Unless the women telling these stories are exceptionally beautiful, I am skeptical about them — and I am not trying to insult Michelle Obama here. I am a woman who is neither beautiful nor unattractive, and I occasionally look well put together. From the age of fourteen to present — I am now in my late forties — no one has bothered me when I walk around American cities. Yet people like Joy Behar (formerly of The View) tell stories about how they can’t stand being treated “like pieces of meat†by men as they walk down the street. Huh? What are these women talking about? I KNOW I am more attractive than Joy Behar, yet no one is mothering moi. Can anybody explain this to me?
They lie. They’re just trying to draw attention to themselves.
I simply don’t think it is a cultural thing in the USA. When I was 13 we might verbally ogle a girl, but that stopped really quick when you realized that not only was it not going to help you meet her, it made you look like a dipstick.
That, and your friends saying “Will you shut up? You make us look like idiots!”
I did not know one single guy after being a pubescent teenager who even did anything at all like that, and that includes four years in the Navy with a lot of guys who were prone to alcohol abuse and the prospective charms of female companionship.
That isn’t to say guys won’t ogle a woman visually, but most grown Americans aren’t going to stick out their tongue, whistle, or say “Hubba hubba” except maybe to each other when the woman is gone.
These people are deranged.
Now, when my family went to Italy back in the early seventies, my mother was dressed all in black with her Jackie O sunglasses and had us six kids in tow, and there were a lot of Italian men who were making a lot of sounds and gestures as she walked by. (My dad was at the Embassy trying to get a space-available flight for us back to the USA on the Military Airlift Command, but it was an impossible task)
Someone told her that being unaccompanied, wearing black and having lots of kids in tow meant something very specific to Italian men...
They are lying?
So - I think what we have here is an urban myth being used as a propaganda tool to further a cause that doesn't stand on it it's own without a lie helping to hold it up.