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Everyone deserves respect. But not everyone can be accommodated in speech. As a woman, I understand the cat-calling issue. It's annoying, and is often disrespectful and uncomfortable. I do often feel unsafe. However, I do not vilify men, and I do not try to pose this issue as a "man's problem". This, for me, is not a men vs women issue, it is cultural and often personal and individual. Some women like being catcalled, most men do not catcall. So, I deal with it on a personal level with my peers. I specify these points because I do see an "us vs them" mentality in our current social atmosphere, and this is why my comment above illustrated competitive groups. However, going back to my anecdote above, safety is important in society and we should all work towards allowing others to feel safe. However, when it comes to speech everything goes gray. So, necessarily, some people wish to sort it and make speech black and white. But it's not so. If a man yelled to me on the street, "Hey, beautiful!" I don't feel unsafe, but I will ignore it because I'm not interested and the dude will probably get the hint. If a man comes up close to me at night and says, "hey, you're sexy, where you going?" that man has something else going on and he probably can't be fixed by society screaming at him that he sucks for being a man. But then there's the in-between-- broad daylight, walking down the street, bro yells, "Nice ass kiddo what's your name, where you going?" I'll probably feel uncomfortable (the statement is too sexual and probing), maybe I'll go to the other side of the street. BUT I'm not going to insist that men stop vocally noticing attractive women! Societies always have a sexual component, people will always express sexuality. So it's case by case. |