I came across this Guardian article covering the Everyday Sexism Project's "get your arse out mate" experiment in my social network feed, and while many of the article’s commentators were sceptical of the experiment, none of those critics seemed to have grasped the most important reason that "reverse cat-calling", "slutwalks" and similar trains-of-thought are actually train-wrecks-of-thought: activists who point out that on average women are cat-called more than men never admit that on average men tend to dress in very conservative and unrevealing attire compared with women: all of the men featured in the video were dressed in bland, functional clothing.

An Unfair Comparison

The harassed men were not flaunting their flesh, their figures, nor even showing ostentatious displays of wealth, strength or influence (which are things that more often attract women to men than vice-versa). Had these men been wearing tight black leather chaps and shirts, Chippendale tuxedos, hotpants over profile-enhancing push-up underpants; if they were parading their waxed and oiled muscles, or if they were letting their £30,000 Patek Philippe timepieces dangle alluringly from beneath their shirt cuffs, it would have been a much more poignant and valid comparison. You would expect that men dressed in such a way would receive comments and attention. But men rarely choose to dress like this, and when they do, they expect and accept the results. It is not fair to compare the experiences of men and women without accounting for such variables.

You might scoff but this is an unfair comparison; a chest-revealing Chippendale tuxedo is clearly more sexualised than ordinary women’s clothing. But this is not really true when you compare women and men’s clothes objectively: even something as ordinary as a skirt reveals acres more flesh than the equivalent male garment. Almost all women’s clothing is designed to enhance their sexual allure and heighten their sexual power, and this is so normalised that we don’t even notice.

Now I will concede to the feminists that when comparing like-with-like; the experiences of frumpy women with dowdy men; or the experiences of the Village People with Hooters waitresses, women probably will end up receiving more unwanted complements than men, due to differences in the sexual appetites of men and women, the differences in male and female sexuality, the different expectations of initiating sexual contact, and, yes, even differences in the way men and women are brought up and the kind of roles they find themselves in (boisterous camaraderie exists in any physically demanding environment: an all-woman building site would be as bawdy and crass as an all-male one. Have you ever seen a women's rugby club on a night out?). But these like-for-like comparisons would reveal nowhere near the supposed torrent of abuse that hysterical campaigners assure us all women are faced with every day.

Cat-calling is a "people who dress sexily" problem first and foremost, and a “women’s problem” second (or third, or fourth, or fortieth).

Sartorial Miscommunication

Dress is a form of communication. Nuns, punks, businessmen and prostitutes all use their attire to communicate different things. While we are all free to express ourselves how we wish, we would be foolish to think we can say one thing while meaning another and absolving ourselves of all responsibility for the resulting miscommunication. If I snarled at a stranger “Fight me motherfucker!” but what I actually meant was “Let’s become good friends”, the miscommunication and its consequences would belong to me. A prostitute dressed convincingly as a nun or in dusty overalls would fail to attract many clients, not because nobody desires her services, but because she is not communicating her sexual availability. Conversely, men and women who advertise their desire for sexual attention, whether verbally or through their dress, are wilfully miscommunicating if in truth they desire no such thing.

While I would not advocate for the adoption of burqas in the west, they are a stark and extreme example of how things like cat-calling correlate with appearance. Their use is encouraged in the genuinely patriarchal Arab world by women who wish to evade the attention of men, and by men who perceive immodest dress to be a way for a woman to gain power over them, and while I consider the practice backward, these men and women both have valid points backed up by empirically observable outcomes: dress dowdy, be left alone. Yet such extremes are not even required for this to work. A female office worker in a frumpy pant-suit or a woman running an errand in baggy jeans and a hoodie is as invisible as a man dressed the same way.

Women’s Unchecked Sexual Power

It is not a secret that men desire women more than women desire men (article). Sex is a seller’s market. Being sexually desired is a form of power. Feminists admit this when talking about other groups: when a study reveals that white people or masculine gay men are more desired, they are said to be “privileged” because of this. But when exactly the same kind of desirability disparity is enjoyed by women, even when that disparity is much greater, feminists frame this as a burden, and oppression. They rationalise away the inconsistency.

If a person has a strong psychological desire for something, be it a man who desires sex, a woman who desires wealth, an ex-smoker who desires nicotine, a recovering junkie who desires heroin or an infected person who desires a cure, someone who is in possession of the desirable thing has an easy way to manipulate the deprived individual. In all-bar-one of these scenarios, the manipulator is considered the morally contemptible party: a smoker who blows cigarette smoke in the face of an ex-smoker is rightly condemned for frustrating them. A pimp who has an abundant supply of drugs can is considered evil for luring addicts to their ruin. A man who pays for sex is considered by many feminists and traditionalists to be taking advantage of the prostitute. Someone who has access to the cure for a disease could easily coerce someone desperate for the cure to commit crimes or perhaps even kill for them, yet most would pity both the pawn and their victim in this situation.

But the reasoning that accompanies these kinds of moral judgments does a full 180° turn when the scenario involves a man who is being psychologically controlled through his sexuality. He is afforded none of the sympathy given to the other, comparably manipulated individuals, but worse than that, he is considered an aggressor if he so much as looks at that which he is being tempted with (the “male gaze”, “visual harassment”), never mind if he passes comment or escalates the situation with a romantic advance.

Empathy Apartheid

In a world that treated the male experience with the same empathy and concern as western society treats the female experience, when revealing, figure-hugging clothing, makeup, short skirts and push-up bras are worn in the workplace it would be viewed as sexual harassment, and the women who seek to gain influence through such means would be shamed and reprimanded in the same way as would any other kind of psychological manipulator.

But in my humble opinion, in a more freedom-loving, yet still egalitarian and just world, dressing seductively and cat-calling would both be considered the very minor infractions of decorum that they really are. If anything, seduction should be considered the bigger infraction, because while women have the option of changing their attire to avoid attention, men have no way of avoiding seduction other than sheer strength of character.

In a freedom-loving, egalitarian world, the only column inches occupied by the Everyday Sexism Project would be those of obscure radical newsletters, and not the world’s mainstream press.

But we don’t live in a freedom-loving egalitarian world. We don't even live in a freedom-hating egalitarian world. We live in a non-egalitarian world, where one sex enjoys simultaneously the freedom to do as it pleases and to enjoy protection from the consequences, while everyone else is treated as an adult.