This is why I'm generally supportive of contemporary efforts to call out that kind of behavior as unacceptable.

I think on some level, everyone who finds someone else attractive has at least some instinctual desire to touch them or hug them or kiss them, etc. It's the definition of sexual attraction. If all you've been told and all of your experience says "hey, go for it! It's not a big deal and occasionally they'll reciprocate," why would you refrain?

It's important for people to learn and understand at a very basic level that it's inappropriate, unacceptable, and degrading to the person on the receiving end. When I was in my mid 20's I used to work with a lot of young guys who would catcall and pester women all the time. I'd shake my head and ask them why they did that. Didn't they know it annoyed the hell out of the women (at the very least)?

Their response was usually along similar lines to the one quoted in the article: "well, some of them like it and occasionally it might work!" Without a real understanding of how flawed this logic was, these dudes had been taught that the ideal approach was just to proposition as many women as possible in the hopes that one might respond positively.

Without understanding the flip side, they just didn't consider or grasp the harm it caused to the vast majority of their "targets".

I'm not sure that it's always sexual attraction, although it might have been for Asimov. Look at the Joe Biden case, how he used to hug, touch etc. people all the time in a problematic way. It wasn't sexual, but it was still an overstepping of sensible boundaries, intimacy etc. that we intuitively feel as "creepy".

Whatever the context (sexual or not) it's important for people to learn how to go about that sort of implied social negotiation that ultimately might make these contacts non-problematic and perhaps even desirable. Just telling them "it's not okay" is not nearly as effective. Tell them it's not OK, and then ask them why they aren't doing it the right way. Do they feel that entitled to another person's boundaries?

All people don't have the same boundaries. This makes me think of a guy I went to high school with. He always stood way too close when talking to me (and everybody else). Close enough to smell his mouth and feel his warm breath against my face. When I moved away he moved after. This was certainly nothing sexual; he did it to everyone, males and females of any ages, teachers and fellow students. I tried to talk to him about it once, because no one wanted to hang out with him and I hoped I could help him. He had absolutely no idea that he did anything wrong. He never understood why no one liked him or that all the girls thought he was a creep.

Maybe people like Biden are the same. They just have a different sense of boundaries, and don't react themselves when other people touch or hug them. I don't know how asking them why they do something that feels perfectly natural to them would help.

> All people don't have the same boundaries.

Of course, but that's precisely why that implied negotiation is so important - far more perhaps than most people might realize. It's never okay to "move after" people who are clearly trying to keep their distance; that's creepy, almost predatory behavior. I don't care if it's Joe Biden doing it or just someone in your high school.

I certainly avoid people who speak too loudly. The foundation of politeness is to not make other people uncomfortable. I think there’s an important difference between someone like Asimov who did know that what he did was wrong, but might not have understood the gravity of it, and someone like Biden who (presumably) just behaved in a way that was natural to him.

But a lot of those boundaries are learned, and most people are not as sensitive as they would like to be. While Americans feel uncomfortable with people standing too close, many other cultures feel uncomfortable with people that speak too loudly or smile too much.

These are different levels of discomfort, though. Speaking too loudly and smiling too much are clear violations of politeness; they might mean that people will distrust you or think that you're acting silly (especially the "smiling too much" one). But they aren't going to avoid you altogether like women would avoid Asimov.

> I wonder if there is a mechanism (there probably isn't) which instead rapidly matches folks so that they can catcall exactly the people who want to be cat called, assuming there are any.

Human cultures have adapted all sorts of symbols and codes for social boundary negotiation. One really obvious and ancient one is the Wedding Ring. The fact that Wedding Rings are an "opt out" by default model in many folks' view for what is "fair game" is a problem to redress.

Another example that comes to mind from books I've read is the 70s "handkerchief code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handkerchief_code. That one at least is more opt-in. There are descendants of that coding system still in use, of course.

In several of the real world conventions that I attend there's a growing pin and button culture that tries to encode directly and explicitly in English some negotiations, across a wide spectrum of consent/interest lines, things such as "I'm a hugger" and "Yes, I'm interested in socializing right now" (plus pronouns, and so forth). The advantage of making plain English over some cryptic code is nice for avoiding some forms of miscommunication, and you can do that in constrained settings like sci-fi conventions. They become a useful laboratory for exploring which ideas should possibly grow out into the real world, even though I don't think there are many ideas of how to do that "at scale" just yet.

(They are also laboratory experiments that some of them still fail and various communities are continually learning from them. Almost every broad consent has exceptions and navigating the line, for instance, of "I know I've given broad consent, but right now you need to accept that this particular circumstance is a no" is probably always going to be a challenge.)

Arguably a large part of the evolution of human communications has always been about social negotiation and we keep building new systems to signal/communicate/explore it. We've never perfected it, but maybe a big part of our human drive is that we keep trying.

> Another example that comes to mind from books I've read is the 70s "handkerchief code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handkerchief_code. That one at least is more opt-in. There are descendants of that coding system still in use, of course.

It's interesting that the opt-in signaling culture arose in the context of symmetrically powerful relationships (two members of the same sex) vs a catcall culture (which is clearly between assymetric power relationships - a male and female). I wonder if the power imbalance has something to do with the consensuality of the interaction.

That's definitely a concern. The growing modern understanding is maybe that you cannot have consent in a power imbalance, and sometimes a lot of the "code" work right now is as much finding and signaling possible power imbalances as much or more than establishing even a broad consent signal. Consider pronoun signaling as one first example where it may also signal an unobvious power imbalance (though not necessarily in every case; part of the normalization work behind pronoun signaling is that if everyone does it, for many people it signals a status quo/no change in power dynamics).

Though also an interesting counter-note to me is that the handkerchief code itself was commonly used in BDSM cases intended to signal the consensual creation of a power imbalance and asymmetry, and it is in (mixed gender) BDSM communities where I've heard most of the less publicly documented, but possibly more generally useful, successors to handkerchief code can be found. So asymmetric power structures have always been intertwined in the opt-in signaling, even if yes some of the early symmetry was probably a necessary bootstrap state.

Hey, thanks. I really learned something from this. I'll think on it.

> I wonder if there is a mechanism (there probably isn't) which instead rapidly matches folks so that they can catcall exactly the people who want to be cat called, assuming there are any.

I think this is what dating apps are for to some extent. Except the 'catcall' becomes ... conversation on a date. Although some of the apps are more on the catcall end of the spectrum.

The article does describe Asimov as a loser in romantic relationships, so one should not underestimate the harm he did to his own prospects. It's also true that we care a lot more about these behaviors than we did in the 1950s, and that's mostly for the better. But Asimov seems to have had comparatively little of that narcissistic, overentitled attitude which you'd find in so many harassers, and which perhaps should be of most concern.

> But Asimov seems to have had comparatively little of that narcissistic, overentitled attitude which you'd find in so many harassers

Exactly. I think he would have been horrified if he actually understood the harm he caused. It sometimes amazes me how people who are extremely intelligent in some aspects of life can be so utterly clueless in other.