not_IOStudy of men who embodied a young woman in VR finds they felt disgust & anger when catcalled
undefinedHere’s the link to the actual article.
Men embodying women in VR report strong emotional reactions to verbal harassment
Unfortunately, many women and girls know all too well what it means to be victims of verbal harassment. They are familiar with its emotional and psychological impact. What about men? What would they feel if they were in the place of harassed women?
AmbitiousProcess (they/them)Thank you!
www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4.pdf
Paper itself above. Need a deeper reading with my notes but on the surface the stats are so-so. They check normality, but don’t confirm linearity (use of pmcc will not be valid without - there are also a few other conditions to check for hypothesis testing with PMCC if memory serves), use of a continuous test (PMCC, ANOVA, unpaired t’s) for discrete (likert) data is also little controversial, but generally condoned.
As for the conclusion, not a psych phd so I’ll assume they know their stuff!
my personal rule of thumb is that if it’s published in Nature, Cell, or another well-regarded journal, the statistical and experimental methodologies are almost certainly solid. Do you think I should adjust that rule going forward?
Honestly, I always poke the stats no matter how good the journal. The best way to read any article is as a skeptic (the onus is on the writer to prove their point), and any small irregularity is something to be queried.
No matter how good the journal, it’s only as good as the reviewers, and reviewers are humans too. Odds are a paper in nature is all above board, but I’m somewhat of a pedant when it comes to checking test conditions.
i do that to, i also try to find most recent research, anything older than 5+years is suspect, because they always come with revised papers in newer studies/research eventually.
In some fields (e.g. mathematics) old papers hold up well. However, in fields like psychology where the landscape shifts a lot that’s probably a good shout!
sometimes, but they have retracted quite a few papers based on misleading papers, or even AI rgenerated. also because it can mislead readers into thinking “oh this is the sole cause and effect” but not potential alternative scenarios.
just a little bit empathy and imagination… and creepy video game textures
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.
What? Men feel empathy? Impossible.
I’m surprised at all my downvotes. Did you think I was being serious?
Do people at really yell out “Impossible!” At the end of a comment when it’s not facetious?
Lemmy doesn’t always get sarcasm - please don’t stop though!
I expect that that women get yelled at more often than men, but if I was on a nearly-empty subway platform and the only other guy nearby started yelling things at me, I’d get pretty worried without having to imagine that I was a woman. It’s a genuinely risky situation.
I compared notes, once, with my partner at the time, who occasionally dressed a bit flamboyant. Being shouted at made him feel annoyed and sad, which sucks, but he though that put him on the same level as me.
The difference was he could recall each time he was catcalled, and was surprised to hear it happened just about daily to me. Even more surprised to hear that sometimes when I don’t respond, guys have followed me and kept shouting. Sometimes in groups. Extremely surprised to hear that on a few occasions I’ve actually had to run from these groups.
Catcalling is easy to ignore, but considering I literally had to run from strangers, I still slide my keys between my knuckles and get ready to sprint whenever I hear it.
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 know what we are doing today, Ferb.
I had an extremely similar experience. It was astonishing how quick people assume you are a women simply be 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.
TonavaA running joke could be renaming the genders as “solo” and “co-op” for MMOs.
Half Life 2 graphics for maximum immersion
mycodesucksI mean… I’d feel disgust, anger and fear.
“You. Pick up that can.”
UltraGiGaGiganticbends over
“Nice!”
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 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah_Vincent
Conscription, parental treatment especially during custody battles are some of the things often talked about where I live. Especially the former one is one of the most blatant examples of men and women being treated differently. But it’s not very high on the agenda for feminist orgs.
You can see the agendas for yourself here for two of the orgs I based this on:
https://naisunioni.fi/polohjelma/
https://www.feministinenpuolue.fi/tavoitteemme/poliittiset-ohjelmat/#yleisohjelma
Their agendas focus on the current biggest issues.
Which, if resolved correctly, would benefit at least your first problem, possibly the second one too.
So I don’t see any problem here.
No, because, and I say that with love towards you, it’s not a main issue right now for society.
I understand that it is the main issue for you right now. And I need you to understand that if that’s the case, you are not on the top of the priority list because there are people who are worse off.
If you are currently battling for custody, it sounds terrible, and I feel for you. I can’t imagine what’s that like. If I can do anything for you, let me know.
Well, yes.
Feminism won’t fight for every issue right now.
But it will still help you regardless of what you’re missing.
That gets us nicely back to start of the discussion. Feminism might recognize men’s issues, it just doesn’t consider them very important to deal with right now. Even when it’s something like conscription that’s the biggest and most blatant legal discrimination there is in my country.
Nothing recognizes your specific issues right now, what do you want me to say.
You’re supposedly from Finland, which means you are better off than most of the world.
Feminism might make draft more equal. That may not be on top of their concerns, but it’s still better than anything else I can think of.
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).
Some of us apparently, don’t need to be a young woman at all to experience this.
I sometimes carry a scalpel on me now.
Uh, we call box cutters scalpels here for some reason. Useful tool, but I put it somewhere so I can persuade certain someone that shoving fingers up someone’s butt is not funny, the situation resolved itself.
That’s a weapon that’s giving you a false sense of security. Either carry a real weapon that you have trained hard to be competent with, or carry pepper spray. And yes, you still have educate yourself and practice with pepper stray. No weapon counts if it’s not instantly available to attack with. No fumble fucking around trying to get your hand on it. Violence comes fast.
MothraI 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.
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.
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 brought back good memories.
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).