Turns out walking through a sketchy area and being harassed are scary no matter what genitalia you have.
Yeah, but the point here is that they were posing as women with female looking avatars. One guy even says that he would have reacted differently if it was male:
Another participant reported that he would have reacted differently had he been in the role of a man, but since he was embodying a female character, he chose instead to walk away.
Did anyone study the opposite? I remember reading about a woman that pretended to be a man for a few weeks to write a book about it, and she described it as something like “soul crushingly lonely”.
Norah Vincent. She was particularly beloved by the manosphere because her experience pretending to be a man for 18 months (not just a few weeks) lead to her “conversion” from a feminist to realising that men too have their own problems.
Thought, she personally was already libertarian, and highly critical of trans people, so she reads more like a TERF imo.
Sadly passed away via assisted suicide a few years ago.
Norah Vincent - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah_Vincent
Which is super ironic, as feminism acknowledges mens issues.
I don’t know of any studies, but I have heard anecdotes from trans men that say the same thing.
I once read a very well put together comment by a trans man on the subject of their experience with this before and after transitioning, and basically, because men are never supposed to show emotion, their relationships lack a level of emotional intimacy at a fundamental level. They said that their relationships with other men felt hollow and largely superficial.
It’s also why men seemingly mistake friendship from women as flirting so frequently - because women can have a true emotional connection in their friendships with other women, but men can only get that same level of connection in romantic relationships or life or death scenarios such as war. Women also often treat men more coldly than they do other women as a result of this to avoid being mistaken for flirting with every man that they talk to (or because they view men as dangerous).
My guess is that the men who don’t think they’d be bothered by cat-calling are imagining a scenario where there are lots of other people around and the risk of being physically attacked is very low. (Something like the stereotypical image of construction workers whistling at a woman walking by them on a busy sidewalk.) Being on a nearly-empty subway platform with the only other guy nearby accosting you is a genuinely risky situation even without pretending that you’re a woman.
One time I was walking on the sidewalk when a car with several young women drove by and one of them leaned out the window and yelled something at me. I didn’t hear what she said but I like to think that it was positive and it made my day, but the caveat is that I did not feel like I was in any physical danger at all from them.
Half Life 2 graphics for maximum immersion
“You. Pick up that can.”
bends over
“Nice!”
Welcome to city 17
I mean… I’d feel disgust, anger and fear.
Kind of unfortunate, that even here on lemmy most comments immediately flip to “but as a man I also feel scared”. True, but it’s not what this study is about. Maybe in 2026 we can try to just read something like this and take it as a prompt that, maybe, some things are not about us. Maybe we should do something about catcalling. We can talk about violence against men and loneliness at a different occasion.
Living in Japan, the country famous for being completely safe for everyone, this gap recently became clearer to me. As it turns out, when people talk about safety in Japan, they primarily mean that you won’t be beaten up and nobody steals your wallet. But there are so many weird creeps around here. I’m really quite happy I don’t live here as a woman.
The language of the post says something that cannot be (meaningfully) derived without a control group of people that didn’t experience a counterpoint: “… the situation of being a young woman alone at night in a subway station being enough to generate the sense of fear.”
As I understand it, everyone in the study experienced all of that in combination, so any subset of those things may have been enough to generate a sense of fear: being alone, being at night, being a young woman, or being on a subway station.
The common objection I see is that everyone feels fear alone on a subway station at night, so the statement is misleading. That matches my personal experience, so I also see that statement as misleading, regardless of any work done by the study.
My SO praises Sweden so much, nobody catcalls and people only bother you because you don’t have your bicycle helmet and that (only) annoys all genders.
One time I was one of the very first people to play an MMO so my friends and I all grabbed up some really good names that are always taken before we start. I made six characters, two female, one of which I named “Beyonce” and put effort into making it look as much like her as possible.
