https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4.pdf

Paper itself above. Need a deeper reading with my notes but on the surface the stats are so-so. They check normality, but don't confirm linearity (use of pmcc will not be valid without - there are also a few other conditions to check for hypothesis testing with PMCC if memory serves), use of a continuous test (PMCC, ANOVA, unpaired t's) for discrete (likert) data is also little controversial, but generally condoned.

As for the conclusion, not a psych phd so I'll assume they know their stuff!

Thank you!

"You. Pick up that can."

Welcome to city 17

You said it. I compared notes, once, with my partner at the time, who occasionally dressed a bit flamboyant. Being shouted at made him feel annoyed and sad, which sucks, but he thought that put him on the same level as me.

The difference was he could recall each time he was catcalled, and was surprised to hear it happened just about daily to me. Even more surprised to hear that sometimes when I didn't respond, guys have followed me and kept shouting. Sometimes in groups. Extremely surprised to hear that on a few occasions I've actually had to run from these groups.

Catcalling is easy to ignore, but considering I literally had to run from strangers, I still slide my keys between my knuckles and get ready to sprint whenever I hear it.

I had an extremely similar experience. It was astonishing how quick people assume you are a woman simply by having decent enough grammar and aren't a shitty person.

At least in an MMO it's not dangerous feeling. If anything, it kind of makes it easier to lead groups since you can get people to just do stuff with you. Not great insight into being a women though, people don't generally accept female leadership irl.

I know what we are doing today, Ferb.

A running joke could be renaming the genders as "solo" and "co-op" for MMOs.

While my first reaction was the same - "how would they react in male avatars?", that doesn't seem to be the point at all of this study but rather the potential of VR to change the subjects behaviour in real life by helping empathy along.

Introduction
[...]
Peck et al.13 found that White participants, after embodying a Black avatar, showed a reduction in implicit racial bias.
This principle has been extended to the context of gender-based violence.
Seinfeld et al.14 had male offenders embody a female victim of domestic violence, finding that the VR experience significantly improved their ability to recognize fear in female facial expressions—a deficit common in violent offenders15.
Similarly, other studies using 360° videos and immersive scenarios of sexual harassment have reported marked increases in empathy and changes in violent attitudes among participants16.
[...]
These findings collectively affirm the potential of VR as a rehabilitative tool for enhancing emotional understanding and mitigating harmful behaviors.

Building on this foundation, the present study utilizes immersive VR to provide male participants with a firsthand experience of catcalling.
While previous research has often focused on overt violence, our goal is to investigate the affective response to a more commonplace form of street harassment. We hypothesize that this embodied experience will elicit morally salient emotions like disgust and anger19,20,21.
By inducing this moral discomfort, the intervention aims to foster self-awareness and encourage a reconsideration of the behavior’s impact22, serving as a potential strategy to promote behavioral change.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-19418-4

And catcalled by M & F I guess?

Black Like Me was eye opening for a lot of people. Even John Howard Griffin, who did blackface to understand the black southern experience, and already fought for civil rights, was surprised by how he was treated.

If I remember it right, at the beginning of his journey he had to beg and find help because he was refused service when trying to cash his travellers checks.

Yeah, but the point here is that they were posing as women with female looking avatars. One guy even says that he would have reacted differently if it was male:

Another participant reported that he would have reacted differently had he been in the role of a man, but since he was embodying a female character, he chose instead to walk away.

My SO praises Sweden so much, nobody catcalls and people only bother you because you don't have your bicycle helmet and that (only) annoys all genders.

The language of the post says something that cannot be (meaningfully) derived without a control group of people that didn't experience a counterpoint: "... the situation of being a young woman alone at night in a subway station being enough to generate the sense of fear."

As I understand it, everyone in the study experienced all of that in combination, so any subset of those things may have been enough to generate a sense of fear: being alone, being at night, being a young woman, or being on a subway station.

The common objection I see is that everyone feels fear alone on a subway station at night, so the statement is misleading. That matches my personal experience, so I also see that statement as misleading, regardless of any work done by the study.

Norah Vincent. She was particularly beloved by the manosphere because her experience pretending to be a man for 18 months (not just a few weeks) lead to her "conversion" from a feminist to realising that men too have their own problems.

Thought, she personally was already libertarian, and highly critical of trans people, so she reads more like a TERF imo.

Sadly passed away via assisted suicide a few years ago.

Norah Vincent - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norah_Vincent

I don't know of any studies, but I have heard anecdotes from trans men that say the same thing.

I once read a very well put together comment by a trans man on the subject of their experience with this before and after transitioning, and basically, because men are never supposed to show emotion, their relationships lack a level of emotional intimacy at a fundamental level. They said that their relationships with other men felt hollow and largely superficial.

It's also why men seemingly mistake friendship from women as flirting so frequently - because women can have a true emotional connection in their friendships with other women, but men can only get that same level of connection in romantic relationships or life or death scenarios such as war. Women also often treat men more coldly than they do other women as a result of this to avoid being mistaken for flirting with every man that they talk to (or because they view men as dangerous).

I would look at the study, while the problem is 100% real and anyone with any empathy should realize is real, to say the study supports it is a bit far fetched. Looking at the scenarios they created and the avatars, it's all a bit uncanny valley and backrooms sort of feeling. Sort of ps2 graphics but in vr.

E: I think the conclusion puts it best, vr is a good tool for showing people what a lot of women have to deal with, and how terrible it can feel. It's like rp for people who have trouble empathizing or don't get why it matters.

There’s a numerical asymmetry to stuff like this. You could have only 1 in 1000 men be catcallers yet a single catcaller could catcall thousands of women on their way to work (stereotypically from a construction site as they walk by).

The study checked this and found that the participants claimed to have no history of catcalling.

The study was intended to see if men would experience greater empathy with women following a VR experience of catcalling.

Peer pressure is a real thing and telling other men that their behaviour is not OK can have real impact.