• paddirn@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I think the pendulum of gender empowerment has swung in women’s favor so much that for alot of guys, there’s the fear of coming across as a creep for even trying to flirt or staring too long at a woman. At my work, there’s a fairly sizable amount of women, but the dangers from acting interested towards any women could cost you your job.

    We had one lady who got a security guard fired because she said he made her feel uncomfortable, not that any incidents had happened at all, she really couldn’t even say that he had said or done anything offensive, she just had a bad feeling because he seemed “weird” and reported it to HR. Just the feeling of uncomfortableness is enough to get somebody dismissed in some places.

    Granted, that’s at a workplace and workplace romances probably aren’t a good idea anyways, but society in general has primed me to think that any advances towards women are unwelcome, unless they’re not. You’ll never know unless you risk getting reported just for trying. So the incentive is to just not try unless it’s blatantly obvious, because I know I could easily misread basic kindness for sexual interest. Even going on walks, I have to avoid walking behind women for fear they’ll think I’m following them or that I’m being a creep.

    In day to day encounters between plebs, women have all the power in relationships in Western society, men are like dogs on a leash. If you want to show us interest, just give us a pat on the head, scratch our chin, or something.

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      We had one lady who got a security guard fired because she said he made her feel uncomfortable

      I have seen guys report women to HR because of actual, verifiable sexual harassment (physical touching, etc.) and be laughed out of the HR office because “women cannot sexually harass a man” and “men always want it”. Many of these men were also punished for attempting to report, with some even being fired.

      They asymmetric societal standards currently in place are insanely misandric and bleedingly hypocritical.

    • Echo Dot
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      3 months ago

      If you want to show us interest, just give us a pat on the head, scratch our chin, or something.

      Got to be honest, I think them doing that would confuse me even more.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      3 months ago

      This is why I have only ever reached out to women on dating sites.

      Dating sites are absolutely horrendous experiences for worthless shitheads like myself, but I will not just hit on random people I see when I’m out and about. They’re just trying to live their lives in peace, at least if you’re on a dating site you know they are interested in meeting someone.

      Unfortunately though the corpo fucks at MatchGroup bought and killed every good dating app and now that they’re all useless tinder clones I don’t use anything.