““If I don’t know you, don’t make remarks to me about my appearance.””
Sorry, you don’t go up to strangers and remark on their appearance.
The last time it happened to me(possibly the only time since I’m an adult):
Last year I walked out of a convenience store and a young man, the same age as my daughter, asked me if I had a light for his cigarette.
I said: “No, I don’t smoke”
When I got to my car door he said: “Yeah, you smokin’, momma”
I almost spun around on him. But, I didn’t. I just got in the car and left.
This little town I was in is dangerous. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
First, unless you know the woman well, you have no idea what constitutes “a special effort to look nice,” nor is it any of your business whether a woman always/sometimes/never spruces herself up, what she considers normal versus a “special effort,” or anything else. So drop that line of inquiry right there. If I usually go shopping looking like broken down farm machinery or a million bucks, that’s nothing you or anyone else I don’t know needs to evaluate.
Second, while it’s usually not appropriate for any stranger to comment on someone’s appearance, of course it is different if a woman comments versus a man commenting. If a woman comments, it is far easier to believe she genuinely cares because she can relate. If she says, “oh my, I love your scarf!” she may want to know where I bought it because she’d like to buy one for herself or a friend. Gender fluidity aside, a strange man commenting is not going to fit into that comfortable possibility.
As to “what if a man did the same” - well, a strange man is intrinsically more threatening than a woman. I’m not too worried that a strange woman to initiates conversation with me is going to follow me and rape me in the parking lot. A strange man? Yeah, the thought of harrassment/violence does indeed occur to me.
Naturally, this is all very sad for you, a man. Sorry we women have the audacity to look our for our own well-being when it might cause you some discomfort.
Nope. I’ve never done this. I’m bewildered why others do it. I assume the success rate is pretty low.
I’m assuming exceptions when I encounter my wife somewhere and do it as a joke.
Never mind!
Thank you, Carol, for your thoughtful and civil reply. If I see you spruced up, it’s either for that day, or as your overall lifestyle, and both are worthy of a compliment. What I say will be well-meant.
In the third world, as an American, the cattall I’ve heard a thousand times is “Allo Meester” from sidewalk lowlifes, and as a lifelong wimp, 99% of them could easily take me. I’m probably as defenseless as you are. But I refuse to be afraid.
Audacity is not what you women have, it’s what you lack. You are so steeped in fear, that you shut yourself off from the civil decency that most people are happily willing to share with you, albeit a few crude ones in the bunch, mostly harmless.
Wow! Have you been in a coma since the 1950s, and only just regained consciousness? 
This makes me so angry, I’m not even sure where to begin.
“A few crude ones in the bunch” is a curious way to refer to the men who have raped or beaten, or both (statistically) one in four women.
What percentage of men who have spoken to strange women have been convicted of brutally raping/beating those same strange women. Wanna go with your one-in-four on that one?
No, you grew up in the dark ages when men be could abusive to women and the women had to smile and pretend they liked it. The fact that you miss that time is telling.
I’m not a woman, but I can relate a story. A few years ago (maybe 10 years, now!), I had to go pick up my sister from the subway. While I’m waiting, she emerges from the station, so I honk my horn to get her attention. She completely ignores me, so I do it again, to no avail. So, I roll down my window and yell her name and she finally looks my way.
I asked her why she didn’t respond to the honks – guys honked at her so often that she just ignored it. Basically, put it out of her mind, because she didn’t want to look their way.
Really opened my eyes to how much casual harassment women had to deal with.
I don’t do that, never have to my memory.
@jtur88, can you answer the question as to how often you tell men how nice they look? Because I don’t tell strangers, male or female, how great they look.
I grew up in the dark ages when my mother was a fearless and proud woman with confidence and dignity. She dressed up to go shopping and men tipped their hat when she passed by. The angry terrified entitlement-queens Ive met in the past few decades can’t pretend to be half the woman she was – a product of her times.
No, you grew up when being white and male made you special. Now, you live in a world that expects you to be proud of actual accomplishments and that’s hard for people who have never had to compete with non-whites and women before, so they cling to false histories.
jtur88, as to the Dark Ages and the shifting boundaries and the presumption of mysogyny hanging over our heads, let me see if I can enlighten you. I don’t know when your Dark Ages were but I’m a 63 year old man.
