@Colman @irene @blainsmith @rbphotographic @alice CONSTANTLY. My partner does all the grocery shopping now because he (I could cut the sentence there, but) is big enough to be imposing. The aisles can be bad, the lines are worse, but the parking lots are awful.

I got used to wearing big baggy shapeless coats if shopping, but honestly that doesn't help much, because it's often not at all about how you look, it's about men feeling entitled to interrupt your day, commandeer your time and attention and sometimes personal space, and generally harass you as if you've come into THEIR space by existing while female (or feminized) in public. Wearing respirators, once covid began, actually seemed to make it worse and more openly aggressive.

Men who compliment without objectification were far less annoying, but in some ways it's more frustrating, because your patience for interruption has been eaten up by the four jerks in the half hour before him and you have to either swallow that or take it out on someone who doesn't really deserve it. Men ruin flirting for other men, basically.

Complimenting someone's skill or ability or creative expressiveness is always a better bet than complimenting how they make you feel (beauty, attraction, any of the stuff in the eye of the beholder isn't actually a signal being "sent," but an experience internal to the audience, according to their personal taste) - essentially the same compliments a man would give another man, until and unless there's a relationship that starts skewing toward the romantic. The flirting edge of playfulness can come in before that, and the intensity of reciprocation can then be indicative.