Is it ok to compliment girls in the street?

The world needs more love and caring people. If a guy complimented me I would take it as just that, a kind compliment! I would graciously say thank you! If he wanted my number or to take me out and I wasn’t interested then I would kindly say “no thank you, but you are SO kind to put yourself out there and ask! I appreciate that!” Just compliment who you wanna compliment. Be nice even when people might think you have alterior motives.
Yes it is true that people see the world differently and interpret things differently, so it is good to be aware and respectful, but how can you know how every person will react! You don’t. So just be as tactful as possible.
Also, I am always more flattered when a compliment is offered about my character like “you are such a kind person” vs my appearance like “you have beautiful eyes”. Both are nice but I am more touched by the first example. I think a lot of people tie their worth to their appearance because we are a society that compliments on appearance and it makes us feel like that is the only thing people care about or notice, at least for me. So there’s my two bits.

 

Good observations. I'd add that if you can control your libido, then you will not bother with hookups... indeed, you will find that kind of woman unattractive. You'll then be a position of effectively going your own way... you'll be able to heavily screen women and just date the suitable ones.

Men are disempowered insofar as they have lost control of their libido.

 

I just club her on the head and drag her back to my cave. But always drag her by the hair, never by the feet cuz that’s just wrong....

 

I didn't say they have to react the way I want them to. I just said it makes me sad that people are so quick to assume something is negative or offensive or that some guy is going to rape them because he told her she has pretty hair. It's frustrating that people like that have made it to where everyone has to walk on egg shells and not be nice to strangers, for fear of being labeled sexist or racist or a rapist. I'm not forcing anyone to change, or expecting anything from anyone. I'm just saying it's annoying as hell, and I'm allowed to have that opinion.

 

I’m so on the same page as you on this one. It’s like people aren’t allowed to interact with each other anymore for fear of offending or coming off a certain way. It’s pretty much impossible to make every person happy and comfortable in this life, so, use your best judgment, have good intentions, and be kind. The rest is up to them how they want to feel.

 

Yes, if they had their way, they'd turn society into a bunch of robots. The lunacy of it is they think they are perfecting 'society' [always an abstraction for these people] when they are in fact dehumanizing it.

 

You really never can please an SJW or a feminist. I don't think they could even make robots who would do what they want properly, because sometimes they want compliments and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they want a guy to hold open the door and pay for dinner, and sometimes they think it's sexist. And so on and so on.

 

You sound like someone who hasn’t had a lot of life experience yet, you should come back to this thread in 20 years and see if you have the same outlook (assuming this place still exists in 20 years).

 

You're now blaming feminists and "SJWs" for a situation they didn't create.

The reason many women feel uncomfortable about men complimenting them in the street is because many of those men have overstepped the boundary of acceptable behaviour. Many of them are aggressive. Some of them have sexually assaulted women. Many women have experienced some form of sexual harassment, whether it be a minor comment, or a more aggressive physical gesture. This is why many women feel uncomfortable with strangers commenting on their appearance. They don't know if it's going to be another attack or not, they have no idea what to expect.

Many men don't realise the impact of their words or actions. Imagine a man saying "Hey, you have a lovely face, you shouldn't keep your head down like that" to a complete stranger, which he thought was a nice compliment. To the stranger, that comment is the latest in a series of completely unwarranted comments by unknown people about their appearance. Maybe she doesn't like to smile. Maybe she's keeping her head down because she wanted to walk by without being noticed. Why does he feel entitled to let her know that? It's this entitlement that allows men to continue with this behaviour, and the attitude is shared by both men who think they're making "harmless" comments and men who physically assault women. It is the common factor between the two.

So please, if you're going to bemoan society's problems about not being able to be nice to people in the street, please blame it on the people responsible for ruining it for everyone else, and not the people who are bringing attention to it and trying to fix the problem at its source.

