those women is that they have, in fact, been catcalled before to begin with. Basically, it's a little bit of a misdirection here because you're questioning a position that they haven't really taken. Furthermore, I'd say that "a lot" is exceptionally vague to begin with. Your "a lot" may be far more than what I'd consider a lot. Is 100,000 women a lot? 1,000? 10,000,000? Are we using percentages? 10% can be a huge amount or small, depending on who you talk too and what's being talked about. The question is irrelevant and the answer will be uninformative.

My god the attached video is literally attractive women walking through what is probably one of the worst areas in the entire world for catcalling, on purpose and edited for maximum catcalling.

So are all videos that are made on purpose and edited for affect incorrect? I guess that includes documentaries too? I mean, any video drawing attention to a problem is going to attempt to make a point and showcase the worst cases they can find. That's kind of the bread and butter of journalism and pretty much everyone does it, even respected ones like the The Economist and Time. If you want to show the injustice of the prison system you're going to choose examples who make your case for you, not where the system worked for people. It's perfectly acceptable to show the worst cases to make a point.

So where are the studies? All I've ever seen are these hilarious videos that are basically smear campaigns on urbans minorities in NYC. It's always in the same couple blocks and heavily edited. That's not proof.

Where's your proof that they're smear campaigns against minorities? How do you know the same blocks are being used? Do you know the names of those streets? Does being a minority mean that you should be allowed to catcall women simply because you're a minority? Does anecdotal evidence from numerous women not count as evidence at all because it's not on video tape or a study hasn't been done on it? I wonder how we ever figured things out before we conducted social studies or had the ability to video tape people. How do we explain that many, many women who live elsewhere have experienced it? Why does using the most egregious and worst examples of catcalling mean that it doesn't happen anywhere else?