Saturday, January 17, 2015

Day 17 of Feminist Joys: Agreeing with Compliments

This is both fun and brave: a young woman tried a social experiment where she agrees when boys compliment her. Shockingly (not really), they don't seem to like it:


Another young woman liked the experiment and tried it out herself, with similar results.
"Many responses state how 'vain' and 'conceited' I was for agreeing with their compliment which I found baffling," Bateman said. "Why give me the compliment in the first place if you didn't want me to believe it? I feel that some boys believe that women should base their self worth off of the compliment that they feed to them, and as soon as a woman realizes that she's awesome without their help they get incredibly angry."
As someone who grew up thinking that you should never praise yourself, and who usually reacted to compliments on my appearance with an incredulous look before she realized how rude that was... it's heartening to see how strong, how confident these women are. 

I've got much better at accepting compliments, though they still embarrass me. I want to try this: to say, "thanks, yes, I am". To own my awesomeness. Let's try it this year, shall we?

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