Does Your Attitude Need An Adjustment? How Men And Women Respond To Criticism

So a while back I did a video, my first foray into like viral level videos. I got like 4+ million views, actually close to 7 million views across all the different social media platforms. And it was a video I did, actually technically it was more than one video. I did two videos where I asked men and women both, what would you do if your partner came to you and said, uh, your physical appearance is no longer attractive to me? I made one video for women and one video for men, and I tabulated the results. And then I put the results into a video where I summarized everything and showed that there was this wild disparity between what I called, in my very subjective and biased point of view, positive responses to that question, which in my mind is, oh, okay, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Hurts my feelings, but I don't wanna lose my family. I don't wanna lose you as a spouse. Let's work together to fix this. How do we fix this issue? What can we do? Often in that very pretty realistic scenario, often the cause of the change in physicality for most is weight gain, for example. And one of the most common causes of weight gain is childbirth. You know, when women go through childbirth, just a whole host of things happen. Hormonally, you're often not able to do a lot of physical exercise immediately after the birth of the child, the stress, the anxiety. Some women go into a postpartum depression. And voilà, before you know it, you're 200 pounds overweight. I know it doesn't just happen like that, but it sure seems to be. So in fact, I put that little blurb in there on the women's video saying, the man says to the woman, ever since the babies came into the picture, you've gained a lot of weight and you're not yourself anymore, etc., etc. A lot of women pointed out to me, like, you put that blurb in there about the baby, dude, women are going to be super pissed off. And sure enough, I created a graphic to show the disparity between the men and women responses, and it was something like 80-some-odd percent of the men were positive. You know, they said like, thank you for bringing my attention, I'll hit the gym, don't want to lose my wife, my kids, my family. And with the women, their responses were basically over 90% of the women said something to the effect of, hey dude, you can go fuck yourself. Kind of interesting. So anyway, the women pointed out not a very good scientific study, um, because of the difference between the two videos. You mentioned the baby thing, and I was like, you know what, you're exactly right. That was the big boo-boo on my part. I tried to make it realistic for both videos, but it's not necessarily fair. And if you're trying to compare the stats between the two, they got to be exactly right. So I think it was about 6 months or so later, I created a second set of videos, two videos. One for women, one for men, and I made them exactly the same. They were exactly the same video except I just, at the beginning, I said, "Women," and at the beginning of the other one I said, "Men." And then I tabulated the results. Exact same scenario. What if your partner came to you and said physically you're not attractive anymore, blah, blah, blah. And the results were pretty much the same. So I said, well, what do we do with this information? It was pointed out to me again by the ladies in trying to explain the discrepancy. And again, this is a very valid criticism. As women, they are judged on their appearance way more so than men are. You know, in the mating game, they look at a man, they go, what kind of job do you have? What kind of status do you have? Are you going to be a good father, etc., etc.? And somewhere way down the line comes, what do you look like? Well, for women, the observation, at least by women, is the overall sentiment is No, we're judged on what we look like, like, A, number one. And then our personality and good mother, and it comes way down the line. All you got to do is look at things like cosmetic surgery, and a lot of beauty products and everything else are all aimed to women, and they're all in an effort to make the women look more youthful and attractive. While women can say, no, no, no, we're trying just to look good to feel better about ourselves, you know, you just peel back layers of the onion and they're feeling better about themselves. Why? Because society will in turn accept them because they are prettier, they have less wrinkles, and they look more youthful, et cetera, et cetera. Right or wrong, it seems to be the overall sentiment from society, women and looks. So women, you got a point there. So I think it's been over a year now since I did that little quote unquote experiment, and I said, let's do something that doesn't involve looks. Let's do two different videos again, exactly the same. I learned my lesson the first time, right? And let's do it, a video about what if your partner came up to you and said, your attitude stinks, like you need to fix your attitude. Something that, by the way, from a male perspective, and I'm sure a lot of men can relate to this, that's not an unheard of statement by the women in our lives. Hey, you're grumpy. Hey, you're being an asshole. Cut it out. Hey, that was very insensitive. Hey, what's going on with you? You know, I know you're stressed at work, but you're being an asshole to me and the kids and cut it out. Not an unheard of thing by any means. And let's be honest, that's good feedback to get from our partner. Sometimes