At one point in time, walking down the street as a woman stopped being just a leisurely stroll and started feeling more like a challenge. The constant shrieks and whistles that come from men’s mouths accompanied by their oh so charming vulgar comments is what is commonly referred to as cat calling. 

Since the 17th century, men of all ages can not seem to find their self control when it comes to women. With the ideology that a good whistle or a nice comment like, “aye girl come here” is flattering, these cat callers will deem themselves as unstoppable. However, this thought process may make sense to cat callers but to most women this raises eyebrows and springs question marks above their head. 

The answer to the age old question, “What do women really think of cat calling?” has definitely been swimming around in the head of not only myself, but the other cat call victims as well. Cat calling varies. It can be something simple such as a whistle to the extreme of a grown man pulling over in his car telling an underage girl she looks good and to get in. It’s hard to understand how cat callers believe their method is useful. When asked what they think of cat calling not one person said they liked it. The overall response was one word: disrespectful.

Every cat call victim claimed the act of catcalling was a bad way to get the attention of the person being catcalled. Student Melanie Sttroner said, “It’s not cute, so stop doing it.”

Here at Blake, I found both women and men who disagree with the use of cat calling. “It’s degrading towards women,” said Vinh Hoang. Although there are a good bunch of male students with the same mindset as Vinh, sadly there are still instances of cat calling in our halls. Student Avery Mavarro claims she only gets catcalled in school, mainly by upperclassmen. 

The good news is the use of cat calling is becoming less frequent. Could it be that our generation has had enough of catcalling? The many young women who were asked said it’s mainly older men who cat call them. Men their age tend to use a more respectful approach to gain the attention of the women.

With social media being one of the larger influences in this generation, it’s easier to educate the younger teens on what’s okay and not okay to do. As for the older men, well hopefully they can learn a thing or two from the kids about how to respectfully catch a date. 

With all of the recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault that have been all over the news, and the fact that catcalling falls into the category of harassment, we did some research on sexual harassment in school.  Here’s what we found:

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