- cross-posted to:
- wholesomegreentext@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- wholesomegreentext@sh.itjust.works
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Girls have a super power they can use to live rent free in any guy’s head pretty much eternally. All they need to do is catch them off guard with a compliment.
A guy will keep a shirt until it literally disintegrates if one time a girl said “that color looks good on you.” Pretty much every guy that wears a particular cologne, wears that cologne because at some point a girl said he smelled nice. It’s not even a horny brain thing I don’t think. It’s just that guys get so few compliments on their appearance that every single one is massively precious to them.
girls would do this more often but there’s always the (justified tbh) fear that the guy will take it the wrong way and get weird about it :(
It goes both ways I think too. Guys wouldn’t obsess over the idea that a single compliment might be flirting if they were more used to compliments in general from both sexes. On the other hand some guys are so afraid of misreading a compliment or normal friendliness that they can’t tell when someone actually is flirting. I sort of think there need to be more voices out there meant to speak directly to men and masc people about social literacy that aren’t trying to turn them into hateful, violent, incel republicans.
hard agree, it’s a tragedy that toxic masculinity has taken over that space. I’m not the target audience being nb but I have a lot of respect for the Speeed yt channel for doing exactly that.
It’s absolutely justified fear. For every one guy who will just take it as a sweet compliment, there are ten guys who will think “she wants the D!”
Honestly I don’t think the ratio is that bad… But it doesn’t have to be, when just one creep can ruin your life…
You fuck one goat…
Is that an order?
It wasn’t a question
I’ve always bought my husband red shirts because I think he looks good in a bold red color. About 17 years of marriage before he finally told me he doesn’t really care for the color, that he just wants to look good for me.
awee 🙄 (I can’t find the sweet teary eyed emoji, pretend this is that one)
Best comment xD
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.
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.
Hey there sugar dick.
That’s not how you should call someone with diabetes and you know that.
Hello aspartame wiener.
Oh. That made me uncomfortable. 😬
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?”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I like your username, and you have great taste in Lemmy instances.
Live long you absolute potato
women get so much attention its like theyre drowning. men get so little its like theyre starving in the desert.
truly ironic
Removed by mod
“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’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. 😂
“You smell so nice” - a gay female co-worker. I was wearing a new cologne that I purchased for myself. It was very expensive so I’m glad I chose well
I was told blue looks good on me by a girl.
10 years later, most of my shirts are blue.
I hope she wasn’t colour blind 😬
Purple for me. Fortunately I like it too.
Turns out she was making a BJ joke and occasionally lies awake cringing at the joke that everyone missed.
Anon’s tombstone:
“She really liked my voice.”
In 1998, the young lady working the cash register at the taco bell near where I worked told me I have really pretty eyes. So I have that going for me, which is nice.
You deserve a blowjob.
That’s kept me floating for years.
I hope you receive it one day 🙏
It’s the thought that counts.
Is it though?
no.
It’s the throat that counts
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…
You missed the word “not” there I guess?
I’m not good at reading comprehension.
I agree. Tim Cruise is short.
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.
yeah that makes sense
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!
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.
One time a girl in a bar just walked up to me and asked if I wanted to make out. Of course, it happened after I was well into a relationship with the person who is now my wife, so I had to turn her down, but it felt amazing.
I don’t remember basically anyone from my secondary schoold other than my 4 close freinds and this one girl that randomly asked me for a hug one day, said I give really good hugs, then basically never spoke to me again.
I get compliments on my hugs on the reg. Well, less regularly as I get older and meet new people less often, but still. Being a good hugger is somehow a weirdly rare skill?
🤗 hugs!
Everytime the cashier flips the tablet over before a tip, they say a compliment. I always tip more than I usually do.
They got you good
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.
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
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! 😁
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.
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.
