820
We appreciate her
(files.catbox.moe)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
820 points (100.0% liked)
CoupleMemes
863 readers
339 users here now
Community dedicated to memes that often hit a little too close to home. Respect the instance rules and remember that sharing these memes with your SO might 50/50 put you in the doghouse.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You all are celebrating something bad. It's bad to assume a guy hitting on someone cannot take "no" for an answer. It's bad to assume people cannot enjoy being hit on. It's bad to assume a guy willing to shoot their shot is a creep.
Ya'll are part of the loneliness problem. Do better and stop assuming the worst of others. You're not smart. You're not helping. You're paranoid weirdos.
Now, if the message said that this was after he was following her around the gym, then THAT is commendable. Though assuming all that off of, "hey you look good, want to go out?" is just ... sad. Sad untrusting society that's spiraling.
Unfortunately, society is at a place where enough men have posed a risk to women that we are all a perceived potential threat.
And women are stepping up to protect each other. Instead of asking women to not step up, you should be asking men to step up and stop normalizing things like locker room talk and porn consumption, things that are proven to increase misogyny and dangerous attitudes of entitlement around sex.
Oh yes, that's why the places where is illegal or extremely restricted are known to be very egalitarian, like the UAE and India for example.
Porn consumption isn't proven to cause violent and aggressive behaviors In fact, the inverse is likely true, those who are violent tend not to have as many intimate partners and so will have higher rates of porn consumption. There are a number of studies that have found sexual violence and rape to be negatively correlated with porn use suggesting that having an outlet rather than bottling up their sexual urges is better. That being said, the content of the porn does have an impact, so it would be better to advocate for respectful and consent positive porn than to try and ban it.
It used to go both ways. Some men felt that they had a duty to protect women. But then they were told that that's actually misogyny, because actually women are strong and independent and can take care of themselves and don't need a man to protect them. So then the men who had respect for women let go of this idea where they're supposed to be protectors.
Meanwhile, the men who don't respect women haven't stopped. There just aren't any men left willing to intervene, because the ones who have have been punished and shamed for it.
So on the one hand, that makes women more vulnerable to the men who don't respect their boundaries. And on the other hand, it means there are less men respecting boundaries in the spotlight (seriously, you don't go viral by taking no for an answer; people only notice when it's something bad), which skews the perception of "men" in general towards "they're all dangerous."
Also, it doesn't help that people who advocate for women to learn self-defense get accused of victim-blaming (as if "be prepared and know how to defend yourself" is the same thing as "it's your fault because you weren't strong enough to stop it").
I agree many healthy social skills need to be normalized among men.
Though normalizing assuming the worst of strangers is not helping.
Another woman gave her an easy out if she wanted to take it - that's all. The woman didn't accuse the man directly of anything and she apparently left them alone once the offer was refused.
It's bad that it is so commonplace for this to happen that women feel the need to look out for one another in this way. I wish it wasn't the way the world is, but it is and it's not bad to try to protect each other.
Do you often express this sentiment to women trying to avoid being sexually assaulted and raped?
If they were trying to avoid a situation going south, sure that'd be helping.
Jumping to conclusions is NOT helping anyone.
Nobody was harmed in the meme. The men are OK. You can rest your weary head and stop worrying about misandry in the case of women looking out for other women.
Several layers of OK, since it's a made up story about a boyfriend pretending.
Hitting on people at the gym is tacky. At best.
I agree. That doesn't make everyone who does it a rapist. Just someone that might need to learn better social norms and skills.
I make the assumption that it looked creepy, specifically because that girl stepped in. She had much more information about the situation, so almost certainly made a better call than anyone here could.
Well, and if the boyfriend is making a joke, he's going to overdo it for comedic effect, too.
It's a fictional vignette with a contrived twist. You should argue that the boyfriend reveal doesn't make sense.
The original sentiment this is a variation on is showing up for a stranger who seems uncomfortable or feeling harassed in an unwanted social interaction by giving them an invented out. That's what most people are assuming the context is.
You make the point that not all men who hit on women at the gym are rapists/creeps, they just need to learn social norms. Well, this is a social norm: going up to a stranger with no context/prior conversation and saying "Your body part is appealing to me, want to go out?" Is not socially okay because it's perceived as leery and objectifying, like you're shopping for a car, not trying to form a connection.
Here's another social norm: Chat people up at the gym and see if they're even open to having a normal fucking conversation with you like you're both human beings. Learn something about them if they are. Then go from there.
TL;DR: Hit on people in a humanizing way, not in a creepy way.
Not every instance of this is social incompetence.
Many men who do this are fishing for the specific type of woman who likes it when a guy compliments her body and wants to fuck her. The guy will take 10-20 no's but eventually find the 1 yes.
A lot of men are sexually ravenous and direct. There is a reason a lot of gay men just fuck all of the goddamned time. They have sex first, then they get to know each other afterward.
Men want to have a real conversation with a real human being, its just that if they're attracted to them they just would prefer to do that after nutting in said human being. Clears their mind.
I wish I was gayer.
How do you expect people to learn what is supposed to be normal if your reaction to the slightest misstep is to label them a creep and rapist?
You all are exactly why the conservative pipeline works.
No it's not bad to assume that, because some men are extremely dangerous. There's a medical term for what's going on, prophylactic.
Go ahead and keep contributing to the world's problems by being a generalizing fool.
This is the same logic as the fucking morons that go, "It doesn't matter who I vote for, they're all corrupt" ... and then vote for Trump.