we gotta snap out of it and they go, "Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. It's, you know, the work thing and I may get laid off. I'm being a dick. Sorry about that." So I took that very realistic scenario and I said, "What if men, what if you heard this from your wife? How do you respond? And women, what if you heard this from your husband? How do you respond?" So after I posted the two videos, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Gave it a few days and I went to the comments. And unfortunately, eh, not that great, to be honest with you, because I first checked Facebook and I went right to the guys. Not a lot of views on the video. And went to the comments and it was pretty much like what I saw with the other video about the looks. You had the comments like this: When you put it in such a mature and assertive way like that, I personally would be receptive to what you are saying and be willing to take a look in the mirror. So interesting. The guy says it's mature and assertive. Men tend to respond to mature and assertive. It's kind of like when I get messages from ladies about my book, The Dead Bedroom Fix. They— it's a book for men, but some ladies, you know, get sneaky and they read it, and they're like, okay, I read the book, I agree with everything you say in the book, I would love to give this to my man, how do I do it? And I'm like, ladies, it's pretty simple. Handbook to man and say, "Hey dummy, if you don't, you know, read this book and take it to heart and do what it says, you're at very big risk of losing your wife." Pretty direct, pretty blunt, gets the job done. That's how us men, that's how we work, right? And that's what Jonathan's saying here. He would appreciate hearing this from his wife. Interesting. Here's another positive comment from Tom. "Were my female to make such a statement, I would consider it." 'And if correct, I would try to change my situation to alleviate these negative reactions. Were my female to make these statements a number of times, I would change my female.' Okay, all right. So first of all, female, kind of odd. It sounds like we're talking about an animal here or something. But it's a mix, good and bad, right? Like, I'm gonna go, if this is true, then I'll fix it. If she says it over and over again, I'm gonna replace her. And then we have what I would consider like a negative reaction by Quentin here. I'd say goodbye to them, or maybe nothing at all, and turn and walk away. Nothing is worth having your partner or spouse crap on you constantly. If they do, give them the boot and then start working on yourself. Be honest with you, when I look at all the comments by all the men on these videos across, you know, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, again, most of them were what I would consider pretty positive. But again, not a lot of response, maybe dozens of comments versus previously when it was like thousands of comments on the other video. So a little disappointing. But let's jump over to the women, shall we? Stephanie says, if he came home and said that to me, then I'd have to sit down and evaluate why the heck I'm acting like that. Maybe see a therapist if I can't figure it out myself. Ask him to start telling me when he notices I act like that so I can check in and see what's going on at that moment. I imagine some people who act like that don't even realize it until their attention is called to it. Holy poop, guys. That's it. Awesome. Wonderful, right? So maybe we're on to something. Maybe when the ladies looked at the previous video and said the reason you got such a negative, you know, for lack of a better term, lack of accountability kind of response from women is because you really touched a nerve with that whole looks thing. And the looks thing is a real button pusher for women. That's why it was so negative. So the first comment I saw by women was from Stephanie here on Facebook, and we all saw pretty positive, taking responsibility, taking that criticism, you know, as it was intended. Bravo, Stephanie. So let's continue on, see what else we got. Maybe this is a sign that things are going to be overall positive from the ladies. Mm-hmm. You say she also works. Are you helping her feel less overwhelmed? Do you support? It is a conversation that won't end well with a person that starts a conversation like this. Why not ask how you can help take some of the weight off her, how you help lift her up instead of tearing her down? Better yet, look around and find ways to do this without asking her. It is your house and kids too. Okay, here we go. We're going down a theme which is not unheard of in my comments. I see this across a lot of different videos, not just these kind of videos, but it is one of an overall theme of men don't help around the house, men don't help with kids, they just sit back and I guess play video games or whatever, and the women are overburdened by the responsibility of the family and the home life and everything falling on their shoulders. That's how a lot of women feel. And this is the tip of the iceberg, what Michelle says here for that sentiment. Probably she doesn't have a partner. She works full-time, takes care of the house and kids all by herself, then you want her to wait on you. Maybe you should do some self-reflection and take responsibility for your part in her attitude. Reason why your wife is negative equals you don't help her with the kids, house, and cooking. Tell him, quote, okay, enjoy your single life. Obviously he's not interested in finding out if there's a