This…..makes me super uncomfortable. His alleged reason for doing it is so he can understand what women deal with when wearing leggings, but that’s obviously not what he’s really trying to do. He set out to make this a joke, not to try to empathize by experiencing the shame, confusion, or actual feelings that come with being objectified. He’s drawing the sexual gaze and then using his (muscular cis) male privilege to ward off that attention by standing up and showing off his bulging biceps and “male” face, which women usually can’t do, so this is actually just an exercise of his male privilege. He’s not experiencing what it’s really like to be casually objectified, to have to shut up and take it because you actually can’t fight back. Because that wouldn’t be funny, would it? It wouldn’t be funny if he actually were helpless, if the objectification and street harassment continued till he felt unsafe going outside wearing any clothing that showed his body. So to me this sort of feels like a cis man just joking about the sexual objectification of women and saying “Haha now I understand”. I know the joke is supposed to be about the men being “caught out” looking at him, but he’s not doing what he set out to do, at all.
And the parts where he actually tries to start fights by playing on their gay panic by sexually harassing them until they become violent? Their experiences with him here just mean that now they’re more likely to actually attack actual gay men or trans women later because now it’s been PROVEN to them that male-reading people wearing “women’s clothes” are actually out to mock and entrap them. He is playing into stereotypes about gay men and trans women here—that they’re predatory, that they’re trying to trick “innocent straight men” into looking at them and becoming gay…..and then he’s making comedy out of the fact that these men are literally willing to attack a complete stranger for “making them homosexual.” That’s not funny to me, that’s terrifying, because I live every day with the fear that happening to me or somebody I know.
