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I could never count the number of times in my life I thought people were laughing with me. They weren’t.
in the psych ward because verbal abuse from my mom bc I’m trans (among other reasons),
“woah how that XXX left, there’s only girls here!”
It’s the sweetest thing anybody other than my sister has told me
It’s such a dichotomy. Women get catcalled every day and feel uncomfortable and harassed. Understandable. The average man gets catcalled a handful of times in his life and cherishes those moments almost as much as their children’s births.
Maybe you do you creep
As someone who’s been catcalled many many times while presenting female and once while presenting male (by women). Yeah tbh it felt similarly threatening. When you’re walking alone in the dark all big burly and bearded and just hear a voice calling out sexualizing you it’s scary. Like in retrospect now I can recognize that it was probably a drunk/high/low inhibitioned young woman displaying the confidence of youth when surrounded by friends. But I was scared because if she’s comfortable doing this she probably knows something I don’t if she chooses to escalate.
When you’re walking alone in the dark all big burly and bearded and just hear a voice calling out sexualizing you it’s scary
The fear is from the group dynamics more than anything else. Gender almost plays no part in it. Age plays almost no part in it. There are several stories about a group of teens attacking a lone adult, and it goes just about as you’d expect. Anyone who is alone and suddenly becomes the focus of attention by a group will (and probably should) become worried, whereas if you’re in a group the (that is, your) reaction can be anything from ignoring to playing along because you have less to fear. All of us can imagine the difference between walking in a group or by yourself when getting catcalled. Most of us have probably seen the difference.
My god if I could just get one compliment I could die happy.
Live long you absolute potato
I like your username, and you have great taste in Lemmy instances.
women get so much attention its like theyre drowning. men get so little its like theyre starving in the desert.
truly ironic
Eh being 14 and having an adult woman shouting out of a car at me to get my cock out I feel is about as gross and threatening as it would be if the genders were reversed.
Kind of gross and threatening even as an adult TBH. But yeah, definitely worse as a child.
Catcalling ≠ Complimenting
Catcalling is about letting the other know, that you want to fuck or harass them.
Complimenting is about verbalising beauty without any other expectations towards the other person.
There is an old idiom that goes “everything is about sex except sex. That’s about power.”
Catcalling is about expressing power over someone else body and life. It’s a veiled threat, coached in sexual terms. No one doing it actually expects to have sex afterwards. Its about saying “i can force sex on you. I can take control of you. Your life belongs to me.”
A lot of the men engaging in it above are doing it because of peer pressure, normalized misogyny and the “thrill” of getting an acknowledgement of that power by scaring women. I dont think most of them want to attack women outright to begin with, but it normalizes mixing sex with violence and dehumanizing woman.
I think the difference is that this isn’t catcalling. If women’s compliments towards men were the same as men’s compliments towards women, I think men would also dislike it. Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that men don’t get compliments often, and often they stick with them, but generally those are complements and not catcalls.
If women’s compliments towards men were the same as men’s compliments towards women, I think men would also dislike it.
Nah.
Every time I’ve ever heard of an experiment where indignant women do/say to men the exact same things that they hate getting from men, they’re always astonished to see the men’s reactions as practically universally positive:
If the goal of the experiment was to make men feel the weird combination of creeped-out and ashamed that comes with everyday objectification, then the experiment failed. Instead, these fellas look flattered and expectant. You can practically see them plotting the nearest route to the cheapest hotel.
I hate to say it, but I think that might be one of those differences that actually is inherent due to biology. Ultimately, women can only benefit reproductively from one partner at a time, whereas men can benefit reproductively from as many as will have them. Therefore, women are only interested in compliments from a prospective partner they might actually choose, while men are happy to receive any expression of interest.
I appreciate your take, but that’s not really the case. Women are open and receptive to compliments. Even from strangers, but the tone and context matter more since women have been socialized to fear unknown, especially aggressive men. Someone yelling their feelings about your body at you does not generally signal someone is a safe person. Here’s my response to the above comment: https://reddthat.com/comment/17768408
It has a link to women being politely catcalled and they seem ok with that. I know that I have personally received compliments from men that I was not interested in or with whom there was no real possibility of connection, and that’s been fine. Generally the problem is tone and context.
