I think a wolf whistle is threatening to some women and not threatening to others. I think most women are not living in constant terror of men. We know that most men have the drive/urge to protect women, not harm them. However, I think there is a lot of confusion in the current climate.

Not using power is not the same as not having power to use. For the most part men are physically stronger than women. And aside from laws and civilized society, men could do whatever the hell they wanted with women. (Which still doesn’t mean most would want to harm them, but it only takes one. And typically the kinds of men who harm women harm them with or without laws, so really it’s all just the appearance of safety. Not actual safety. And no, I’m truly not some paranoid who thinks she’s gonna get jumped by a man any day now.)

So when a man wolf whistles, while he probably isn’t a threat, I think it does reinforce the potential threat. What can a woman do really? She can’t beat him up. That escalates a situation to potential violence against her. She can’t make him stop it. Unless she wants to shoot him, but just like stripping, that’s a pretty extreme reaction to a wolf whistle. When someone operating from the place of physical power abuses that by doing something even as innocuous as wolf whistling at a strange woman, it makes some women skittish.

But most of these men are just clueless, not bad. They don’t really know what a woman’s life is life. We may not live in constant terror but we operate with far more caution than most men. We don’t think about it. It’s just part of our day, being aware of our surroundings, not walking down dark alleys, etc. (I’m not saying men aren’t aware only that women have far more potential threats than men, and managing risk without paranoia isn’t the same as there not being any risk or greater risk for women.) Men don’t come from that world or that possible threat. Even though men can be violent against other men, there are slightly different circumstances and dynamics usually at play.

The fact that the law saw her nudity as a larger threat when she poses NO danger to the male by being nude, but they ignored what could be seen as a potential display of power from a man toward a woman who hasn’t consented to be in that situation… That’s a social problem. Because it continues the view that “women ask for it” and that women’s sexuality is the real danger to a civilized society. Her mental issues aside.

I don’t know what to do with the “what if it was male nudity” issue. I know that taboos against females showing body parts tend to be more rigorous than males. Men can’t show their penis. (Men show their ass all the time. Witness “nightmare on crack street” the next time a plumber comes to your house. Nobody calls the cops over that, even though it’s usually gross.)

Men can walk around topless. Women can’t. Even though breasts are secondary sex organs, nipples are also erogenous zones for men. The fact that women can’t show breasts, often can’t even discreetly breastfeed in public, while men can mow the lawn topless, is an issue for me. If we want to talk about sexual equality in terms of nudity laws, then really, either everyone can be topless or no one can, because there is nothing all that threatening about a female breast. I mean, hello Janet Jackson debacle. Society has some issues with women and their parts, above and beyond the issues they have with men. IMO.

What if she had been a guy?

I saw a naked man masturbating in the shrubbery at a beach overseas once, and when he saw me, he “pointed” his masturbation at me as I went past. Is it his right to do this? If he had been a woman, would his behaviour have been permissable? Is it a tourist’s right to take her clothes off (it must be pointed out that she was not in her home country or culture) whenever she feels like it? There are times and places for getting naked, and doing it while using an ATM on a busy public street really doesn’t seem very appropriate, no matter who or what provoked her. It was still her choice, and her decision was a very odd one.

She wasn’t charged with anything, just told it wasn’t cool and to please not do it.

I don’t see why so many people are taking issue with the NZ police’s actions - it’s hardly police brutality or sexism. They just asked somebody to stop doing something that was against the law. And for the sake of fairness, I DO think that it should be against the law! If a man had done it it would have been considered sexual harassment by some. Best to keep things simple, and have one law for all.

“Fractal pegged as one of the people who thinks you can ‘effectively win’ a debate on the internet”

Yes, one can, just as one can debates in any medium of discourse. The arguments and the conclusions are what are important.

“mental pleasure from proving that there are people who are, ZOMG, wrong on the internets!”

No, it’s for the ability to actually put those conflicting beliefs on the line and in doing so, have ones erroneous beliefs corrected and ones correct beliefs epistemically strengthened.

“But I’ve got nothing to prove”

Then I heartily suggest that you stop making sweeping social commentary that you are unwilling to defend based on facts that you only half-know or this will keep happening your entire life.

“I made my point”

Made as in stated clearly, yes, it was perfectly clear what you were claiming, which is why I took odds with it.