 

Im not here to start a war but when a girl thinks its creepy when a man gives her a honest compliment or when they say they would not like to get aproached by guys they are lying, except if hes very good looking or rich. Many girls are double standard and I know this by experience. As I said again, I'm not here to start a war but when this kind of topic comes up, the truth must be told. Look at it this way, a simple and yet more understanding explanation: If an ugly guy goes up to any random girl in the public, street or anywhere they get treated diffirently which everyone already knows about or if a good looking/rich guy goes up to a girl he gets treated better and is more aproachable. We all know this is the truth and this can be applied to 70-90% of all the women worldwide. There is too much influence on what standards men should have everywhere you go, this applies to women aswell but its affecting men more. You see models, bodybuilders, rich people in every social media there is, in the street posters, TV and alot more so women have higher standards for men and what they should be so not many of us get the chance to meet our soulmate cause of social media brainwash. I am not saying this is affecting me but I believe in equality and everyone should be treated equal as we are all human wether black, white, male or female. This is something that is very rare nowadays

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like your saying men who compliment women and men who physically assault them are equally evil. If that's what you're saying then you have a problem. Someone giving someone else a genuine compliment, regardless of anyone's gender, isn't a problem. When I've been complimented by someone I've never felt insulted or hurt, and it actually made me feel good. I've never felt that any of those people were evil and those compliments don't count as "sexual assault" as you worded it. I also don't think any of those people should be grouped with people who would want to physically hurt me.

 

Never listen to women if you're a man. I'm not even joking. Women don't know what the fuck they want. So by listening to them, not only are you NOT giving them what they actually want, you become an approval seeker and lose yourself in the process. (Trust me. I've been fighting this myself.) Don't seek approval, be yourself, stand up for yourself, and have pride in yourself. Go after what you want and don't give a fuck about what anyone says!

 

You're missing the point. Feminism, as a controlling ideology, wants to promote a blanket policy, or ban, on certain types of human behavior [or, if this is too strong, there is a tendency toward this]. Now obviously, there are cases of obnoxious uninvited intrusions by a stranger into a woman's life, where she is just going about her business. But to extrapolate from the intrusive interaction to all approaches between men and women in public [yes, women approach also] is unbalanced and puritanical. There is an element of comedy, attraction, drama, spontaneity, and just plain old joy that feminist women of the sour countenance will never comprehend. They are the new Schoolma'ams who have taken over the universities. God help us. I see grown men cowering at their feet, having lost all the courage of their convictions, fearful that the fount of sex might be turned off.

It all comes back to ideology, which I keep banging on about. This is egoism, which is about power... which is the anti-thesis of truth and life. The collective ego, the mass mind, wants a grey world where everything and everyone is the same and controlled. Life wants color, and spontaneity, and self-determination. Morality and law are there to restrain excess and punish criminality, not to enforce conformity.

Reason operates by the excluded middle, and yet is in moderation that we find our humanity.

 

I'm not saying that at all, apologies if it came across like that - but what I am saying is that the sense of entitlement is shared between those two groups of men. Now obviously there's a wide spectrum of entitlement - on one end you might have a man who thinks he is entitled to talk to a perfect stranger about their appearance with no invitation, and on the other end you have a man who thinks he's entitled to a woman's body and enforces that. The issue is that when unchallenged, some men on one side of the spectrum will eventually slide into the other. Obviously that's not everyone, and there are other factors at play, but I'm specifically talking this one problem. That's why I asked earlier "why do you want to comment on a woman's appearance in the first place?".

The feminism that I subscribe to (and let's be clear here - there is no singular version of any ideology that comes without its variations, this is solely my interpretation) simply seeks to challenge and remove the structures in society that prevent true equality. One of those structures revolves around privilege, and more specifically entitlement, and how people in society feel they are able to act a certain way that disempowers another group, and not suffer the consequences of those actions. What you might see as minor actions by a small group of men is, from another perspective, a larger and more ongoing problem that needs to be addressed. Sure, there may be some "plain old joy" in the idea of a man spontaneously going up to a woman, but when more and more women are complaining about feeling uncomfortable with the instances of this - and the frequency at which it's occurring - at some point society has to sit up and take notice.

 

It's tempting to see gestures such as this as romantic and that the mean old feminists are trying to take that away. But attitudes are gradually shifting and people are starting to feel uncomfortable with some of these old-fashioned behaviours. And that's ok - our ability to communicate with each other and let each other know these things is how we can all navigate it together.

Another example is the good old-fashioned story of persistence. Grandad asked grandma out every day for a month until she relented and said yes, and now they've married for 50 years. We hear that story all the time. And grandma speaks fondly of it, and she was "playing the game" herself, so to speak. But some men might hear that story and take it the wrong way. They might start to follow around a girl, approach her in public and ask her out every day until she says yes. She feels uncomfortable about this, but doesn't know how to stop it without offending the man, who she knows probably means well but is making her feel uncomfortable. He means well, but he lacks the ability to see that from her perspective it's making her uncomfortable. Even if she suspects he might be harmless, the fact that it makes her uncomfortable is still very much a problem. From one perspective: good old-fashioned romance. From the other perspective: stalking. We need to be able to discuss this as a society in order to remove the barrier between those perspectives.

