3 ms·

90% of times when strangers were telling me compliments it ended up with "street scam", iukwim

• AlecSchueler 4y ago
  I'd also recommend that folks reading this remember not to put too much pressure on women when trying this out. They are already approached a lot and often will feel the need not to communicate their discomfort having had saying No go badly many times in the past. Just remember that when you approach someone they might be uncomfortable even if they don't say that. Keep the pressure on yourself to end things, don't put it on the stranger you've chosen
  • annyeonghada 4y ago
    Can something not be gendered, for once?
    • AlecSchueler 4y ago
      Why? There is a natural power imbalance between men and women. If you find it tiresome then you're getting a sense of how tiring it can be to be a woman in public.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • origin_path 4y ago
        • maxbond 4y ago
          None of the men I know carry mace, walk with their keys in their fists like brass knuckles, or have stories about being harassed in public. Most of the women I know have all three of these things in common. When I was in my early 20s I regularly tried to hit on/chat with strange women in random public settings (sitting at a park bench, buying groceries, etc). It made them visibly uncomfortable. But I felt like I was entitled to keep doing it anyway, and my male friends felt the same way. It wasn't until reading "me, too" stories that I realized I shouldn't regularly make people uncomfortable, and not to excuse my carelessness (women had certainly tried to communicate this and I had failed to listen), but part of the reason was that I had been given the impression that that was simply how a man behaved, and I didn't really know men who disagreed with that perspective. I also didn't understand why I was making them uncomfortable and just how common harassment was, and how in their mind there was a totally reasonable concern that I might be dangerous or creepy (and indeed, the way I was acting was a bit creepy, so how can I blame them). I think I mostly saw it through the lens of whether or not my advances were rejected and how I felt about that, and to the extent I considered whether they were welcome, it was to minimize rejections rather than to understand the experience of a fellow human. Not everything is gendered, but the experience of talking to strangers unfortunately is. I'd like for it not to be, as well, but without recognizing truth there is no reconciliation.
          • origin_path 4y ago
            Have you considered that it might just be you live in a dangerous place? None of the women I know carry around those things and never have. If they have stories of being harassed in public places, it never came up in conversation either. But I live in a place that's quite well policed and safe. In a more dangerous city, out on the street if there's nobody around, yes you're going to be safer if you're a ripped 6'3 man than a small lady. No doubt about it. But again, to stress this, it's the other way around if you're at a managed venue of some sort like an office, a conference, etc. There it's actually the men who have to fear the women and not the other way around, although fortunately as bad incidents are very rare in both directions, we can all mostly live without fear. With respect to hitting on women - again, please don't be tricked by others into thinking these are universal global truths. I successfully flirted with and got dates with female strangers quite a few times in the past, in all sorts of places (before I met my wife). In fact I even got picked up by a stranger myself once! So it's not only men that hit on strangers. Of course it's heavily dependent on how you do it - I definitely found it much harder to do that when I was in my early 20s. As with all men, you're just a lot more awkward and less able to read the signs at that age, as well as less successful, so much more likely to come across as undesirable ('creepy'). That's true of both genders. But it didn't stay that way. A lot of women had big problems with #metoo and the general culture it was trying to create. My experience has been that for every woman who loudly proclaims their hatred of creepy men there are multiple others who quietly wish that a nice man would strike up a conversation and chat them up, and are sad that men have now been trained not to do it. #Metoo and the feminism that surrounds it is intensely ideological, so people who disagree often are afraid of speaking up because they know they'll be viciously attacked by the left, even if they are themselves female. If you live in a very lefty place like San Francisco, especially one with a gender imbalance (so attractive women get hit on a lot and badly), you're probably going to draw conclusions like the above. If you live somewhere a bit more normal you'll see both sides of this and realize the balance of power has been tipped so far in the direction of women now that it makes quite a lot of them unhappy. They are now expected to take risks and do the work that traditionally men would do, because the men are afraid to do so.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        It's important to pretend that's not true, because it makes men feel bad about themselves.