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We live with somewhat unspoken social framework that says women are valuable because they are attractive, and they’re encouraged to be so for our sake. We men get to judge this and do so often. If we think they are dressing to emphasize this, we think that you and I in particular are part of the intended audience. If we think they’re innately attractive, we feel entitled to observe them, and we interpret their intentions in choosing attire in terms of how it emphasizes or denies this. The social framework includes a precedent for us men to voice these opinions and interpretations. It really startled me to hear a woman say that men can decide whether clothing is appropriate in the workplace by looking at the clothing, whereas women have to judge it by looking at themselves wearing it. Can you imagine having to think that way?
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The safety and risks of interactions across gender lines are fantastically unsymmetrical. Many women say they have to monitor this risk and make choices to avoid it. Many express so much fear of risk from strangers that they avoid activities like traveling alone at night or getting on an elevator together. Some women in the workplace express so much fear of risk from familiar coworkers that they will avoid one on one meetings, dinners with a colleague, or business trips together. There are even social mores against women choosing to do these things. Can you imagine having to think that way?
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There are lots of brief social interactions that keep reminding women (and men) of this framework while maintaining plausible deniability of malintent on the man’s part. Uninvited comments about appearance can easily do this. Though there is judgement required, we men can often navigate the line of acceptability if we put some thought into it. For example, if you see a woman you don’t know entering a sports event wearing an enormous outrageous foam rubber hat in support of the home team, it’s more likely to be OK to say “Great hat!” in passing. However, you could also say, “Go team!” without alluding to clothing/appearance. Better still it’s perfectly easy for us men to just not engage on appearance comments at all. If your thoughts frame a comment in terms of whether it crosses the line by going “under the outfit”, that’s a good sign to just not engage in it.
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Honestly, we men do not have a difficult existence in this context. We don’t have a presumption of mysogyny hanging over our heads. We are accustomed to not having ANYTHING hanging over our heads, especially if we don’t belong to any significantly minoritized identities. There’s some awful history out there, and it’s not so difficult for us to be aware and avoid reinforcing it. Margaret Atwood expressed the simple idea that men are afraid women will laugh at them, while women are afraid men will kill them.
Consider this look at things, and see if it makes sense.
Yeah, she doesn’t know that. What she does know is that she knows friends/family who were catcalled and it turned aggressive. Doesn’t have to be rape or “brutally beaten” but maybe they got called a fucking bitch for not fawning all over the compliment, or maybe they got followed or maybe it was the first step towards stalking behavior, etc. She has no idea what your motivation is so your compliment, however well-meaning, has actually made her day a little more uneasy and perhaps made her feel bad about choosing that outfit. Because now she has to worry about this shit.
It seems to me that someone who legitimately means well wouldn’t choose the path that makes the other person feel bad. Or, if they’ve done so unintentionally in the past, wouldn’t defend future attempts as “But I meant well” or “You women need to toughen up” and you’re going to just show her the tough love of a random guy objectifying her and demanding that she smile and thank you for it.
Another thing that opened my eyes more recently is that women are seeing at least one upside to this awful pandemic – because they’re wearing masks, no one tells them to smile more.
This isn’t my thread, but if we could step away from the jtur88 show, I’m curious as to whether the amount of catcalling has come down (either due to more awareness of how bad it is or simply due to the pandemic, or something else). So, I’m stepping out of the thread, and I’m hoping more women respond.
I don’t catcall, honk, or anything else. I’m sure I did back in my younger days (30 or 40 years ago), and I’ll admit it. I realize it was a jerkish thing to do.
I certainly don’t compliment total strangers on their appearance. I do sometimes compliment the people I work with (i.e., a new haircut, new outfit), but I keep that to a minimum. We all do it at work. We’re a small group who have known each other for well over 30 years.
The only compliment I might make to a stranger is to compliment him/her on their Jeep Wrangler, but that’s a Jeep thing.
I don’t get catcalls anymore, now that I’m in my fifties. But I just want to add that what women feel about catcalls may not necessarily be fear. When I was in my prime, I got my share of unwanted male attention, and what I usually felt was anger and resentment. “Goddammit, I have to go through this again??? God, what a fucking jackass!!”
A few times, I did feel fear, but only if the guy started following me. A couple of times, guys whipped their dicks out, and followed me. Nothing happened, but yeah, it’s not something you would call a compliment.
This all happened years ago, and I can still feel anger constricting my gut about it…
I’ll say it again. No, guys. Women DO NOT secretly love the attention. She thinks you’re an asshole.
You shouldn’t say or do anything towards a woman that you’d be uncomfortable with a gay man saying or doing toward your teenaged son alone in an elevator.
If gay men were honking and baying at your boy, would you/he take it as a compliment?