This is back? Ugh.
Men are turned on by women (well the heterosexual ones). When it's hot, sometimes when it's not, many women will wear spaghetti-strap tank-tops with no bra on. That is visually appealing to a man. A wolf-whistle is him aloud saying "man, I love the looks of what I'm seeing." It's like smelling good food and saying "mmm, mmm" aloud.
Wow. That "defense" is
super messed up.
Women are not a consumable, roasted up for your pleasure. They do not exist solely to please you; they do not walk on the streets for your entertainment. That very attitude is the core of the problem.
For example: In the infamous "wolf whistle" case discussed in this thread, men at a construction site were verbally harassing a woman pretty much non-stop for over a month... in
January and February. It didn't matter what she was wearing, in fact she often deliberately wore modest clothing, wore headphones, tried to ignore them, refused to engage them. One man claims that he couldn't see her face, just "the back of her." (He also said that the woman who complained "must be thinking things above her station.")
One day, one of the construction workers deliberately blocked her path, while his fellow workers made comments. (That's why she ended up calling the police, who did not wind up arresting anyone. This also happened more than a year before Nottingham changed its record-keeping process, in a town about 100 miles away.)
Street harassment does not start in June, and end in August; it's a year-round problem. I routinely see men harass women in the dead of winter, when everyone is wearing coats and jackets and hats, often wearing big puffy down coats. Those women are not trying to look sexy; they are trying to get to work.
Street harassment is not about allegedly harmless appreciation of the female form. The street is not an art gallery where one can abstractly ponder the wonder of the human body without having any impact on the subject.
It's about power. It's about men who value their own desires above all else; it's about belittling women; it's about putting them "in their place," according to the man's beliefs about his status; it's about treating women as objects for male amusement.
No, wearing a tank-top is not necessarily an "invitation" for a whistle, but guess what, one is not needed. A men has the right to whistle because he FEELS like it. Period.
A
right? Does that also mean that any man also has the right to walk 5 paces behind you, commenting on how sweet your ass looks, twice a day, day after day?
The right to speak freely does not exculpate you from how you use that freedom. It is not acceptable to say whatever you want, to whomever you want, just because you feel like it. It is rare that this escalates to the point where there is a useful role in law enforcement; but the fact that street harassment may not escalate to that point does not mean that it is morally justifiable behavior.
