Has the nature of men reached a new low?

This is a video of Shoshana Roberts, an actor who described herself as 34 DD, as she walked through some of the sketchiest neighborhoods in New York clad in jeans and a crew neck t-short.  She did this for ten hours, and along the way she was heckled and harassed over a hundred times by various men.  The catcall video received over 12 million hits.

The purpose of the video was to show how our society is changing, how culture has changed, so that men have no scruples, and lack respect for women.  The video was meant to show that men behave worse now toward women than ever before.  However, those of us who pay attention to history know this is not true, that men will be men will be men. 

The video was made by Hollerback, and the woman had apparently been sexually assaulted more than once, which was the motive behind the video. So as she walks the streets for over ten hours she was the victim of verbal street harassment over 100 times in ten hours.  For the purposes of the video they culled 10 hours down to four minutes.  

So the purpose of the video was to show how low men in our society have become.  They wanted to show that this was new.  But it's not new.  This type of behavior by men has been going on since the beginning of time.  It's nothing new.  I wouldn't do it, but there is something about seeing a hot, sexy woman that causes men to say and do goofy things, and most of it all in god fun.  They wolf whistle and cat call and they mildly intimidate her.  They ask for a phone number and stuff like that. "Hey, baby. Looking good today, girl. Have a good day. How are you? Ooh. Ooh. Looking good."

There were a couple instances in the video where a man was following her for five or so minutes, and that was pretty scary.  But most of the chants and whistling by men was just men having being men and having fun.  So this video basically shows the nature of what men do.  It's nothing new.  

The effort to end this type of behavior is nothing new either. There was a movement after WWI, and there was another one in the 1960s and 1970s.  Those who are old enough might remember Miller Lite commercials of women scantily clad, walking through construction sites being wolf whistles at by men.  It wasn't new back then either.  

The purpose of the movements is to stop men from treating women as objects.  They wanted to force men to see women for having brains and minds, and not just beautiful bodies.  They wanted men to stop insulting women by only seeing a large breasts and hot legs.  

 They wanted to make it so men would  feel uncomfortable due to peer pressure and never do this again.  People who resorted to this type of behavior would be shunned and shamed by society.  And usually it works for a year or two, and then men forget and go back to doing what comes natural to them.  

There was an article in a 1995 issue of TIME Magazine that tried to prove scientifically that boys only acted the way they do because of the environments they were raised in.  They fight and have wars with their toys only because we given GI Joe toys, and girls only want to bake cakes because they are given miniature stoves and ovens to play with.  

So they did this experiment where they gave the boys miniature stoves and ovens, and the girls GI Joe toys.  What happened was the boys built forts and had wars with the miniature stoves and ovens, and the girls dressed up the GI Joe toys in different costumes.  So this little scientific experiment proved what most people who use common sense knew all along, that boys will be boys and girls will be girls.  

So, human nature is what it is.  We are as we were created to be, and no political movement can change that.  There is no law made by Congress, and no executive order by the president, that can change the nature of men.  It's not even possible.  

There are certainly those of us who have respect for women and wouldn't do this sort of thing.  There are those of us who would see such heckling as an intrusion of their space and that they shouldn't do it.  Still, while there are women who will disagree with me on this, there are women who might see such behavior as deeply threatening, but what I saw in that video was mostly harmless. 

Still, if I lived in Manhattan, if I had a girl and I lived in Manhattan, I'd encourage her not to walk alone, especially in some of the sketchy neighborhoods she willingly walked through.  I mean, that's just common sense.