Men are routinely mocked online for being cringe desperate DMs, awkward self-expression, bad fashion, performative behavior. Sometimes it’s deserved, sometimes exaggerated, but it’s openly acceptable. Men are expected to self-police before acting.

What’s rarely acknowledged is that women engage in equally performative, awkward, and objectively strange behavior online, yet criticism of it is treated as illegitimate by default. For example:

Women regularly complain about unsolicited sexual messages or the occasional explicit image and that’s fair.

But at the same time, men routinely receive unsolicited semi-nudes, sexualized photos, or “hey 😊 support my page?” messages from women they never engaged with.

Unsolicited is unsolicited. The difference is the framing: harassment vs. empowerment. Men filming themselves crying with or without a tripod would be mocked into dust.

Ladies have also routinely risk relationships to follow a new social trend.

Women doing the same thing are praised for vulnerability.

If a man stopped a group at dinner and said, “Hold on ,no one eat until I get the perfect shot,” people would call it controlling or a red flag. When women do it, it’s normalized and expected. If a man dressed in a way that visibly outlined his genitals in public, intent wouldn’t matter,he’d be labeled embarrassing or inappropriate.

When women’s anatomy is equally visible, pointing it out is called sexualization rather than observation.

There’s also a cultural irony worth noting. Women used to joke that men would have sex with anything “with a pulse.”

Fast forward to now, and women are openly online comparing pulse settings on their sex toys like tech specs yet questioning the cultural shift is treated as more cringe than the behavior itself.

cringe is being selectively enforced

Same behaviors. Different moral lenses. Pretending that asymmetry doesn’t exist isn’t progressive it’s dishonest.