In France, right now, lawmakers are considering fining people 90 euros (£78) if they’re caught wolf-whistling as part of efforts to combat sexual harassment (how the police would implement it hasn’t quite been worked out). One British politician is similarly calling for a crackdown on it and catcalling. While if you search for wolf-whistling on Twitter, you’ll quickly find women complaining about it being done at them, highlighting the intimidation and fear it creates, an obvious example of #everydaysexism. Wolf-whistling – once thought to be heard by every woman who passed a building site – looks set to be extinct.
How on earth did this two-note whistle – the first high in pitch, the second deep – come to be so charged with meaning? And how did it go from being an everyday occurrence to one that shocks? Its history has surprisingly never been told before.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
If you search online for the wolf-whistle’s origins, the one theory thrown about is that it’s down to sailors. While at sea, they mainly shouted orders to each other. But in storms, they would rely on piped or whistled ‘boatswain calls’ – the only sounds that could be heard above the waves. One of these, the ‘turn to’ call, sounds a lot like a wolf-whistle and the idea goes that sailors took that and started using it to call women when they reached shore. There’s just one problem with the theory: it’s not true, at least according to historians at both Britain’s Royal Navy and its National Maritime Museum. Spokespeople for both said they’d never heard the idea before and felt it extremely unlikely that sailors would have taken a call used in difficult – frightening – situations in the middle of the ocean and transported it to land, let alone to leer at women.
So where does it come from? The clue is in its very name.
“My theory I got from talking to an old shepherd,” says John Lucas, author of A Brief History of Whistling. “He was this very knowledgeable guy, trained sheepdogs, and he ran through a whole bunch of calls with me and did one that sounded exactly like a wolf whistle. I said, ‘Christ, that’s a bit politically incorrect!’ and he said, ‘No, it’s kosher, it’s from Albania’.”