reason why, says Bitch Spice Latte. There's always a reason why this behavior happens, and it's most likely because of the man. So I'd be dishing out all the things he does or doesn't do to make me act this way. And then the eyeballs. I'm not sure what that means. Yikes, there are so many ways to have this conversation. If you don't have the ability to gently correct your wife while still being loving towards them, you probably need some work yourself. So we see, uh, there's two themes here. I'm not going to read all the messages, of which there were hundreds from the ladies. I didn't tabulate it, but it's safe to say that well over 90% of them are of the what I call negative category. And they can be broken down into two different categories. One is men don't do shit around the house. Whether that's objectively right or not, that's how they feel. Okay. And thing two is the method in which the message was projected was offensive. It hurt their feelings. It was too abrasive. It was too direct. Women, what if your partner came up to you one day and said, You need to have a seat. Let's talk. Your attitude really stinks. You are negative like 90% of the time, and you didn't used to be. You complain constantly about work, you complain about the house, and you complain about the kids 90% of the time. And all that does is make me not want to come home to such a negative person. I don't want to spend the limited number of days I have left on this planet with somebody who is so overtly negative, like 90% of the time. Nobody would. So you need to change your attitude and find out how to be more positive. How do you react to such a statement from your spouse? So we can see the dichotomy here, the men saying direct, yay, thank you. You know, men don't like subtlety. Men don't like vagueness. Men don't like things that dance around the issue. Like, you know, women are very cognizant of, "I don't wanna hurt the guy's feelings. He's a pretty sensitive dude. He kind of flies off the handle sometimes if he says I nag at him a lot. So let me dance around the issue and, you know, weave and bob and weave my way around it and maybe he'll get the idea." And often the men don't. We work on direct. Versus the lady saying, "Such a direct approach." is abrasive, offensive, and me no likey. So men, you don't do much, and if you come to us with issues and try to communicate directly, you gotta be a little careful, a little subtle, and a little more soft about it. Otherwise, we will react abrasively. And as you can see in the messages, by the way, the majority of the responses came from— number 2 was Facebook, and number 1 in a big way, for whatever reason, was Instagram. Hundreds of replies from the ladies on Instagram. And again, about 90% of them were the, the, the, the, of the variety of the two categories I just mentioned. Men don't do anything. And, um, you're being an asshole by presenting in this way. Here's the difficulty, ladies, and this is kind of a 30,000-foot view of this, but let's try to have a, an adult discourse here. One is egalitarianism above all when it comes to the workplace, when it comes to the home, when it comes to whatever, men, women have equal footing is what we hear often. But then we get mixed messages again in the workplace, in the home, and so forth, which is, you know how you approach and how you communicate with your fellow man. You know how you, man, want to be communicated to. You know how you like it, blunt, direct, to the point. You know how you like it, like fill in the blank. Well, I, woman, am different. I need more subtlety. I need more softness. I need more this. I need more that. You have to— you can't just go right from step 1 to 2. You got to do 1A, B, C, D before you get to 2. And it's— we're way more complicated. That's how we men interpret it. Therefore, we women are different yet equal. It, it doesn't quite work that way, ladies. It's a good way of your having your partner lose respect for you, as horrible as that may sound. Let me give you another example. This is a very real-world example that happened to me some 20-some-odd years ago. I worked for this giant multi-billion-dollar company. I worked in the corporate headquarters, and it was myself and a bunch of mostly youngish guys that worked in this department that did IT stuff, information technology stuff, and we used to travel all over the world doing IT stuff at our different dealerships for this large company. And we sat in a little cubicle farm together. It was like these cubicles all facing away from each other, and we were all kind of formed like these four corners of this, you know, cubicle area, if you will. And we would turn our chairs around and stare at each other, you know, we look at our monitors. And then when we have like a meeting together, we would just turn our chairs around and stare at each other in the four corners of this room and talk to each other about some work-related thing. And a way in which we kind of bonded, stress relief, whatever it was, was we had these little squishy stress balls and we would toss them to each other around the four corners, just pass them around, just having fun while we're talking about what if we did this. Boom, pass it to him and he squished the ball and he's like, no, but what if we did that? And no, no, no, what we need to do is this. And that's just how us guys in this group work together. And one day we were approached by somebody, if I remember right— again, this has been some 20-some-odd years ago— uh, HR person saying, um, a lady in the cubicle area next to