Reply To: This is why guys like us are so damn screwed up…

[The_Hurricane]

First, the original video is not an accurate representation of the life of an attractive woman. I have dated my share of attractive women. Most of them report a handful of interactions with men per week, and most of those interactions would not fall into the category of cat calls.

So what’s different about this video? They chose a girl with all the right equipment to attract attention in a part of town where men are used to routinely expressing interest, welcome or unwelcome, dressed her in an outfit that showed off that equipment, and paraded her for ten hours through those parts of town where she was most likely to get a reaction.

Most New York women aren’t on the street for more than half an hour per day. In other words, this represents about twenty days of harassment, not one day. In that outfit, walking through those neighborhoods for half an hour per day, she is likely to encounter 5 such interactions per day.

This video has been criticized for the absence of professional, middle class men. They did that on purpose. Take away the neighborhood and 5 negative interactions per day drops to 1 every couple of days. Take away the outfit, and the number drops to 1 such interaction every couple of weeks.

Women understand that when they wear an outfit that highlights their most attractive attributes, they will get two kinds of attention: the kind they want and the kind they don’t want. Given that the choice is completely theirs, many women consider that a worthwhile trade-off. On some days, they want to be noticed by attractive men and are willing to tolerate some unwanted attention.

It would be a terrible imposition on women who want to meet someone in public if such meetings became taboo to protect the small number of women who both want to wear outfits that get attention AND at the same time are unwilling to tolerate unwanted attention.

One more comment that is more relevant to what we discuss here. To women who genuinely want to be left alone, the most threatening game is direct game, game in which a man expresses his sexual interest directly and before engaging a woman in conversation. The mental calculus that a woman must perform when she is approached by a man running direct game is what that article gets completely right. That is one of the reasons I prefer a somewhat elevated style of game. When I do Deep Thoughts, the first thing on a woman’s mind is not “Will he become angry when I don’t respond positively?”

–Lee