Piropos

I was puzzled about piropos - could something that was a compliment in the milongas really also be a catcall in the street? I had heard this from a Brit and decided to ask someone from Spain.  Olaya was matter of fact:  Yes, a piropo could be a compliment or a catcall she said. It depended on the context.  

But in Murcia it turned out to be not so clear after all.
- What is a piropo?
My friend looked shocked.
- It is an aggression.
- Seriously? I said.
I don't know him well except that he has a sense of fun, which is one of the main things.  I wondered if he was putting it on.
- Yes! It is an invasion of privacy. 
Apparently not, I thought, a little startled.  He is Catalan.  It wondered if perhaps that region is more modern, more PC, more serious. 

- Well, he conceded, making the same point about buildings sites and twenty years ago.

His wife added that there was a difference between a man saying you are looking so hot he feels like biting your neck (astonishingly she had thus been threatened) and May I say how nice you look today?  She was indubitable:  a man had to ask permission to compliment a woman otherwise it was an infringement.  This made sense to me because once coupled with a guy on the dance floor, he knows that, gross discomfort apart, he has you for the tanda.  Some, treading a fine or a coarser line, try to exploit that.   I asked her: did she still dance with the guy?  Yes, she said,  surprising me.  But - and then she demonstrated the careful, almost exaggerated politeness he now used when speaking with her.  I wondered why she still danced with him and supposed it was a victory of sorts but I wondered how fun it was.  

Later, in a milonga, a guy from another Latin American country, a long time resident in Scotland, would say that the guy thinks he's making a compliment, but that might not be the girl's view.  The woman should have the last word, he said.  We would say that was canny advice, coming from a Scot but I thought it was more like the Latin courtesy that Janis wrote about recently.

Another friend, Isabella, is from Spain but spent over twenty years in Latin America.  We are the same age.  She looks great, besides which she is tactile and has the warmth and sense of fun that I have found in some women from that continent.  Her tone and expressions say at least as much as her words.  We caught up at a milonga recently and chatting and dancing with her was the highlight of my evening.  Isabella said a piropo was a compliment.  She too mentioned building sites.  But, she said, the way you would react would be  - and here she set her face firmly, looking ahead, defiantly pretending not to hear anything at all.  In this, she echoed a British woman who had lived in Spain under Franco's rule.  She was adamant: if a woman responded to a street piropo it was taken as a come-on. She said:  The advice then in the late sixties was to ignore such attentions and keep staring straight ahead.

But inside, said, Isabella you would be...  and here she grinned hugely and wriggled in delight.  Pero, she said, her dark eyes suddenly serious; she lifted a finger and said with a warning tone:  My daughters  - who are about twenty - don't think piropos are compliments.  They say they are an invasion of privacy.  "Mama," they say, "I don't need a man to tell me I look good."  Their mother and I cast down our eyes and looked sideways at one another from under our eyelashes, reproved by youth.