Catcalls and the Right to the City

“Catcalling” – Image: Mashable illustration, Bob Al-Greene

• Male catcallers found in many places around the world
• Unlikely for a woman to spend a day alone in a city like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador or São Paulo without being catcalled at least once by some strange man who decides to stop whatever he’s doing to say exactly what he thinks of her body or give details about all the stuff he’d like to do with it.

• In Brazil, both men and women, think that catcalls are a compliment
• Journalists Juliana Kenski and Karin Hueck: August 2013, they launched an online survey with 7,762 participants
• 99.6% of Brazilian women have been harassed in public places
• 83% of respondents said they did not like being the butt of such compliments in the street
• The survey is part of Kenski’s online campaign to denaturalize catcalls.

• On one side there are those who advocate preservation of this habit seen as a typical Brazilian cultural trait.
• On the other side, there are people who believe that catcalls are just a veiled way of curtailing women’s participation in public life that limits their right to walk around the city.

“Women have their right to come and go restricted. Many of us have to chose longer paths not to pass by a bar or cross a group of men. Many girls give up wearing what they want and go for clothes they believe will not draw so much attention from men”, says Kenski in a interview for Future Challenges.

• Major urban centers: women find work opportunities more easily since most of the female workforce is employed in the services sector.
• Opportunities that Brazilian cities provide to each gender are still unequal since the very comings and goings of women are limited by this feeling of insecurity.
• Poor women: rely on inefficient public transport

• Demonstration of power from an heterosexual man against any woman he considers desirable than a seduction game or a relationship starter.
• The point is to give both men and women, both heterosexual and homosexual, the same rights to the city
• It is in fact changing all the time, adapting to the social practices of each period

• Argument that claims that restricting catcalls would undermine a Brazilian cultural trait is interesting because it conveys a point of view that sees  culture as a static object that should be protected like a museum piece
• When Brazil went from being a slavery society to a kind of equal one, hundreds of cultural habits had to be refurbished
• Slavery was a mode of social organization that carried with it many social behaviors and cultural habits, just like sexism does.

• When a man makes a compliment to a woman in a context in which a woman would never do the same, he is well aware he is intimidating her.
• When a man stops a woman who is obviously busy or rushed, he knows that he is intruding on her.
• He just decides to give his prerogative more weight than the woman’s needs, interests, will, and welfare.

• Catcalls = clear demarcation of gender positions: majority of the cases, heterosexual guy approaching a woman, treating her as a sex object.
• Lexical choices highlight this strong genre background: “doll” or  “princess”

• Flirting = subtle movement that stops when it does not receive a positive response from the other person.
• Harassing = make clear to women that they may have left the home environment and are gaining ground in public and social life, but none of this will be easy.

Article by  Juliana Cunha 1/11/ 2013.

Tags: brazilian culture, catcalls, chega de fiu fiu, juliana kenski, karin hueck, Latin America, un women