“it appears my point was comprehensible and comprehended”

That I never contended.

“are doing a better job of reinforcing my point than any arguments I could make myself”

By presenting you with a variety of epistemic problems in your stated claims that you refuse to address? In most people’s book, holding beliefs without justification doesn’t reinforce those beliefs. I believe your definition of civility seems to preclude any intellectual disagreement; okay, the response I received at first was not really defended and seemed to bring in American culture arbitrarily, but I humoured it still. The only tones I set was to tell you where your arguments were weak and structure mine analytically.

My real reason why I debate like this on the internet? The same reason I debate analytically when debating anything from mathematics to computational logic to ethics. Analytic debate is the best and surest way of arriving at the truth of the matter. Occasionally, outside academic circles, when one finds someone who believes something quite strange (like truth relativism or nihilism). Nine times out of ten, they won’t be changed, but occasionally one finds one who’s actually willing to strive to find out what is the truth of a given matter.

Now, I’m not accusing you or anyone I’ve seen here now as having strange beliefs like nihilism, just ones I took issue with. What irks me is that there are people willing to make very grand statements about an issue that they then never intend to defend. A colleague once defined this as being part of the “slackivist” age where people like the comfort of cushy moral judgements (though often held relativistically) without the effort of having to risk them, defend them or fully define them. I didn’t even believe you were that when I first posted, I just came to that conclusion. The only reason I was aware of your particular blog was the fact that my girlfriend reads it occasionally.

Ave atque Vale.

On your second point: yes, most libertarians do defend whistling as a freedom of expression and so would I, however, what I would state is that employers can insist that employees conduct themselves in a certain manner and, as such, something can be done about the builders (a similar system exists in several places in Europe). What I would also say is that a wolf-whistler isn’t automatically justified to whistle, it may still mean that person is doing something morally suspect, at least.

On your next point, yes it is an opinion and a fact. It is an opinion about an empirically testable fact. If you walk down a high street wolf-whistling at attractive passers-by, you will be shunned in most places; if you walk down it naked, you will probably be arrested. Further, nudist colonies do not constitute “public spaces” and, surely, that can be gleaned from the second word in “nudist colony”. I can be offended by someone’s nudity in a public space, while happily it allowing on, say, a nudist beach (which marks a designated bound where such taboos do not apply).

As regards the link between nudity taboos generally and the atmosphere of fear surrounding things like you mentioned, that may well be the case, but I am only concerned with public nudity. Public nudity is the specific sphere of discourse I was interested in as regards Bacchus’s original claims.

On the final paragraph, as regards Ivy Leaguers: looking down on you as regards your accent is wrong, fine. As regards the “preening”, yes, doing better at one’s chosen goal and attain a higher status in society and amongst ones peers is a good thing. I have a choice between two of the best institutions in Europe (one being Oxford) for my Ph.D. and I feel pretty good about it, because it is an achievement and represents a better career and more academic success for me by achieving that possibility. This idea of “indoctrination-education” sounds like bitterness ungrounded in the realities of institutions of higher learning.

As regards libertarianism and authority, I don’t know what you mean by “argument from authority”. The premise important to libertarians is, or should be, “question authority”, but not “reject authority for rejection’s sake”, given the importance of human rights for libertarians (consequentialist libertarians aside, as a minority) denotes an obvious authority for rights-libertarians and those in the U.S. obviously hold the U.S. Constitution in high regard as an authority on many matters.

Finally, no, we are not “just people” as you say. We are individuals with a varying level of skills and competence in a variety of different areas. Knowledge is not a democracy, I would not trust a doctor to do my plumbing or a plumber to heal an illness (all else being equal) and opinions on any subject are not just that, they are more or less well-informed and are correct or wrong in virtue of the truth or falsity of the values and facts they reflect.

Well, that’ll be cause they’re private property.

“I didn’t intend to join any debate or argument, I was just expressing my opinion…”

Heheh, well see there’s a slight problem with putting those phrases together :)

I don’t write ErosBlog, or maintain the comments, to provide a playground for people who are out to score debating points or derive mental pleasure from proving that there are people who are, ZOMG, wrong on the internets! As far as I’m concerned, life is just too short for that. I have views, sometimes I express them, if people want to discuss them in a civil and friendly way, sometimes I’ll do that. But I’ve got nothing to prove, and not enough mental energy to argue with somebody who’s just trying to “win” and who is eager to condescend whenever they think they may have scored.

