Comment by marcellus23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcellus23 | Hacker News Reader

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You can choose your response to such things. Annoying, sure. Uncomfortable, sure. But that's life. At a certain point you have to just accept that things like the comment in the GP (which, to be clear, is the behavior I'm talking about here, not actual sexual harassment) will happen to you as a woman, and you can either get upset about it constantly and view yourself as a victim, or learn to accept that that's life.

People who are not women have to deal with such things as well, as a sibling commenter pointed out. Short guys, fat guys, skinny guys, they would all get picked on (in a friendly way or otherwise). The difference is that society will not tolerate them whining about it. Women won't care and men will laugh at them. So they suck it up.

It's frustrating when people say "just talk to a woman", as if all women have the same perspective on this, or women are the only ones who experience it. It's itself a sexist thing to say. I know women who don't have this kind of victim mentality and they're happier for it.

Not to mention, guys live the other side of the coin: you can often go months, weeks or years without a genuine compliment.

Two particular instances I remember:

- a couple of streamers in a chat, and this was brought up. One of the girls in the chat didn't believe it and yelled at her brother, who promptly answered that the most recent compliment they received that was not from their mother was 3 years ago. Cue other guys in the stream relaying the same story.

- multiple people that transitioned from female-to-male, all of them mentioning they didn't realize how lonely you are as a man in the world, and how invisible you seem to be. Some almost got suicidal because of it.

At least one actually did commit suicide from that IIRC.

Men could fix this quite easily by starting to compliment one another, or by starting a culture of not interpreting women's compliments as come ons.

I'll bring it up at the next male convention where we all decide as a group how we should behave.

I mean it would be pretty easy to make it happen in any given friend group.

If a man has 0 male friends, that's a different problem then the way that men treat even their close friends.

When's the last time he gave a compliment?

Or you know, we can collectively work on not making people uncomfortable because of who they are. Just because a behavior is very common today doesn't mean it is universal and written in our DNA. Society has become more tolerant over time, and that is a good thing. You wouldn't tell your female assistant to wear shorter dresses like in Mad Men, even if that wasn't considered unusual in the 60s.

I never claimed we should not strive for that kind of society. My points were that: 1) this is not a problem unique to women, 2) that comment specifically should only upset you if you have a very thin skin, and 3) having a very thin skin is not a good trait to have and everyone should strive to be able to handle comments like that without getting upset.

I actually think humans will never be able to achieve a utopia where no one will ever be made uncomfortable for who they are. One problem is that some people are more sensitive than others. Put another way, someone will always get offended at something. At some point you have to draw a line and say everything on this side of the line is fine, and if you get upset, it's _your_ problem.

>having a very thin skin is not a good trait to have

It is if you get leverage from it. There is a perverse incentive to have thin skin - in fact, you can get flak for not having thin enough skin, these days. I once heard someone call it "reverse CBT". I invented a game called "Take it Personal" to demonstrate how easy this is, where the participants say anodyne things to each other and are tasked with taking offense. It is an easy game, if an unhappy one.

>learn to accept that that's life.

Yeah, harassment is is part of life. Just accept it, right!?

WTF? How low should our standards as a society be!?

I'm sure there's a line somewhere where "nice watch" or "you're better looking than the guy before" are acceptable

As a man who lived outside western society for many years, I often received comments about my looks and mannerisms.

Did I cry like a baby, no. I made jokes about their looks and mannerisms. It's called banter.

There is a line that should not be crossed, but someone making one off comments on the out of the ordinary shouldn't be classed as harassment.

That's your perspective though. Others' perspective is that it is a form of harassment, and reactions like yours are toxic masculinity, a feminist catch phrase, of ignoring our issues and feelings. Yet for all the hate for toxic masculinity, as a gay guy all I see is that straight guys are still forced to uphold those traits in a bizarre way. Yes, be violent she says now, but only to those who insult me.

No, receiving comments like "you're better looking than the guy before" is a part of life. Using the term "harassment", which is vague enough to cover both innocuous comments like that, and actually creepy disgusting stuff, is an easy way to create a strawman.

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