So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit today there’s a dude completely losing it over the issue of … tipping waitresses. Seems that these women, especially the younger ones, sometimes see a big tip from an older guy as a sign that the tipper has feelings for them (in his pants) and sometimes this kind of creeps them out.
Somehow this makes our Men’s Rights Redditor so mad that he’s decided not to tip women any more.
Starski09’s rant is just a teensy bit confusing, so let’s see if I can explain it a little more clearly than he manages to.
It starts with him reading about a little experiment some women on Tik Tok conducted in which they went to work wearing pigtails to see if this increased the amount of tips they got. And it did. Women discussing the experiment on the 2XChromosomes subreddit found this a bit gross, as it suggested that the men tipping the pigtailed women not only were sexualizing them, but were also responding to a hairstyle that made them look younger, even childlike. The women of 2X found this more than a little bit icky.
Starski09 was having none of it. What if the men weren’t sexualizing the pigtailed women, but just trying to help out, as nice older men sometimes do.
I scrolled through and read hundreds of the comments, not one of them mentioned the possibility that pigtails make women look a lot younger and that it could be men see you as young, vulnerable and men want to help you start your life.
Yeah, because sugar daddy fantasies aren’t, like, even grosser than plain old fashioned lust.
Starski09 concludes from this experiment that the men aren’t sexualizing the pigtailed women; it is the women themselves who are sexualizing the situation, both at work and in the discussion on 2X.
No longer is asking someone out on a date or asking for their number means we want the sex. Now just tipping someone has sexual motivation, tipping a young woman or even teen will be sexualized by them. I’ve seen this more and more in my real life the older I’ve gotten, anything men do is sexual while woman can say and do as they please.
So he concludes from all this nonsense that he no longer needs to tip women at all. As he puts it in his title,
we don’t have to tip women anymore and we should completely stop helping any women outside our personal lives, with anything. Women will sexualize anything and everything they can just so they can be offended by it.
Indeed, he complains, women sexualize him all the time. Especially when they give him advice on how to look his best.
I’ve had women tell me what to do and what not to do my whole life. So many women have told me how unattractive and ugly my beard is, how they don’t like it being multi colored and it’s not full enough.
So these women are doing him a little favor by letting him know his beard is shit and he would look better without it. So he just continues growing his beard harder.
I grew it out for years in spite of all the comments I got, no matter how well I kept it trimmed I still got looks on the daily and was treated like a creep for my bad genes.
So you can’t grow a decent beard. Fucking learn to live with it.
If I was a woman going against the grain I would be hailed as a hero and badass for fighting the patriarchy.
Yes, women are often hailed for dressing badly and having crap hairdos.
I’ve been told by women not to wear certain clothes, not to grow out my hair because I look like a child, not to wear certain hairstyles because they don’t look good,
Is it possible they’re, you know, right and he’s a badly dressed baby-faced man with a crappy beard? And they just want him to know so he can upgrade his appearance?
I mean, when women tell me I really need to get a haircut it’s because I really need to get a haircut.
these are all examples of sexualizing a man, telling him he needs to look good for you to take him serious, find him attractive or not be a creep.
I’m not sure telling a guy he looks like shit is really the best way to start flirting with him.
Women don’t understand what men go through their whole lives, how hard we have to try not to be seen as a creep or even a pedophile, how we are constantly sexualized by women openly. Some try it but they often times kill themselves because they weren’t raised into our lifestyle.
What the fuck are you even talking about.
So it is time to fight back by not going out of our way to help them, financial withholding is a good non aggressive way to do so. Let women pick up the tab and support their own.
Plenty of women are happy to pick up the tab.
But of course I’m going to state exactly why I won’t tip them so they know I’m not just a cheap skate,
Yeah, that’ll go well.
mostly going to find way to avoid bringing them my business all together, time to find a barber for starts!
Get him to shave off your shitty beard while he’s at it.
My go to responses are going to be, Sorry, I can’t tip you because of the possible implications and I don’t want to sexualize you by tipping you, have a good day! It’s sad because I always tipped women well and now I’m seeing what all those weird looks were and why they barely ever said thanks.
