Sometimes A Compliment Is Just A Compliment

"God made the flirt the moment he made the fool." –Victor Hugo

Some people use Twitter like so: they board their plane, situate themselves in their seat, and scroll through their timeline as the rest of the cabin settles in. In those dwindling moments before airplane mode is activated, a silly sensation will stir the back of their brainpan, prompting them to shoot off one last bit of snark or sardonia into the all-chattering void. Staring at their fresh internet dropping in the hopes of seeing one or two likes before take-off, they will snap out of their social media daze and begin meddling with their settings to connect to the inflight entertainment, forgetting all about the random witticism as a superhero or romcom swallows their attention—and in good time the earth is left behind.

On landing, they re-open Twitter to discover their random observation had stirred a hornet’s nest of highly offended strangers. In their email will be assorted hate mail and one tersely worded missive from their employer, indicating they needn’t bother returning to work. A scarlet letter P for pariah will then follow them about for two to three days (the average lifespan of a social media stockade), and they can now look forward to their name being evoked whenever another witless soul violates a similar social media taboo.

That’s other people. I use Twitter a differently. I wait until after I’ve landed, am woozy from lack of sleep and lag of jet and lapse of social inhibition incurred from hours of suppressed claustrophobia—and as the sardines in front of me queue out the jet and I await my freedom, I’ll open the app, scroll a bit, and allow a silly sensation to prompt something terribly easily construed as a very, very bad thing to think, let alone publish for the world to see & skewer.

This Saturday past a friend of mine wrote about her experience as a teenager. How every man who told her she was mature for her age eventually turned out to be a creep. This is a troublesome experience shared by many women, and I should have kept my silly sensations to myself. But I did not. I thumbed:

I’m gonna keep complimenting women. I don’t care how many men do it wrong or for the wrong reasons. I don’t care how many women come along and express surrogate offense. Complimenting women is enjoyable and fun. It’s like a water park with words.

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Why would you write such a thing?

What a valid and pertinent question!

Two reasons: I have a longstanding positive rapport with this woman. We’ve done several podcasts together and can clock each others wry humor a mile away. She’s also Scottish, and sharp as nails, and tough as leather, and is not easily offended. The second reason is that I know the audience her tweet would be seen and shared by, and I have issues with some among that audience. Specifically, the women who will show up on my youtube channel and express offense whenever I compliment a female guest.

Seriously. If I say a woman’s accent is delectable, or soul is gorgeous, or presence is captivating, or that Meghan Murphy is buxom, I will catch flack from a specific type of female internet user. It doesn’t matter that the woman I actually complimented is not offended (and will laugh with me about the messages she, too, is receiving, about my shameful act of complimenting).

I call this surrogate offense, and it is a main staple of many social media storms, the driving force of both Political Correctness and its chthonic spawn, Wokeness. I’ve grown so used to it that I know exactly what combination of words will trigger it. For example, a couple weeks ago I interviewed a young woman about her intersex condition (DSD or Disorder of Sexual Development is the preferred term), and how trauma and her different body drove her to take male hormones in a bid to transition out of her womanhood. It was a powerful episode, and she got me crying on camera, and toward the end I felt compelled to recognize how much light she brought into the world. I considered telling her she has a beautiful soul, and immediately knew that would stir surrogate offense.

So what did I do? I told her she has a gorgeous soul. Because if people are gonna misconstrue me, I’m gonna con up a strue they can’t miss.

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This is an immature way to act. And is bad for business, insofar as with my interviews I am trying to build a place for respectful discourse, especially around the topic of gender. A true professional would avoid riling the ire of an audience he’s courted—and I have courted a feminist audience, by platforming as many radfems as will speak with me. That said, one of my concerns as a “content creator” is succumbing to what I call fanarchy, where my audience controls my content. So, while acting in this way lowers my status in some people’s eyes, it keeps my audience down to a size and type that get me.

Also, to return to my jet-lagged, lapse-of-tact tweet, the original context was regarding mature men using compliments of maturity to weasel proximity from immature women. My reply switched the context from the mature manipulating the young to a benevolent word between mutuals. And when pushback came, I—like an immature rascal—turned not tail nor cheek, but the more cheeky.