Implying men are entitled to have conversations with women if they aren't predators makes you seem like a predator.
People can talk to strangers in public, we're adults. If she tells him off then he should go away, but attempting to strike up a conversation doesn't make someone a predator. Entitlement has nothing to do with it.
Your attempt to conflate the two concepts is what I think this other commenter is trying to draw attention to (albeit ineloquently).
The attitude of "my intentions and want to start a conversation supersedes another's right to avoid one" is the one of entitlement.
You can't know how a person will respond to an attempt to start a conversation before you attempt to start one, so by your logic no one should ever talk to anyone ever.
If a person doesn't want to talk, they can say so directly (or more likely come up with some other excuse to evade it). But striking up a conversation in and of itself violates nothing.
The attitude that you are always in the right trying to have a conversation is entitled. Sometimes, you will be right, and sometimes you will be wrong. It's up to you to be respectful when you are wrong.
I never said otherwise. Show me where I said "If someone makes it clear that they don't want to talk to you, you should force them into a conversation with you to assert your dominance." You can't, because I didn't say that.
What I said was that there's nothing wrong with trying to strike up a conversation, so whatever additional layers you're trying to add onto that are merely strawmen.
Sometimes, there is something wrong trying to have a conversation. Just because you don't know, doesn't make it right.
Not to say you should feel bad about it or anything. You didn't know.
What you're saying sounds a lot like gaslighting. "You might be wrong without knowing it, but don't feel bad about it! Just know that you were wrong, although I won't tell you why."
Being "wrong" implies moral agency. You're not exercising moral agency if you're doing something wrong without knowing it. I mean if the "wrongness" depends on knowledge that you don't have access to, not if you just choose to not know better to carve out an exceptionalist place for yourself.
To illustrate, if a person hands you a pill and says "Give it to this person, because it's medicine and they need it to live," and you give it to the person but it was actually poison and they die, you didn't commit the murder. The person who switched out the medicine with poison and then lied to you about it did.
Likewise, if you're talking to a stranger in public and they're being polite but deep inside they're silently resenting you and wishing you would go away, you're not doing anything wrong because there's no way for you to read that person's mind. If they want you to stop talking to them, they need to communicate that to you in some way or else it's not an issue of morality on your part.
And it's ridiculous that you're trying to moralize that situation.
I did say why. The person feels uncomfortable or threatened. If you make someone feel that way, requiring a specific performance from them is pretty entitled.
Who does? The person in this hypothetical situation that you're making up? Sure, you can make up a hypothetical situation about a person feeling uncomfortable. Just as easily as I can make up a hypothetical situation about someone feeling comfortable? See how much good that's worth? What's ridiculous is how you're trying to cast moral judgements on me for this hypothetical situation that's the product of your own imagination.
It's not "entitled" to require someone to communicate how they feel about something in order for you to understand how they feel about it. In fact, it's entitled to expect someone to know how you feel without having to communicate that to them. Mind reading is not possible, and if you seriously want to rely on that for women's safety and to make moral judgements about people based on their inability to read minds, then you seriously need therapy.
If someone tells you that you're making them uncomfortable, then you need to leave them alone. If they don't tell you that, however, then you can't just assume that they do feel that way. How fucking psychologically damaged does a person have to be to go around with the default assumption that everyone they talk to is being made uncomfortable by them? It would be impossible to function as a well-adjusted member of society on that premise.
And the fact that you don't see that is wild.
What, are you entitled to that response? No? Then you are not entitled. If you are still demanding it, you are "entitled"
It's not "demanding" anything. It's predicated on the simple fact that nobody is a mindreader. How many times do I have to restate that?
You're the one making demands that people should be reading minds, so if anyone has an entitled outlook here it's you.
If you think this means you need to be a mind reader, you need a lesson for graceful failure.
Huh? I thought you blocked me. Why are you still responding? In fact, don't talk to me. There, I made my boundary clear. So if you really mean what you say about not being entitled to talk to people, then you'll respect that boundary by leaving me alone.
By the way, what you were insisting, would require mind reading, and cherry-picking small snippets devoid of context to say they don't require mind-reading doesn't change that.
Lol
Who said anything about a conversation? This was an opener lame pickup line. Like I already implied in my original post, to assume they cannot take, "no" for an answer (and end of the convo) ... is to assume the worst in people.
Interesting how you're so willing to defend assuming the worst in others. Really says a lot about you...
It's the kids who are wrong still huh? There's no hope for you guys.
That is in no way what that expression means. lol
You got some good points, people too often assume the worst and jump to defensiveness.
Because when women get caught off guard, we're stalked, raped, and/or murdered by men.
Women looking out for each other in subtle ways isn't the big bad issue in this scenario.
Nowhere did I say looking out is bad. The jumping to intervention based off of assumption is the bad part.
Pardon?
Yep, you are confirmed part of the problem.
You literally assumed, "being quiet" from a partner as, "I want attention from my partner and I'm going to act weird until I get it."
Part of the problem.
It feels so good to know you are just better in a way than certain people, just allows you to go "Uh-huh, sure" knowing that you have better things to do, probably a decent future, and that you have done enough for society already, the accusations and offenses no longer matter.
The actually hateful people can burn in their self-righteousness. That's how you avoid being flammed.
Ok, I’m not sure if you’re agreeing with me or being sarcastic, ha.
To be honest, I don't even care who is right anymore.
Cool cool, have a great day out there in this crazy world :-)