Women weren’t giving you weird looks because you tipped too much. They could probably sense that you’re so stuffed with weird resentments of women that you would literally go to the Men’s Rights subreddit to lead a crusade of men not tipping their waitresses.
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When men as old as my father tried to make sexual comments about me or my body when I worked at restaurant. Yes that was even more creepy then then when men my own age did it. Surprise surprise. Let’s have a 90 year old woman come up to you and say
‘oh young man. Come poor that sweet sweet cum down my throat. I’ll give you a big tip for that “and tell me that it’s not creepy to you.
@full metal ox
I guess his style is a bit seventies! The sideburns are a tribute to Lemmy (sans handlebar) but as a younger man his go -to was white tank tops, jean flares and leather jackets (sometimes losing the top entirely, haha). He’s also promised if we ever visit my brother in Texas that he’s going full cowboy, which I’m concerned with his celtic tattoos might make people make the wrong assumption about his politics.
@Alan
I absolutely love that. As a man who got a lot of attention in gay bars as a youth I imagine the husband will appreciate it too.
@.45
Yes, I agree with you. In my family was a story like that. My aunt married a foreigner 21 years older than her. He was quite short, calm and not very rich musician and she is ambitious, high-earning narcisstic and very agressive woman. He was like a father figure to her, as her actual father and my grandfather acknowledged. They had 2 daughters, sadly he passed away from his long term disease. But people nowadays increasingly say that age difference always means that man is manipulative creep and woman is a victim.
@Elaine
It is not creepy at all, actually it is extremely funny, it should be put in some comedy film, although with gender swapped it would be less funny.
Well, this is bizarre. Apparently, Reddit has banned me. The bizarre part is that I don’t even have an account there, and have never posted anything there. I read things there from time to time, due to it cropping up in links (usually during some sort of researching of some topic or another, particularly tech topics and most recently “how to back up the data on Android devices reliably and comprehensively”), and regularly monitor one subreddit (for a game I play, nothing political or otherwise likely to be controversial).
Now, I get a bogus error message claiming, essentially, that the site is down when I try to check that subreddit. I know it is lying and singling me out because I can still check the subreddit if I use an online web proxy, thus proving that Reddit’s server is still up and running and is perfectly willing and able to serve web pages to other people. It’s demonstrably discriminating based on a visitor’s IP address, and furthermore it’s lying to the one(s) it’s blocking, feigning a malfunction that provably doesn’t actually exist rather than having the decency to admit that they’re being blocked intentionally.
What I can’t figure out is what I could possibly have done to provoke this. I don’t think I’ve generated excessive or unusual amounts of traffic; and again, I’ve no account there and don’t post there. Are they trying to proactively bar known leftists from even reading what’s posted there or something? Or have I merely tripped some sort of automated spammer/hacker/DDoS detection that is on too much of a hair trigger, despite not having generated especially many page loads there? Maybe some kind of pattern matching heuristics or Bayesian classifier?
BTW,. this started sometime in the past three or so hours. For me, at least. Perhaps they’ve been blocking other people with deceptive site-down messages for longer.
I may not be able to read that game’s subreddit for much longer. Logically they’ll be trying to identify and block proxy (and Tor, VPN, etc.) exits soon, if they haven’t already started doing so, to prevent people from circumventing their IP blocking the way I just did. Indeed I had to try several proxies before I found one that worked instead of complaining of timeout errors, most likely because Reddit is blocking the others already. Ones that still work to view Reddit might soon become extremely hard to find. I have a DHCP assigned IP here so might soon have proxy-less access again for a time, if they haven’t blanket-banned my ISP’s entire address range (which would be rather drastic just to stop one guy from reading there). But over time presumably any IP I use will get blocked, at least if I keep doing whatever I did to (inadvertently!) trigger this situation.
So … does anyone have any idea what that might have been?
And why have they configured it to lie to the people it’s blocking? That’s the especially disturbing part. Regardless of the reasons for the blocking itself, lying to the affected users strikes me as profoundly unethical.
