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.
I wish they had tested all 8 scenarios: Male/female participant, male/female body, catcalled/not catcalled.
Because even as a man I don’t feel comfortable being alone at a subway station at night. Nor can I imagine would I then enjoy being catcalled.
I wonder how much your VR body seen in a mirror affects this. My gut says not a lot but more data would’ve been great.
Now, if your own VR body does affect your reaction there must be bodies which maximize/minimize reactions. That’d be fun to test. You don’t even have to limit yourself to human bodies, what if you’re, say, a dinosaur (with body height still being the same)?
But that would be actual science and not whatever the slop study in the article is.
I feel like if you’re going to slag off the study as “slop” you should at least follow the links to the study itself where you can see that they did in fact have a control group who were posed general questions instead of catcalling. They didn’t switch genders because that wasn’t the purpose of the study.
While my first reaction was the same - “how would they react in male avatars?”, that doesn’t seem to be the point at all of this study but rather the potential of VR to change the subjects behaviour in real life by helping empathy along.
Introduction
[…]
Peck et al.13 found that White participants, after embodying a Black avatar, showed a reduction in implicit racial bias.
This principle has been extended to the context of gender-based violence.
Seinfeld et al.14 had male offenders embody a female victim of domestic violence, finding that the VR experience significantly improved their ability to recognize fear in female facial expressions—a deficit common in violent offenders15.
Similarly, other studies using 360° videos and immersive scenarios of sexual harassment have reported marked increases in empathy and changes in violent attitudes among participants16.
[…]
These findings collectively affirm the potential of VR as a rehabilitative tool for enhancing emotional understanding and mitigating harmful behaviors.Building on this foundation, the present study utilizes immersive VR to provide male participants with a firsthand experience of catcalling.
While previous research has often focused on overt violence, our goal is to investigate the affective response to a more commonplace form of street harassment. We hypothesize that this embodied experience will elicit morally salient emotions like disgust and anger19,20,21.
By inducing this moral discomfort, the intervention aims to foster self-awareness and encourage a reconsideration of the behavior’s impact22, serving as a potential strategy to promote behavioral change.That’s fair, I only really glossed over the study.
But still, have they actually collected data to support illiciting these emotions works as a “potential strategy to promote behavioral change”? In the study, I haven’t found anything like a pre and post experiment survey showing a different attitude towards catcalling. In my mind that’s required to demonstrate the VR experiment is such a strategy.
And catcalled by M & F I guess?
I can where to say this. This is anything but science. Entertainment at best.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
At least in an MMO it’s not dangerous feeling.
This is true, as you are kinda protected by the avatar and screen as layers between you and the others. I’d imagine the fear can definitely seep into gaming as well though, if you start getting harassing private messages and all that
A running joke could be renaming the genders as “solo” and “co-op” for MMOs.
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.
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.
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.
just a little bit empathy and imagination… and creepy video game textures
I looked at the comments.
I knew it was a mistake, I did it anyways.
It sure was a mistake.
I would look at the study, while the problem is 100% real and anyone with any empathy should realize is real, to say the study supports it is a bit far fetched. Looking at the scenarios they created and the avatars, it’s all a bit uncanny valley and backrooms sort of feeling. Sort of ps2 graphics but in vr.
E: I think the conclusion puts it best, vr is a good tool for showing people what a lot of women have to deal with, and how terrible it can feel. It’s like rp for people who have trouble empathizing or don’t get why it matters.
I just had surgery and have grown a new appreciation for the fear women can feel. Im a taller dude and lifted 4-5 days a week, so im fairly bigger than other guys my size, but since my surgery im so fucking fragile and have no ability to defend myself. I live in a city and walking around at night has become a whole new experience. Before I never worried much being out alone, but now I have a constant anxiety, a fear that someone will come and overpower me. Hurt me.
I know its not entirely the same, but the fear of others in this capacity definitely makes me much more empathetic towards what I used to view as overreaction.
Ladies, I apologize.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A couple of years ago I played VR paintball with my gf’s avatar without a mic and got to experience first hand what it feels like to be aggressively hit on. I didn’t want to play with a female avatar from there on.
But that was real. It didn’t artificially reify stereotypes of women being scared in subway stations at night. The take-away was simply that this stuff is annoying.
I thought of something: Anorexia. That condition where people, mainly young women, starve themselves to death. This is often claimed to be the result of unrealistic beauty standards in media. Women are also more often diagnosed with phobias. Why aren’t we talking more about a possible role for stereotypes here.
FWIW, I am very skeptical about the role of beauty standards in anorexia. Vague societal expectations seem a poor explanation for something as drastic as starving yourself to death, especially given how most people are overweight. But I am also sure that my behavior would be different in many ways, if I wasn’t expected to “man up”.
Your takeaway from my experience was that it was annoying? I felt attacked, vulnerable and defenseless, to say it was mere annoying is an underestimation you seem to make quite quickly. Since you are interested in anorexia I might recommend starting from the wikipedia article that lists the causes linked to it, which are numerous in addition to societal pressure.
What made it so bad?
I wonder if the disgust:anger ratio is markedly different depending on the gender of the viewer