It's not about creating a greyed-out, robotic society. It's asking people to look at the impact of their actions, and then trying to improve the quality of life for everyone.

 

Well, it's an interesting one. I think there has to be an element of tolerance built into society [where we balance various Goods together], for otherwise we will be trying to legislate everything. I think the case of cat-calling and leering is obvious enough, most decent men disapprove of this behavior in others, and accordingly hold it in check within themselves.

The problem to my mind is some feminists would want to institute something like a puritanical movement in this area. And this may turn out to be short-sighted [ideology again] as there will no doubt be unintended consequences involved. One of these, would be a stifling of people's natural and spontaneous interactions with each-other. There would be the tendency of 'social' behavior to become overly prescribed, overly domesticated, instead of free and self-determined, where YOU judge the appropriateness of your actions. It's potentially a slippery slope toward a new and grimmer orthodoxy.

 

What you're saying suggests you think that feminists seek to overthrow the status-quo entirely and establish some kind of nanny-state that conforms to their every whim. I disagree with that, and while I do agree with the idea of instilling more tolerance and resilience in society, it's important to see that no interaction exists singularly. Telling women they need to be more resilient to these kinds of things ignores that they're frequently having to put up with it while men largely have never received it at all. One tiny negative interaction could be one of thousands that an individual may have had in their lifetime, and the aim is to minimise the frequency of those negative interactions by asking people to think before they speak.

The aim of challenging the structures I mentioned is to encourage thought between impulse and action, something that we're all trying to do here at NoFap. Have the urge to comment on a woman's appearance? Think about how it might come across before you say it. We could all do this more often. After a while it's just habit, and you'd be surprised how easy socialising becomes when you're no longer worried about what you say because you've figured out how to talk to people without alienating them. But like a lot of things, it takes time, practice and commitment.

 

Hmmm, I see a 'splintering' of the old-fashioned behavior of men [the socially appropriate I mean].

Today, on the one side, you have the more socialized man, democratically concerned with equality and justice. I take you as representative [no offence intended].

On the other, you have the new breed of the 'pick up' artist. He tends more to the ant-social, to the power of nature and Eros, if he is interested in development it is more Nietzschean.. a kind of natural aristocracy. He has come to disdain middle class and mediocre values. He is reacting to the other.

In my opinion, something significant has been lost in this splintering. Neither 'camp' has it right. What the men in the good old-fashioned 'school' often got right [I think of my own grandfather] is an instinct that enabled them to balance their nature with the social. They inherited a culture, we are contrasting an ideology.

Me? I guess I would be 'old-fashioned'.... with the best of both of these new schools re-combined in harmonious relations.

 

No offence taken at all, I definitely self-identify as someone concerned with equality and social justice. I feel that my identity as that person stems from my belief that we must always strive to be bigger than our physical bodies and impulses. It also stems from a mixture of self-aware privilege (I'm a young, white, upper/middle class male in the country with the second highest standard living in the world) and oppression (I'm also gay, and even here in Australia I've had some harrowing experiences).

I think your proposal of the "splintered" male is somewhat ungenerous, and a bit of a false dichotomy. To me it's more akin to a spectrum, where you might have the "overly sensitive neurotic male" on one end and the "Nietzschean, naturalistic male" on the other. Where you fall on the spectrum at any given time is up to you, and like many spectrums it's not fixed. It is, after all, your own identity.

 

Yes, an exaggeration and a hyperbole no doubt in order to paint a picture. And I'd also be among the first to rant against excluding the middle.

As you say, there is a spectrum laying between the extremes. But I'd also say that the process of splintering is forcing the middle [the old fashioned ground of common sense] toward one extreme or the other. Ideology is the cause for this move away from the middle ground [moderation] toward extremism. It's like two camps are developing, each with their own ideology.

I'd add that the concern for identity often lies at the heart of ideology [and with it identity politics]. For identity, the serious representation of the self to the Self [ego] is ideological in nature. The good old men always had a solid sense of humor about themselves.