As for why I am posting this here, that’d be because a number of you, and David himself, routinely monitor various far-right subreddits. Whatever I’ve run afoul of, you are also likely to, if you haven’t already. So, it behooves me to warn you that they’re doing this and not to take any technical-error pages they serve at face value; at the same time, it may also be the case that someone else here has already encountered this sort of thing and knows more about it than I do, so might be able to give me useful information, such as how to avoid provoking their sneaky IP blocking in the future.
Anyone here who has multiple IPs on different networks (e.g. work and home, or different cable/DSL ISP from their mobile provider) can likely detect (and circumvent) an instance of this by trying to access Reddit from the other location/device. The rest of us will likely just have to try various proxies and different proxy/VPN exits in the hope of finding one that gets through, and unless they do, will not even be able to ascertain whether they’ve run afoul of this blocking or it’s genuinely down. (Though, my first clue to try using proxies was when downdetector said it wasn’t down, and even their own redditstatus.com showed green across the board — seems an oversight on their part not to fake that to a blacklisted IP, too, and one they might soon correct, but they can’t spoof third-party sites like downdetector without making themselves look like they’re down to everyone. So, if downdetector says it’s up but you get a technical difficulties page that’s consistent, rather than a one-off, you’re probably being blocked.)
@feliks
Your disgusting and I hope women steer clear of you
Also yes sane men are creepy. The men who grope me, the men who raped me, the men who cat call me, the men who stalked me. All sane men who saw someone they saw as vulnerable and could get away with. I’ve never had an autistic man cross boundaries other then me having to tell them I don’t like hugs or being touched.
If an autistic man is being a creep. I have no problem telling him that’s hes being inappropriate so that he can fix his behavior. Autistic people are hot toddlers. You don’t need to coddle them and hide there short comings to them. You can and should point out when they are crossing boundaries.
@ Elaine the witch
I would probably laugh and say “Oooooo… that would be soliciting.”
That is because it is a false equivalency. (No offense.) Never have I been in such a situation, and if I did, I would mostly not expect things to escalate or continue. In our society I, as a AMAB person, am reasonably safe from such affairs in ways AFAB/trans women/etc are not.
Similarly, as I was implying with my earlier comment, Feliks, there is a world of difference between a healthy relationship with a large age gap and old guys being creepy. The existence of the former does not justify the latter. Your conduct thus far does not inspire confidence in your ability to differentiate between the two. Apples and oranges.
Anyone who doesn’t tip anyone, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, religion, etc. is a douchebag who isn’t fit to be in society.
I wonder if he’s considered that if he leaves a waiter a big tip, that guy might think he’s coming onto him? Plenty of waiters are gay men.
I think he’s just a grumpy old badly-groomed asshole, and nobody of any gender wants anything to do with him, ever. The Mr. never grew a beard because it comes in patchy and multi-colored (ok, gray/white now; blond/red/brown/black then), and he had just enough self-awareness to realize it looked stupid. Also two sisters who clued him in.
@RJ Dragon: “May you forever step on slugs and Lego” is a fine, fine sentence.
My original response, which Steph quoted:
????
Like, in case it isn’t clear, “they don’t find you attractive” was a stand-in for ugly. I didn’t say “ugly” because attractiveness is subjective, so someone might find a given person good-looking and someone else might not like how they look at all. Also I just think ugly isn’t a nice thing to call someone.
There are definitely some men who are considered less conventionally attractive than others, and I’m guessing those are the men you’re calling ugly. Everything Steph and I said applies to those men.
@viscaria
Or if you do it away from work premises in an effort to be less culpable, specifically tell them you work with their boss and can open doors for them, implying you can also fuck up their career if they say no, and make sure to flex just how high on the totem pole you are compared to them. In fact this exact situation happened to me less than a year ago. I filed a sex harassment complaint and luckily my manager backed me up. I don’t think either would have happened ten years ago, mostly because I don’t think that ten years ago a manager or the organization would have backed me up.
So the ‘love handles’ association was correct then. Thanks for clarifying anyway!
@.45
So I know you’re at least trying here, but please don’t use “AMAB” as a synonym for “cis man” like that (even though you mentioned trans women as our own case etc). I’m an AMAB person who is subject to misogyny, as are e.g. my nonbinary transfem friends, who are not women but look close enough for misogynists not to care.
