Like: if someone makes a video about their work, and I message them “omg so handsome 🥰!” That would be *really* weird, right?
If I posted a neutral/work-oriented video and got a lot of comments on how I looked, I would feel pretty conflicted, I think.
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I think women share more selfies etc, where it is more clearly ok to publicly compliment them?
I’m a bit less certain about men, unless they post themselves... idk, dancing or something? Or a selfie I guess?
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I also recognize some sort of fear I have about complimenting too many men. Like, if I were to just go around telling men how I thought they were attractive, or looked good today or whatever, I’m *pretty* sure I’d either get judged about it, or people would think I was insincere.
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When men receive compliments from a woman, they assume that the woman is flirting with them.
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Ok so how do I resolve this with what said? Do I just have to compliment in a way that makes it clear I don’t have romantic intentions?
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What if it’s not that clear whether I do have romantic intentions (as is the case for lots of relationships between men and women, I think)? Do men feel a need to clarify this? (Not asking rhetorically, genuinely curious.)
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i think many men are bad at playing in that sort of liminal in-between uncertain space and it’s very regrettable because we could be having a lot more fun if we were - we want certainty but we’d benefit from learning how to have fun without it 😅
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visa has good tweets about this and i’ve learned from them
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan and @codeic
what a lot of straight guys don't get (IMO likely more because of trauma / bullying etc) is that attraction and flirting isn't an on-off switch. Sure, people might generally be more or less interested for a start, but really we're all flirting all the time, just to different degs
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Oh yeah, Visa gets it. But most men are so starved for love/affection/affirmation that they turn it into a binary
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Seems kind of a catch-22 then
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it’s rough stuff :/ lotta men running around starving for affection with horrendous attachment wounds and lotta women deciding it’s not worth their time and energy to do anything that might poke them
So many of us are basically unacknowledged abuse and neglect victims... yeah
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i will never stop acknowledging it
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