So this video has some food for thought…

[MrAntiquity]

OK I know that generally we’re the ones that ask the questions, and Eric and Lee provide the advice, but I thought this was interesting and I had some thoughts on it–would like to hear from folks.

Street harassment

This has been making the media rounds lately–a cute, normally-dressed woman (happens to be an actress) filmed herself walking around Manhattan for 10 hours. She recorded all the instances of street harassment (from catcalls to people following her). It’s pretty ludicrous what she goes through. This is a (very) condensed 2 minute video with some of the examples. It got me thinking about a few things in the context of dating/”game”.

1.) The notion that “Hot women get approached ALL THE TIME”–therefore you have to outdo all the competition.

My thoughts: Well, they certainly get acknowledged all the time. I don’t think they really get “approached” (in our sense of the word) very often at all. In clubs/bars, sure. But I think it’s pretty damn rare for a woman–no matter what she looks like–to actually have a normal, regular guy chat her up out of nowhere. The “all the time” we keep hearing about refers to these characters in the video–and they’re the reason it’s hard to get women to give us regular guys the time of day. Why on earth should they trust us? They don’t know us. We’re probably annoying, like all the other guys out there.

So the bad news is that women are automatically on the defensive even before we get started. But the good news is that IT AIN’T ALL THAT HARD to beat out the competition. The reason most of us here on this forum struggle is simply because we’re scared. That’s it. Nothing more.

2.) The “Creepiness” factor.
Watch these guys. Some of them aren’t so bad, but some of them are creepy as hell–especially the stalker or two in the video. (you can see how tense the girl gets in a few circumstances) But ultimately, most of them just come across as kind of pathetic.

What’s causing the creepiness, though? A combination of things–complete lack of social calibration in some cases, but in other cases it’s a lecherous quality–these “approaches” come across as sleazy–basically meaning that they’re the kind of approaches that make women want to ignore you or run. In most of these examples, there’s nothing that suggests that the woman is, to them, anything other than a piece of meat. A lot of these comments are offhand, throwaway comments that suggest that the guys don’t actually buy into their own sexuality either–or their own ability to date women.

So we can learn from these characters, I think. For one thing–if we’re going to approach–you HAVE to approach–none of this half-hearted misdirection stuff, no off-hand comments, none of this saying “Hot dayum!!” to no one in particular. That all comes off as not actually believing in yourself, not actually wanting to engage with the girl except in the hopes that she’ll acknowledge you back–this in itself is creepy. You basically have to completely commit yourself to what you’re doing, and the message conveyed has to be “I want to talk with you to see what you’re about”. Not in those words–“Hi” works–but the subtext has to be that you’re establishing a full connection. Whether or not she’ll connect back with you another issue–but she’ll never let you in if you come across like these guys.

just some thoughts….

[zhelyazko]

Very interesting video. And the observations about creepiness. I think as long as you believe in what you do you will not come across as creepy and these guys really did not believe in what they do.

And I have gained a new appreciation of why some women are bitchy when you first meet them. No duh!

[The_Hurricane]

A good response in Slate:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/10/29/catcalling_video_hollaback_s_look_at_street_harassment_in_nyc_edited_out.html

The more subtle point is that when a man doesn’t feel empowered to approach, everything he says is tinged with anger. Instead of de-sexualizing men, why doesn’t society teach them how to meet women in public in a way that is not threatening to women? There must be something we can all agree a man is allowed to do to express interest in a woman in public. I bet you that at least some of the videos that were not included in this compilation showed men doing just that.

–Lee

[SomeguyUK]

I think there’s a couple of interesting things we can learn from this video.

Firstly, this explains why girls have their guards up so much some times. We shouldn’t take it personally.

Secondly, looking at the comments this video got, it is amazing how many guys see nothing wrong with what the guys in this video were doing. They cannot tell the difference between giving a genuine compliment and declaring sexual interest in an aggressive, intimidating way. This is a large chunk of our competition – so we should be happy we are already way better than these guys!

[SomeguyUK]

Just seen this – great response to that video from a woman.

Link

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