@Feliks
It is absolutely creepy, WTF are you talking about. Stop trying to mansplain our literal life experiences to us. WTF.
@Elaine
Ugh I’m sorry. And yeah it’s wild how aggressive a lot of these old geezers are. I literally just had to deal with one yesterday, out at lunch with a friend – this Jeff Bezos looking creep started drilling into me with his eyes the minute his wife went inside the cafe, and begged me not to leave when we were ready to get going. The way he was looking at me, I would be scared to run into him again. Absolutely wild.
@ battering lamb
I have just this moment realised that’s what love handles means!
@Elaine: You are right about the creep factor, but I have also seen clueless women be incredibly disrespectful.
Years ago, I was traveling with my young daughter, my elderly mother, and her elderly friend, a short clueless loudmouth in her 70s who never shut up. We stayed in an old-world hotel where a young Italian man worked as a bartender/waiter/general helper. And he was gorgeous — feature a young Baryshnikov — as well as friendly, outgoing, kind, and efficient.
My mom’s friend would not leave him alone, and would not shut up. “Oh, Nico! It’s Nico! Nico, come over here and talk to me! Where’s Nico today? Nico, come to the bar and make us a drink! Nico, you’re so handsome! Let’s have nightcaps with Nico! Is Nico off today? When does Nico get here?” Ad nauseum. At top volume. At one point, I was waiting in the lobby for my mom and her friend, and heard her come into the hotel bellowing about Nico. Nico was off to the side doing some prep work, and I saw him literally cringe when he heard her voice — followed by a very visible effort to straighten up and smile before he turned around to face her.
If this had been a short, elderly, clueless, vulgar, incessant male loudmouth chasing around a 20-something waitress, it would clearly have been a problem. But my mother’s friend seemed to see her actions as harmless “compliments,” even though every person around her was extremely uncomfortable.
I did ask her to stop admiring him so continuously and so loudly, since it clearly made him uncomfortable. When that didn’t work, I told her it made my 12-y-o uncomfortable. She could not see that her loud enthusiasm or continuous pursual could be a problem. Did I mention she was clueless? I think we got out of there before she propositioned the poor guy, but there’s really no telling if she managed to corner him when we weren’t around.
From my perspective, the advice for her should have been the same advice as to a clueless obnoxious man: one admiring comment could be written off as a compliment, but more than that (especially when they’ve been asked to drop it) borders on stalking. We asked, she ignored us and barrelled right through all boundaries or propriety. People who can’t read the audience should not be so convinced of their own innocence in creepy behavior. And yeah, women can be creepy, too. And FTR, we never invited my mother’s friend to travel with us again.
@kaybee
Literally nobody here is saying that isn’t creepy, though. And a lot of us have seen the occasional woman being a creep (gods know I have). The problem isn’t that only men can be creepy, it’s that male creepiness is systemic.
A woman creeping on a man is usually a pretty isolated case, something I might see once or twice a year. A man creeping on a woman is something I half the times I leave my house.
@GSS ex-noob,
It should be noted that not all societies look at tipping the same. I’ve heard that in Japan at least leaving a tip is interpreted as ‘you should go back to school and learn your manners; here’s some money for those classes!’ rather than ‘you provided good service tonight; here’s some extra cash as a reward’.
So if the non-tipper is from a different country than the waitperson, that could be a factor on what kind and size of tip gets left.
@Cyborgette — thanks. I stand corrected in thinking this was a discussion about creepiness in general. I’m a 60+ yo woman who worked in the oilfields when the M:F ratio was about 300:18. I have also personally experienced male creepiness. But my point — that maybe creepiness was not solely a male attribute — was… wrong?
