Can you wolf-whistle? Do you? Should you? Photo credit: Myrmi http://www.flickr.com/photos/area/752565747/
British Prime Minister David Cameron has committed Britain to signing the the Council of Europe’s convention on violence against women. This included a pledge to pass legislation which will criminalise or impose sanctions for “unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”, reported The Telegraph. Jenny McCartney in The Telegraph commented that the wording of this clause “manages to be woolly yet potentially dangerous, like Freddy Krueger in an angora sweater.” Many are wondering whether the pledge signals an end to the peculiar British pastime of men (mostly) wolf-whistling at women passers-by they consider attractive?
Builders, van-drivers and even Cameron to be jailed? Although a spokesman for Cameron told The Sun: “We have harassment laws in this country. We are not proposing to criminalise wolf-whistling,” various possible punishments for verbal abusers have been dreamed up by commentators, from “carted off to a hell-hole prison in the Mexican desert to be tortured until they accept their hellish sins” (Daily Mail) to Cameron being “up before the beak for telling the Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear!’ so patronisingly in the House of Commons” (The Telegraph).
Killjoy militant feminists behind this? Rick Dewsbury in the Daily Mail blamed it all on a group of “militant bra-burners… bony-fingered killjoys … po-faced testosterone haters,” who he imagined “sitting around in WI style meetings sticking pins into voodoo dolls of men as they plot their bitter quest to create a dull and overly-regulated world.”
Anne Widdecombe left whistling for a compliment. The former Tory MP and Strictly Come Dancing star also ridiculed women who were offended by “being told they look pretty” in The Express, adding: “Well, dears, when you get to my age you’ll wish you could hear a wolf whistle or two instead of mothers telling offspring to ‘mind that little old lady.’”
Or is wolf-whistling to rape what marijuana is to heroin? Hollaback London, part of a global network to end street harassment, praised Cameron’s action. They define street harassment as: “sexual harassment which takes place in public spaces [including] … behavior such as staring, commenting, shouting, following, touching, grabbing, groping, flashing, assault, and violence.” Their co-director, Bryony Beynon wrote in The Guardian that the most serious sexual assault she ever experienced began with a wolf whistle and that defending this behavior is a gateway to the cultural acceptance of much more serious crimes.
Let’s keep this in proportion. Jenny McCartney called for a sense of proportion in The Telegraph: “Britain’s attitude to sexism, however, has become a bit like its weird attitude to food. We are either bingeing or purging.”