On five of the characters people pretty much ignored me entirely, as usual. But when I played Beyonce people wanted to talk to me all the time. They would constantly invite me to stuff, give me things, name drop me in chat. Just kind of gather around me in town. Even other men who were playing female characters just assumed I was a woman.
I don’t know what it was about that character specifically, but it was a valuable insight into the life of women.
I had an extremely similar experience. It was astonishing how quick people assume you are a woman simply by having decent enough grammar and aren’t a shitty person.
At least in an MMO it’s not dangerous feeling. If anything, it kind of makes it easier to lead groups since you can get people to just do stuff with you. Not great insight into being a women though, people don’t generally accept female leadership irl.
A running joke could be renaming the genders as “solo” and “co-op” for MMOs.
Oh this is such nonsense.
They basically decided “what if we tested a scenario that has been happening in ChatVR for about 10 years.”
When I play a shooting game in VR I don’t think I’m going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Also what’s this research supposed to prove anyway?
Ah yes, the ever popular “I’ve never experienced it, so it doesn’t exist” argument.
Where did I make that arguement.
VR is not the real world. It’s not the holiday so you can’t turn off safety protocols to simulate real world threats.
When I play a shooting game in VR I don’t think I’m going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Who cares what you experience in the context of this study? Why is your input here useful in the context of the discussion? What does this statement add? Why did you say this? Why would anyone here want to know this?
deleted by creator
He assumes that the feelings were not real because he doesn’t have feelings in VR. If true for everybody that would invalidate the results.
When I play a shooting game in VR I don’t think I’m going to die, I do not experience fear. Any claims along those lines are at best overstated and at worst straight up lies.
Did you forget to read your own comment? Because this is you saying that the study is wrong because of your limited personal experience, which no one cares about.
Your anecdote does not invalidate data
Turn your logic around. If men feel the fear when it is just a simulation then real life for women is much worse.
Removed by mod
You need to learn what sociopath means.
This is a dumb test. How people react in VR is not relevant to the real world.
Irrelevant is too strong a word given the opportunities in VR for training or even therapy… but you have a point.
Training and therapy absolutely. But this is about empathy, they are claiming the people are more empathetic when they experience a situation in VR than if they haven’t experienced that situation ever in any medium.
I don’t believe they’ve demonstrated that.
At best they’ve demonstrated the people are empathetic but they might be anyway. They definitely haven’t demonstrated that that’s a result of the VR experience. To do that they would have had to have taken some sort of test both before and after the VR experience to see if their attitudes have changed.
Training and therapy are appropriate uses for VR because they don’t need to demonstrate that they are better than real world alternatives, because the benefit they have is cost. They are cheaper in VR than they are in the real world, that’s the only metric they need to pass.
to fight an anecdote with an anecdote - when i play games sure i don’t experience the fear of death, but i do experience compassion towards what i’m fully aware is a bunch of pixels & lines of code presented to me as a character in a video game. and i experience the thrill of discovery or a tough fight with a boss. the more i’m immersed in a game the deeper emotions i feel.
and VR in particular is much more immersive. even in a game like Beatsaber, which doesn’t aim at realism, your brain interprets the boxes coming at you as actual objects about to slam into your face. you intuitively attempt to dodge them, especially when you’re in the flow state of playing.
games can elicit emotions, and VR games can do it in an even stronger way. from my perspective, there is no reason to doubt the results of this study, especially if the fear response wasn’t measured through a subjective report of emotions, but through observing the physiological effects fear has on the body.
the research is supposed to highlight - not prove, there is nothing to prove, it’s a fact - how much fear women and girls go through in their daily lives, that men or boys don’t have to worry about
just a little bit empathy and imagination… and creepy video game textures
I haven’t read this study but what matters to me is, are these same men catcallers themselves? Most men I know don’t catcall and already understand it’s unpleasant so I’m not surprised this is their reaction
There’s a numerical asymmetry to stuff like this. You could have only 1 in 1000 men be catcallers yet a single catcaller could catcall thousands of women on their way to work (stereotypically from a construction site as they walk by).
