Gentlemen, if you want to understand why women hate catcalling, or think you understand it but want to experience it yourself, I have a suggestion: take a job delivering beer.

There’s something about wheeling a full keg of beer into a restaurant that makes people feel like they just have to comment. “You can put that in the car over there!” “Wheel that down a couple blocks, to the house on the right!” “You can leave that here with me!”

It’s always something like that. It happened to me four times during one day of deliveries last week. (I’m actually in sales, but we all have to pitch in when the brewery is new.) And don’t get me wrong, the first few times it happens you laugh and joke about it, but after a couple of weeks you’ve already heard them all. It’s annoying. It’s not even original. You just want people to leave you alone so you can get done and go home.

Which is the problem with catcalling. Men feel like they have some kind of right to a woman’s body, a right that needs to be communicated, in the same way that people want us to know they like beer. If we’re advertising said beer at the time, all well and good! But when we’re delivering it to a customer, it’s a bother.

The other problem with catcalling is, of course, the menace—the fear that the man might take what he’s signaling his desire for (see Schrödinger’s Rapist). That’s not as big of a problem with beer. If someone wants to accost me, they’re welcome to try to make off with 160lbs of beer. That should give the police plenty of time to catch them. And even if they get away, the brewery is only out a couple hundred bucks. The stakes are higher with rape.

But it’s instructive at least, and like this story about coffee, maybe it will help someone understand. If nothing else, maybe it will keep a few people from making obnoxious comments to the hardworking men and women delivering your beer. It’s the lesser or two goods, but I’ll take what I can get.