yours is asking that you please stop throwing the squishy ball around. You know, we're like, why? It's not loud or anything. You can't hear it. It's— she doesn't See, we're not throwing it at her. We're in our little area. She's in her own little area. And she says because she was in a marriage before, she got divorced, if I'm remembering this right, and her ex-husband was abusive and he used to throw things at her. So when she sees people throwing things, it triggers her emotionally and it makes her very stressed and she can't come into work because of this. That's not necessarily a female thing though, let's be honest, right? That is an emotionally very sensitive person thing. It's an extreme example of what we're talking about here. That woman in that moment, let's call her Anne, Anne in that moment went from one of our peers to the person we kind of have to really walk on eggshells around. The person that we lost a little bit of respect for. As sad as that may sound, she's no longer quote unquote one of the guys. She went from one of the guys that we would pal around with to the lady that you can't throw squishy balls around. A lot of you ladies hearing that story may, may say like, yeah, well, just don't be an asshole. Just do you have to throw the squishy ball around? It's not the point. As something as innocuous and silly as throwing a squishy ball 6 feet over to my pal, and back and forth triggers somebody emotionally to the point where they can't work. Not good. The tie-in to this subject matter is I can't go to my partner and say, "Boy, your attitude stinks, man. You are just super negative 90% of the time. We got to do something about this because living with such a negative person is really, really wearing on me, and I don't know how much more I can do this." To most men hearing that, it's a 'Phew, thank you for being so blunt with me. That's what I needed to hear. High five, sister. Give me a hug. I love you. I'm gonna change my attitude.' And to a lot of women out there, to be honest, at least the women responding to my posts on the social media, 90% of them say, 'Go fuck yourself,' followed up with, 'You do nothing,' and, 'Your approach was mean.' I guess what I'm trying to say is, ladies, you gotta toughen up a bit here. If your dude is in fact not doing anything around the home, or you feel like you are doing too much compared to his too little, the discrepancy between your work levels is you're way up here and he's way down there, whatever it may be, it behooves you to take a page out of the man book and go, "Hey, dummy, notice how I just did 10 things around the house and notice how you were sitting on your butt playing video games." Don't do that. Shitty of you. You know what he'll do if he's a good man? He'll go, oh, oh shit. Okay, sorry. Yeah, you're right. And he will bounce, jump to attention and start doing stuff. Before you say, well, I shouldn't have to, you do. Sorry. At least if that's, you know, your dude and that's the case at your home. Yeah, sounds like you have to do that. Reality. Sorry, you married kind of a boyish kind of guy. At least now he needs somebody like his spouse to go, hey, The boyish shit you do, eh, not very nice. Time to adult it up a little bit here, dude. Some women, believe it or not, need to be told the same thing. I have a lot of guys who do like 90% of the housework and their wife tends to be, you know, probably she's depressed and she's just on her phone nonstop. And he's scared to tell her like, can you get off your phone please? 'Cause he doesn't want to upset her because he has learned over the years that approaching her with anything like that really sets her off. And I'm kind of seeing some of the same thing in my social media feed. Guys and gals, what do you think? Let's start with the ladies. I want to hear from the ladies. Am I way off base here? Am I being unfair? Is this egalitarianism even when it comes to, you know, verbal approaches, whatever? Is that kind of a silly point? Am I missing the bigger picture here? I know a lot of you are going to come back with, you're missing the whole thing about men not doing stuff around the house. I hear that again and again and again. And I'm not saying you're making it up. I'm not saying you're lying. It's just that I haven't seen it with my own eyes. I guess I'm in a weird spot. And my pal, Dr. Psych Mom, Dr. Samantha Rodman-White, and she's a psychologist, she always is in agreement with me when I bring up this topic. She's like, oh yeah, all my male clients, they do all kinds of domestic stuff around the house. They do everything. And the wife admits it. Yeah, it's men are more domestic than ever. I'm like, yeah, I've seen the same thing. So when I hear all these ladies coming to the comments saying my man does nothing, I'm like, where are all these men? Where do you live, ladies, like in the world that allows this? Maybe it's certain pockets of our country have this very kind of old-timey— I don't know how to say it, you know, woman does all housework, man does, you know, drinks his whiskey and watch television thing. You know, that was a thing for years, right? Maybe that's still going on in a lot of parts of the world I'm not aware of, but I've not seen it. And if, ladies, you're putting up with that, what are you doing? You know, you have power over that. You can change that, right? And again, like I say, hey dude, cut it out or leave said man and go find one who's not such an asshole. I don't know what to tell you. So anyway, long-winded way of saying, what's going on here, guys?