I christened myself the Oprah of compliments

I told the world I’ve been proudly complimenting women since 1976

When given the opportunity to draw a line at men lowering young women’s boundaries for nefarious ends, I replied:

Boundaries can be lowered without being violated. (Though threat of overstepping brings a thrill to the proceedings.)

This one caught fire, and now screenshots are circulating through the sub-community I was chiding in the first place. Namely, the surrogate offense community, primed by social media to co-ruminate on the foul deeds of bad actors.

The way this sub-community—as a community—operates is to 1) read something in the most offended way possible, and 2) gossip about it until it becomes a legendary stain on the offender’s character.

It is, in point of fact, a very gendered group behavior.

The technical term is relational aggression—colloquially known as “mean girl” behavior. It peaks in females between fifth and eighth grades, as they are acclimating to more advanced social milieus. It’s not the exclusive purview of females, but stereotype (and scientific literature) suggests that women are more keenly attuned to policing and conforming to social norms.

Relational aggression takes the form of gossip, innuendo, and reputation destruction. It is a way of controlling and shaping the social environment particularly suited to the verbally acute and physically frail. And, generally speaking, women’s prowess skews toward the verbal and social, as men’s skews toward the physical and spatial.

I also take this to mean that women shape society to a greater extent than they are credited. All the same, the predominance of male physical dominance and sexual aggression justifies women in taking a hard line against male advances and entitlements.

As one respondent to my tweets wrote:

Once women are past the age of 25ish, we’re generally pretty good at distinguishing creepy from friendly.

When you’re 14 it’s not so clear.

Creeps are unfortunately very good at what they do.

What, then, distinguishes the creep from the friend? Speaking from the male point of view, it hinges on expectation. As a teen and into my early twenties, expectation drove a great deal of my relationships with prospective partners—and for a time (a very brief and very chaotic time) I somehow supposed every unattached woman was a prospect—and so my flirtations were off balance, and meant to evoke not friendship, but longing. That period—about six months or so of my 21st year—taught me that chasing every prospect depleted my own value; that treating women as puzzles to be unlocked (less so than fortresses to be conquered), which started as a game, turned everything about me into a calculation, lacking real heart, let alone valiant virtue.

As a teen I pined for women, idolized women, projected my own feelings onto women. During that season of flings I learned first my own power to evoke response, then I learned that no one would trust me, and I couldn’t trust my feelings, if I centered myself solely on securing a series of sweet brief bouts of cheap sensation.

I got burnt, for good measure. And retracted from public life. Moving across America and finding myself working at a preschool—which was my day job for the next decade plus. The saying goes that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. A stupid saying but what I wound up teaching and learning while working with children was how to be a human.

And I did feel a gnawing unease, being a 24 year old man working with 3 and 4 year olds. The stigma of a why a man would do that sort of work comes from at least two sides: one side that doesn't think men should be entrusted with children, and one side that thinks there’s more manly work for men to do. That decade in charge of children taught me loads about the human condition—which I will divulge more of as this trove of essays expands—but for now I want to use that experience to show how my expectation of and for and toward women was altered.

For one thing, I began to see the adult in the child and the child in the adult. My understanding of humans deepened to recognize the inviolable soul nested in each of us, groping for means to express itself—and my view broadened to recognize we are always unfolding to ourselves and one another in miraculous ways, when allowed. I recognized the vibrant diversity of our personalities—and yet still a sacred charge that is distinct between the sexes. I also had to learn massive amounts of patience, but lastly, a few years later, when working in the toddler room (1 to 3 year olds) I learned how to put a child down to sleep:

If you still your heart, and detach yourself from any expectation, worry, want, or discomfort, you become a nest the child enters and finds rest inside—and being that sort of space for another is the height of intimacy, the depth of trust.

That is somewhat of what I meant by writing “Boundaries can be lowered without being violated.” And while I don’t begrudge any of the offended strangers for calling that a red flag or me a creep for writing it, my point is that, despite all the bad men and mad women out there, good men and good women build, sustain, and beautify society, by lowering their guard and building up trust.

And sometimes—sometimes—a compliment is just a compliment.