So basically everyone should avoid being dickish. But I think some guys who catcall don’t even think about it, or class it as dickish. They think they’re “appreciating the goods” which is a problem because, well, I am not up for that. Nor am I goods. But when they think they’re being jokey, flirty or even friendly, it’s hard to get through.

I think the specific issue with gendered street harassment is that it uses gendered language in a way which also infers that the woman is there as a sexual commodity, rather than solely as a target of abuse. This is why it’s difficult to tackle and is treated on blogs like this one with a degree of specificity – it is often insidiously “appreciative”, which other forms of abuse aren’t – when you cycle people aren’t going to offer the excuse that they were “just being nice”, right?

This is not to say that you don’t suffer, or to compare suffering levels (a waste of time for all!) but just to explain why I think the feminist reaction to ‘street harassment’ is levelled in specific terms.

Homophobic, sexist, trans*phobic abuse etc often all come about because of the same horrible patriarchal (or kyriarchal if you prefer as this also expands it further into race and class) rule-set. It happens, as you say, because of objections to deviation from a favoured form (be it white, cis, male, straight, thin, some or all of the above), yes. And none of it is nice. I’ve had “nice tits” followed by “are you gay or something then?” which I think neatly illustrates the *interrelated* nasty power structures at play.

But it’s not all the same thing, too. Here is Markgraf on harassment post-slutwalk – http://www.badreputation.org.uk/2011/06/21/slutwalk-where-are-we/ – this was not a “flirtatious/threatening” catcall, it was an invasive interrogation and it became full-on scary bullying.

However, I think it’s worth saying that the gendered harassment of the sort Hannah is noting, which is different in tone to the above example, does happen, and is no less gendered and disturbing because it happens to other people in different (even more serious) forms.

To conclude, I do agree that these forms cross over and stuff and reflect a bunch of intersecting power structures, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t talk about that!

(there was supposed to be something else about how feminism is wonderful because it highlights problems that affect women as well as other people but I couldn’t make it not sound massively patronising and sexist so I’ll just leave this here instead and walk off mumbling)