one of the lovely ladies I’ve been seeing got covid & she’s like “maybe you didn’t catch it?” Girl I was not a ‘didnt catch it’ amount of space away when we were- wheres that tweet about the vaxxed guy. you know the one
this is from a “manipulation advice” video and it’s just so fucking funny to me. why didn’t I think of responding to insults like this
I can’t remember where I got the information now, but apparently if you stare silently for at least 4 seconds it triggers a feeling of rejection which I don’t have to tell you is uncomfortable and makes most people backpedal pretty quickly and awkwardly.
Immediately going concerned/extremely polite always throws people off their game, it’s beautiful.
The Quiet Stare Of Disappointment is also super effective, indeed .
My sister and I were walking across a car park.
Random bloke: Maybe if you walked more you wouldn’t be so fat
My sister stops dead, stares him in the eye and goes: Is everything alright at home?
I’ve never seen a man’s face turn to horror so fast
We just walked to her car and drove off
The silent stare is so effective. I learned about it in social psychology in undergrad, and have often used it to great effect. Probably the best example is when I went to sign the papers on the car I was buying—I had already worked out a price and my trade-in with the salesmen the day before—and they decided they were going to take $1000 off the value of my trade-in. (I want to emphasize that I was buying a 10+ year old car; I ended up paying $8k total.)
“No,” I said. “That doesn’t work for me. If you’re unwilling to honor the deal we made, I’m not buying a car from you.”
Well, they talk for a living. So they talked. Here I am, a young woman on my own, and these two men at the dealership are giving me all the reasons they couldn’t possibly honor the deal we made yesterday.
So I sat. I didn’t say a word. I just stared at them.
They kept talking, trying to get a reaction out of me. After about 10 seconds, they abandoned all pretense of logical arguments and started hammering pathos. They weren’t even buying my old car from me for the dealership; it was a personal favor for which they were using their own hard-earned money to help this poor guy at church who just got out of rehab and his house burned down and his children exploded and his dog left him for another man, etc etc
I didn’t say a word. I just stared at them.
They began falling apart. They continued trying to hustle me, but their confidence left them. I think they might have been sweating.
Within five minutes they caved and signed the papers for our original deal.
I have been told for years I am intimidating, and by people who had never even seen me angry. Just in general, intimidating. This absolutely baffled me until a friend one day pointed at me and said — “This! Right now! You’re being intimidating!”
Friends, I was staring silently at someone while inwardly flailing desperately to come up with a response to something they’d said that wasn’t overly rude but also was holding my ground. In my mind, I was being hellishly awkward. I couldn’t summon any charm, I couldn’t figure out a sentence to string together. Silence spooled out horrifyingly between us as I got farther and farther away from being articulate and became more and more flustered by this failure to respond. From the outside, I guess, I just looked like a stone cold bitch waiting for them to get their shit together, lol.
I still don’t think I’m intimidating but you know I’ll take it.
People who are hard on yourselves: may I humbly offer you the 100 floors of frights philosophy?
In the SNL David S. Pumpkins sketch, a couple is on a ride called “100 Floors of Frights,” where they see a different scare on each floor, and at one point they complain about many of those floors being lame. And then Kenan Thompson delivers this line of deep philosophical wisdom: “Hey look—it’s 100 floors of frights, they not all gonna be winners.”
My husband and I use this line all the time to give ourselves grace. For instance, I’m a good cook, but when I make a dinner that doesn’t turn out well, I will literally say out loud, “It’s 100 floors of frights—they’re not all gonna be winners,” or just “Look it’s 100 floors of frights.”
It just means when you do a thing a whole lot, there’s bound to be some instances that are bad. You don’t have to be good at the thing 100% of the time. You can’t be good 100% of the time. Some of the 100 floors are gonna suck. It doesn’t negate your skill at creating the rest of the 100 floors.
You can use this for anything: art you make, performances, school assignments, days at work, outfits, sex sessions, literally anything that you are too hard on yourself about when it doesn’t go great. Listen to Kenan Thompson and remember that it’s impossible for them all to be winners, and that’s okay.
My husband and I use the phrase this way ALL THE TIME. It’s helpful!
Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.
You’re gonna make stuff again. You’re gonna make stuff you’re proud of. You’re gonna make stuff you’re excited to share. You’re going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you’re stuck in now. You’re going to have awesome ideas, and you’re going to make them into reality. You’re going to create again. You’re still an artist. You’re still a writer. You’re still home to the same passion you had before. You’ll find it again. It’s not gone. It’s just resting. Let it rest. You’re going to make stuff again. I promise.
