Actress Jameela Jamil of “The Good Place” shared on Twitter about an upsetting encounter she had while shopping with a friend.
The actress said Sunday that during the outing, a man ogled her and approached her to give her his number. When she declined and explained she has a boyfriend, the man responded defensively.
“Man then threatens my career, saying I better remember that I rejected him. And then Shouts at me that I’m low class...” she wrote.
As the star tweeted, dudes should really just ...
While the encounter sounds extremely upsetting, it’s a scenario familiar to many women, as social media users pointed out. Many shared their own stories of being harassed and subsequently shamed when they attempted to stand up for themselves.
According to Kimberly Resnick Anderson, a sex therapist and a clinical instructor of psychiatry at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, women are socialized to deal with rejection in a more internal way. However, men are conditioned to externalize rejection.
“Young men often assume that malice is involved in the rejection,” Resnick Anderson told HuffPost last year. “It’s easier to justify an aggressive reaction if you can convince yourself that you were intentionally ‘wronged.’”
Dudes, do better.