Man that article was insufferable to read lol
Lol
“I want to destroy your dick,” SJ Son whispers into the ear of an unknown man as she walks by.
Yeah 99% of dudes I know would be ecstatic to hear a woman whisper that to them on the street.
I’d just be so fucking confused.
Forgive me if I don’t think two comedians making a skit counts as a study. The camera is clearly visible and the women don’t seem to be credible at all and are clearly playing it for laughs. Often, catcalling happens to women who are alone and by men who could physically overpower them with no sense of it being funny or a joke. I mean, it’s kinda gross that they did this regardless, but I don’t really see it as a one to one. It’s hard to explain the feeling of concern that women are raised to have when it comes to being targeted by men, and it would be hard to put a man in a situation that mimicked that considering they have not been bombarded by stories of women stalking/raping/murdering men who they only saw in passing. Here’s women being “politely catcalled”: https://youtube.com/shorts/LNxf74FXyAs
Again, played for laughs with a visible camera and similar reactions from women as the men in your video.
The guys doing catcalling get upset when called out and admit they wouldn’t want it to happen to their family: https://youtu.be/jDoVckC6NhA
Do I think men don’t get as many compliments? Yes. But men can solve that themselves. Give each other compliments. https://youtube.com/shorts/aWLr03PJiuA
If these guys were catcalled by each other I have a feeling they wouldn’t like it.
Doesn’t even have to be catcalling; even a normal compliment is something we remember for a long time. I don’t think I’ve been catcalled at all, though I’m not very attractive so I wouldn’t expect to be.
I might have been catcalled once. I was riding my bike on the road when I was in college; at the time I had super long messy hair that went down past my shoulders (I’m a guy). A car drove past and this girl put her head out the passenger window and shouted something at me. She might have said “looking good, hippie!” She might have also said, “fuck you, hippie!” I’ll never know haha.
Hey there sugar dick.
That’s not how you should call someone with diabetes and you know that.
Hello aspartame weiner.
One time, when I was in 6th grade, an 8th grade girl called me cute. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it
I was a sophomore in high school. A senior girl I vaguely knew but wasn’t friends with, apropos of nothing, leans over to me and goes, “You’re nice. I like nervous, twitchy virgins.”
I don’t know if I’ve ever been more baffled in my life. I don’t even remember if I responded or what I did after that. I just remember thinking, “what the heck just happened?”
Women drown in the ocean whereas men die of thirst in the desert.
This is obviously an overgeneralization, but it matches the experience of many.
I heard a similar analogy, men are in a desert, women in a swamp. In both cases they struggle to find drinkable water.
Oh that’s good. It highlights the quality of available water.
I think back to a compliment I recieved once. Probably one of my more pleasant memories.
Only time I’ve ever been “hit on” was when a really old lady (over 65 at least) at a local Moose club called me a “cutie”… Back when I was maybe 14 or 15. Even my past partners didn’t give me compliments.
I got far more compliments from women (age 30+) when I was 14 than when I was 24. Got literally catcalled by a car full of women when I was 15.
I’m an ugly woman and I remember getting a compliment from someone at dunkin. It was another woman, but she said I looked pretty. I think to this day she’s the only person who has complimented me that wasn’t a friend or something. 😅
I’ve had plenty of men yell out “huge bitch” and what have you though. 🤷🏿♀️
I don’t imagine they were quoting Deuce Bigalow?
Some of them definitely were. They said it with the inflection and everything. 😂
“If I wasn’t a lesbian, I’d 100% date you”
Normally, I’d write this off as someone “letting me down easy”, but this was my best friend in High school that I knew for years, so I know the sentiment was genuine.
I give my man compliments all the time. He calls me silly and pretends he doesn’t care, but I think it is working. Have been running a semi-non stop compliment campaign since Covid where I tell him how beautiful his hair is in the hopes he will cut it less. It’s been a good while since he last came home looking like a sheep after shearing. Summer is approaching, though, so I’m bracing myself for him getting the idea to visit the barber and have him mutilate those beautiful locks of his. It should be crime, honestly.
It’s such a cruel thing that compliments from partners don’t feel the same as compliments from strangers. My wife has been telling me parts of my body are attractive for agres, but I didn’t really internalize it until I heard it from others as well.
It’s the same phenomena as when your parents try to give you good advice but you will only listen to it if it comes from the mouths of “outsiders”.