You know, almost every time I’ve commented here, somebody jumps in to tell me why I’m wrong, or why my comment wasn’t relevant. Except Alan, who is unfailingly kind and welcoming. (@Alan — thanks for your kind comments, and I still plan to walk the Broomway someday…)
I can take a hint. I thought this was a conversation, but it’s feeling more and more like an in-crowd echo chamber. I’ve actually supported this site financially for years. But I come here less and less often, somewhat because some of the epic commenters (scildfreyja was a favorite) no longer drop in, and now it feels like only regulars are welcome to comment. And god knows there are urgent funding needs among other pro-woman groups as well.
peace and love
Welp. I’d thought kaybee might have posted here before, did a web search, turned up nothing. Figured she was just a rando posting apologism. RIP.
@RedSilkPhoenix: I know, but this guy obviously lives in a tipping society (probably the US), clearly KNOWS that tipping is the expected thing to do, and has deliberately decided to punish only female waitstaff by not tipping. Sexism, pure and simple. Presumably he’s going to still tip male staff, but I bet he’s a pain in the ass to them too. And under-tips the men as well.
I hope there’s a lot of restaurants in his town, because he’s going to get on the naughty list at each one of them pretty fast. Even in places he hasn’t gotten to yet, because people in the same line of work talk. And keep lists. Hopefully as his “fame” spreads, more and more restaurants will exercise the “we have the right to refuse service” clause, or else send out their swishiest, flirtiest gay server. Because you know he’s probably homophobic too — that’s part of patriarchy.
He’ll have to eat only fast food, since you don’t tip there… but judging by his overall attitude, that’s probably what he mostly eats anyway. He can’t even go to Hooters with this policy he has. An all-straight-female group of us once went there just to see, and our waitress was really relieved to be treated like a human (The famed chicken wings were meh, BTW). We overtipped in sisterly solidarity.
@Feliks
@Viscaria, Steph
Why you go to the extreme with men in 60s flirting with 18y/o girls? It can apply to different situations with lower age gap. Also you ignored part about ugly men labeled as creepy.
1. It’s not an extreme – I was showing that older men are now called creeps for hitting on women unless they are creeping on a significantly younger woman. Nobody calls a 60 year old man a creep for hitting on a 60 year old woman.
2. I did not ignore the part about ugly men – I answered it directly. They are incorrectly assuming the are called a creep because the woman does not find them attractive. Actually it’s because they keep pushing after she has signalled her lack of interest.
@kaybee
First, she wasn’t clueless she knew exactly what she was doing. She was told her behavior wasn’t appropriate but still kept doing it.
Second, I never said only men were creepy and I don’t like being painted as that. I’ve had creepy women in my life. being bi, I have met the gold star lesbian that get weird about the fact I’ve been with men. And I wasn’t even talking about men out of no where. I was going after incel boy felkis who thinks that the only reason men are seen as creepy is because they are old and or ugly. An old man going after a young woman will always be creepy.
Third. I guess it doesn’t matter since you’ve decide to leave, but like the woman in your story you just got all offended when told your behavior towards me wasn’t appropriate.
@Cyborgette
It’s not your fault. I don’t have to work in restaurants right now anymore and that’s been great. It’s not even just grandpa looking men either. I don’t like it when men 10 or 20 years older then me hit on me either. I’ve been told my adult life that I look young. Most people assume I’m in highschool even though I’m 24. I think I’ve slowly been bumped up to maybe looking 19 because of how I dress but I still get carded all the time. (My husband is younger then me and they don’t card him). So when the dads of the little girls I teach start hitting on me and they are in there 30s to 40s, especially when I was actually 19, it was so damn creepy. Like maybe you can’t be my dad sir, but you are a fully grown fucking adult. Maybe don’t hit on someone who just graduated.
Even if they are married and don’t think it was flirting, it is weird how many of them decide to make a comment on my body. Like after one class I had this man tell me I was going to be a great mother just because of how easy it will be for me to just open my legs and shoot out a kid. Don’t think that was flirting but it was creepy and pisses me off evertime I think about it
@ Cyborgette
My apologies. My mouth, or in this case, fingers were moving faster than my brain and I hammered that post out quickly.
@Elaine the Witch
… isn’t that because it’s sexual harassment and you’re operating in a really bad work environment if men just come up and say that shit to you with no consequences? Is there no HR you can turn to? I don’t know in what circumstances you are teaching girls, but I can’t think of a school district in my state where that would fly.