After our trip to Japan, I got interested in seeing what happens in a dating culture where men are more omnivorous. Eric and I searched around for the world’s particularly aggressive dating scenes and decided a good place to go was Argentina. If Tokyo is the capital of the “herbivore man,” then Buenos Aires must surely be the capital of the “rib eye–eating maniac.”
Whether or not they deserve it, Argentine men have a global reputation for their hot-blooded, romantic passion, which often bleeds over into something pathological and scary. In 2014 a survey conducted by a nonprofit organization called Stop Street Harassment revealed that more than 60 percent of women in Buenos Aires had experienced intimidation from men who catcalled them.18 To a lot of men in Buenos Aires, women’s concern came as a surprise. When asked about the survey, Buenos Aires’s mayor, Mauricio Macri, dismissed it as inaccurate and proceeded to explain why women couldn’t possibly have a problem with being shouted at by strangers.
“All women like to be told compliments,” he said. “Those who say they’re offended are lying. Even though you’ll say something rude, like ‘What a cute ass you have’ . . . it’s all good. There is nothing more beautiful than the beauty of women, right? It’s almost the reason that men breathe.”
To be clear, this is the mayor. Upon reading this quote, I investigated, and I can confirm that at the time of this interview he was not wearing one of those helmets that holds beers and has straws that go in your mouth.
As you can imagine, these statements didn’t go over well. Hundreds of women—including the mayor’s own daughter—condemned Macri’s remarks, forcing him to publicly apologize.
Among men in Buenos Aires, however, Macri’s opinion probably isn’t uncommon. In Argentina, where Eric and Shelly, a sociology graduate student, spent a month doing interviews and leading focus groups, hitting on women with abandon is deeply ingrained in the city’s cultural traditions. Men are expected to be pursuers in what Argentines casually refer to as “the hunt,” and the primary arena for such pursuits is the street.
In Buenos Aires the streets are filled with sexual energy: There is sensual tango dancing, chamuyo (flirtatious chitchat) and various sexual quips are heard left and right, and people make out publicly in parks, restaurants, and on buses.
In Japan a woman would be surprised to be directly approached, but in Buenos Aires the women we interviewed said that being the object of unsolicited male attention was a daily occurrence, and many men were reluctant to take no for an answer. “Guys here, they don’t care if you turn them down or deny them,” one woman told us. “They just keep talking to you.”
Talking is the least of it. Many of the women we interviewed told us that Argentine men can be uninhibited in their pursuit of sex. In one memorable focus group, a woman named Tamara reported that men she’d just met had kissed her, touched her leg, and tried to slip their hands up her skirt despite her clear lack of interest in them, and that when she told them to stop, they responded as if frustrated and asked, “Why?” As she told the story, every other woman in the group nodded to show their familiarity with this situation. “That’s normal,” one explained.
“When I go out and I get approached by a guy, no matter if I say I’m in a relationship and if I’m not interested, they still keep on going,” said another. “They’ll say, ‘Is your boyfriend here right now? Do you live with your boyfriend?’ It’s, like, totally acceptable. As much as you say, ‘no, no, no,’ they get closer and closer into your face.”
Rob, a twenty-eight-year-old expat from New York, tried to explain this behavior to us during a focus group. He said the attitudes in Argentina were much different from the “no means no” culture of the United States. “Here, if [women] say no, they’re interested. If they’re really not interested, they just don’t say anything to you. They just completely ignore you.” So now Rob only keeps clear if women literally turn their back to him. On his reading of courtship in Buenos Aires, “no” is usually just a prelude to “yes.”
You can see how much trouble this could generate. In our focus groups both men and women said it was common for a propositioned woman to play hard to get and then, only after the man had made a sufficient number of attempts, finally agree to a date. Many woman attributed this farce to a need to keep up appearances. If they responded too quickly, they might appear cheap.
“I have a friend who told me last week that she said no a few times to a guy she actually liked before saying yes just to play hard to get,” one woman explained. “It was just to make sure that he wanted something serious and to not be taken for an easy girl.” Sexually, too, women described a fear of appearing too eager. “We women know that if we have sex on the first date, then it’s over,” said another.