Example: my boyfriend tried to get me into Tool for ages and I was very indifferent to it. Then my closest colleague starts playing Tool at work and I’m like “omg this music is awesome” and I go home and tell my bf about this amazing new band I have gotten into and he just gets so offended like “I literally tried to get you into it for years wtf”. We laugh about it sometimes.
Where’s the greentext?
Maybe the standard issue coloured 4chan post text is the greentext we made along the way.
I don’t see any text
My eyebrows got complimented back in high school. I ran out of the room red-faced mid class (it was during a science lab, and it’s been 10 years).
I (afab) intentionally give my male friends and coworkers lots of non sexual compliments, and it’s been a mixed bag for people I don’t know well. I genuinely love men’s business wear, so I frequently go for a comment about what they’re wearing (think “I like your shirt” or “that’s a cool pattern,” not “that shirt makes your eyes pop” or “you look sexy in that shirt”), and about a third of the time, they still seem to think I’m coming on to them. Since I got married and wear my wedding ring, that’s down to about a quarter.
non-sexual
“You look sexy in that shirt”
I mean…
That’s an example of a compliment I don’t give. I’m not trying to start something I don’t want to finish and I don’t want to finish anything.
In my defense, I am very drunk and I do look sexy in that shirt thank you very much
You even look sexy without that shirt. Your sexiness is shirt-invariant!
You missed the word “not” there I guess?
how is the eyes pop one also in the not category
I try not to compliment men’s physical attributes. Given that around a quarter of them still react like I’m flirting when I compliment the pattern they have on while I’m wearing a wedding ring, I don’t want to go any further, lol. Maybe I should have said non-flirty instead of nonsexual though, because I agree, that’s not a sexual comment.
I’m not good at reading comprehension.
I agree. Tim Cruise is short.
I was working in a hotel kitchen and one of the waitresses told me I was more beautiful when I smiled. That was in like 2012 and I still remember it.
It’s crazy how few times in an average man’s life he gets real compliments on clothing or looks. It happens so rarely most of us can tell you about the times even when they’re 20 years ago.
I try to be mindful of this (I compliment people fairly frequently when I’m out of the house), and I still find that I don’t really ‘notice’ men as much as women (I am asexual, so it is not an attraction thing either.) I think it’s because a lot of women’s clothing is varied, lots of different and interesting patterns and color combinations and cuts and styles. Men’s fashion tends to be pretty… similar? The times I remember noticing and complimenting men has usually been when they’ve worn a t-shirt with an anime or something I like on it. One time I saw a guy with these really cool, vibrant sleeve tattoos too and I mentioned how much I like those.
Not that I’m saying it’s men’s faults–men’s casual fashion seems to really stake itself on being ‘plain’ and ‘simple’. All the t-shirts look the same, just in different solid colors. Plain jeans are plain jeans. Cargo shorts are cargo shorts. It’s easy to let your eyes sort of slide past it without registering much. Almost like social camouflage!
My husband wears a lot of 90s nostalgia t-shirts and he gets compliments on them!
I’m pretty average looking but I have a cool looking cloak and I get a compliment literally every time I wear it because it pops. It’s different.
As a wearer of nerdy t-shirts, i appreciate you! 😁
Speaking from first hand experience: try growing a handlebar mustache (if you can). If you groom it well you will get complimented all the time. I’m a fairly generic looking guy without the stache, and almost never got complimented on my looks before I grew it.
Similarly if you grow a John brown beard but condition it that worked for me as a 18 year old but that was 12 years ago so ymmv. Also admittedly I was apparently hot
Muttonstache also works
2 I have had 2 on the exact same shirt. I have no idea where that shirt is and it is my favourite shirt because of those compliments.
And honestly, I’m happier that way. The less I’m noticed, the happier I am, generally speaking. I’m an introvert and feel obligated to spend some “social energy” whenever a random stranger says something to me. They might compliment my kid or ask about something I’m wearing or whatever, and I need to respond to that in some socially appropriate form.
I’m not socially anxious or awkward or anything, I just don’t like putting in the effort. So I generally avoid the things that would lead to random social interaction.
Damn people are lonelier than me?
There’s always someone happier than you in the same way there’s always someone more miserable than you.
But there will never be anyone more you than you.
Yes we exist
Me, probably