Having done construction with temps who did this, they indeed catcall anything that looks like a female. 2 different people were like this and i yelled at both to no avail. They were also just ahitty people to even talk to. I had both of them black listed after one day.
Well done. Thank you.
Idk why but when i read this, then reread everything else i said, you just sounded like the sassy black girl i work with and i couldn’t help but smile.
Glad I bring good memories and associations.
sassy black girl
I’ve known quite a few people over the years who fit that description, and I can’t remember a single one I didn’t think very highly of, so I’ll take that as a big complement (despite very much not fitting that description myself).
Construction often ends up with the worst sorts of people. I have multiple friends and family who have worked in the business and they’ve dealt with people who would regularly no-show (not even call in sick), show up drunk, high on meth, and do all kinds of dangerous / stupid stuff including throwing heavy tools down from upper floors, walking around without paying attention (and falling off scaffolding etc).
My uncle also had to deal with mafia guys involved with construction unions.
The ones on meth are some of the best workers though. Get them on a task and it goes by fast.
If they’ve got ADHD. Then the meth is literally self-medicating them and allowing them to function. Non-ADHD people on meth are a different story.
I completely agree. Ive worked with both types but i dont think the problematic ones are always non adhd. It has to deal with how much meth you consume, because one meth is fine for anyone. But five meths is to much for anyone.
One hundred percent agree with you and have experienced the catcalling from the receiving end. But I don’t see how the study does anything useful or state something new. Now if they said the men involved were catcallers, that’d be interesting. I would imagine catcallers would not care about the women if they participated in a study like this
The study checked this and found that the participants claimed to have no history of catcalling.
The study was intended to see if men would experience greater empathy with women following a VR experience of catcalling.
Peer pressure is a real thing and telling other men that their behaviour is not OK can have real impact.
Male American here. Always had a hard time internalizing women’s fear, hard to truly put myself in their shoes. My first wife really woke me.
At the major hospital she worked at, the female nurses often needed escorts through the parking garage. There were alerts about shady characters hanging around. She clearly got roofied one night, and when her friends compared notes, it had happened to many of them at that same restaurant (a really nice one!).
I was a small guy, little punker in the late 80s and early 90s. There were places we couldn’t go or the skins or rednecks would get us. And yet that doesn’t even begin to compare with the fear women must deal with.
I’ve had a pretty fucking wild life, but I’ve never been stalked, drugged or raped.
I do kinda think everyone should have to Freaky Friday swap with anyone they disdain or don’t have empathy for, and also one random swap.
I’ve never been bothered by catcalling but haven’t had it happen in a dangerous feeling situation.
Similar social experiments include the same fear from being on the receiving end of society when people in real life dressed as Muslims, Jews, homeless people, even as black people (much harder to do). There is such trusism as walking in the shoes of another person. Living as them for a week would be most interesting.
This looks more like sexism dressed up as science, rather than science.
If the men really felt that they were in the body of a woman, then I would expect the overwhelming emotion to be gender dysphoria.
If not, then they answered whatever they felt they should. That’s a well-known problem in such studies (eg Social Desirability Bias). Maybe they answered what they felt the interviewer wanted to hear. Or maybe they just regurgitated sexist stereotypes. Imagine putting the avatar in a dirty kitchen and asking: Don’t you feel an overwhelming desire to clean?
But suppose that this is a good “empathy building” exercise. What is the take-away? Say, some years down the road, these men are hiring employees. There are qualified female candidates, but the job requires working at night, or maybe being alone with male clients. Hmm. Benevolent sexism is still sexism.
Also, statistically most of them were heterosexual, and it seems obvious that most heterosexual men don’t want to be catcalled by other men. Homophobia etc.
deleted by creator
Completely useless, says the random Internet man about a study of random men
deleted by creator
I’m sure this badly done study won’t trigger knee jerk malicious comments from misandrists who feel validated.
