The hosts of "The Five" on Fox News have joined the debate on catcalling, and they've made it pretty clear that they're not only fans of the practice, they're also practitioners.
Earlier this week, a video showing actress Shoshana B. Roberts getting 100 catcalls as she walked through New York City for a day went viral. The point of the video was to show what women go through, and how uncomfortable this form of verbal harassment can be.
But the point was lost on "The Five" hosts.
“She got 100 catcalls, let me add 101," said cohost Bob Beckel in video posted online by Mediaite and Media Matters, among others. "Damn, baby, you’re a piece of woman.”
"Look, I'm not going to condone it, but I will tell you nothing was disrespectful there," said co-host Eric Bolling. "There were a lot of people there saying 'God bless,' 'you look fantastic,' very complimentary. She may not have wanted it, but I find it hard to find what she called verbal harassment going on."
However, the video shows one man getting angry after not being acknowledged by Roberts.
"Somebody's acknowledging you for being beautiful," he said. "You should say thank you more."
In other instances, men walked alongside her for minutes at a time. One man walked silently while another tried repeatedly to get her to respond to his unwanted advances.
"You don't wanna talk? Because I'm ugly?" he said. "We can't be friends, nothing? You don't speak?"
On "The Five," cohost Greg Gutfield called women who oppose catcalls "classist," saying men meet women in bars using similar lines.
"She is finding fault with men in the street saying hello to her which may in fact be their only way of contacting women," Gutfield said. "It's their bar, and she's walking through it."
"If these guys were in a bar or a supermarket, she probably wouldn't feel the same way," he added.
Some of the women on Fox News made headlines over the summer when they also suggested that catcalls were complimentary.
Last month, both Bolling and Gutfield came under fire after cracking sexist jokes about a female fighter pilot leading the assault on ISIS. Bolling later apologized.
(h/t Mediaite)
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