Let Fractal chalk up a win on the great scoreboard of internet victories that nobody else can see. I’m not invested in that contest. I made my point. From the reaction of the regular commenters, it appears my point was comprehensible and comprehended. From there, the arguments people are making against my point are doing a better job of reinforcing my point than any arguments I could make myself. It may not be internet victory, but it suits me just fine.

I have a few libertarian friends and I think they would view wolf-whistling as freedom of expression, not harassment. Back in the day I got whistled at and I didn’t care what the whistler’s intent was, I thought it was a very nice compliment. If the guy followed up with some talk, then it became something else, but I could just ignore it. Way too many people have forgotten how to do that.

Public nudity is a greater breach of the peace, on purely pragmatic grounds.
That is an opinion, not a fact. If it were a fact, how are nudist colonies exempt from it?

I didn’t intend to join any debate or argument, I was just expressing my opinion that nudity taboos go overboard in “civilized” society. In the U.S. it’s so bad that among my friends, some are afraid to take a bath or shower with their kids, and there are enough stories of parents getting arrested for child abuse for the cute bathtime pictures that used to be common. Taking the mystery out of what normal human bodies look like would help end a lot of sexual hangups, imo.

And while we’re talking about hangups, I have been around academics alot for some jobs and the Ivy Leaguers are always the ones preening the most. They’re the ones that look down on people like me that have a southern accent, like the way I sound automatically means I’m not as smart as them. It’s like they know they overpaid for the indoctrination-education they got, and have to feed their egos by lording it over the rest of us. They can stuff their degrees and pedigrees. We’re all just people. Don’t libertarians talk about “argument from authority” a lot?

I never spoke dismissively of it, you are putting words into my mouth. I spoke of wolf whistling being a much milder form of harassment than many others (say, those that contain the overtones of violence like physical threats).

“Fractal pretty conclusively with the backward police attitudes I was attacking.”

I tend to associate terms like “backward police attitudes” with the sort of people who are going to insist that “9/11 was caused by the Bush administration and covered up by the Zionist-run media”. Actually, I’m a libertarian. So far my central claims have been:

a) Wolf whistling is a milder form of harassment than physical harassment and several other forms of harassment.
b) Public nudity is a greater breach of the peace, on purely pragmatic grounds.
c) Any defence of the latter on grounds of freedom of expression will ultimately allow the former.
d) Breast-feeding, however, is defensible in public on functional and ethical grounds.

Now a and b to have have also lead to:
A1) The wolf whistling should have been punished by fines or informed complaints to the employers.
B1) The police were right to take her away.

If this is the sort of response you identify as “backward police attitudes”, one shudders to think of the terms you’d apply to genuine authoritarianism, no matter how well-defended.

But let me put all this aside, since I think this is a debate I’ve effectively won, let’s look at what you’ve done on this blog. You’ve made a piece of social commentary and yet neither seek to defend it, convince others of it if they raise objections (beyond a few limp arguments) or engage with its opponents (by your own admission here). This seems totally backwards to the very reason of making social commentary in the first place. You have here stated an opinion, maybe you should put a warning on your blog that the author invites no criticism of his views and will respond (at best) with shoddy arguments or (at worst) with dismissals of being in league with authoritarianism/conservatives/. The practice of stating ones views only around the sort of people who are not going to to be critical in order to feel better about oneself and never actually have to risk intellectual engagement is an age-old tradition, but I’m afraid I have little sympathy for it.

Further, yes, *mild* harassment. I can think of much stronger forms of harassment (and stripping off unwanted in front of someone would also count as sexual harassment)and very few weaker ones. Wolf-whistling is, as much, if not more, to do with flirting than with harassment. Now, you can claim that the flirting was unwanted, but really how is anyone to know that without trying?

It seems to me to be attitudes like these that make women the victim, suggesting we need to be protected from the bad bad men, rather than the relatively harmless flirts of these uncouth guys.

Of course you’re free not to engage in any of Fractal’s, or my, arguments, it just seems that where we could have ended up with a healthy open debate we’ll have nothing but narrow-mindedness. It seems strange for a sex blog to shut down debate on such a topic.