Getting Your Butt Pinched

The experience of American girls in Italy is that it is incessant and ubiquitous: anywhere and everywhere they go, throughout the long, roughly boot-shaped peninsula, some strange Italian man is going to grab a handful of one or another of their butt-cheeks and twist it. It's obviously meant, sort of, to be funny, and it's not funny--it hurts. It is something like--given the crowdedness of public spaces in Italy--the Italian version of cat-calling. The odd thing about it is that American girls seem to be the only victims of butt-pinching; Italian girls never get their butts pinched.  And why is that?--It's very simple: Italian girls wouldn't put up with it.