What Happens When Girls Decide to Accept and Agree With Compliments They Receive Online

18-year-old Gweneth Bateman had a problem that many women experience online...if a male messaged her with a compliment, if she didn't reply, she was critised for not replying.

She said that most boys who critised her felt they were owed a response.

“If a guy messages me I usually don’t reply because most of the time they are complete strangers to me,” she told BuzzFeed News. “When they don’t get a reply out of me it usually ends up with them calling me ‘rude’ or a ‘bitch’."

She ran an experiment she'd seen on Tumblr: If a boy messaged her with a compliment, she would reply with a warmer, nicer answer, agreeing with and accepting the comment.

Here are some examples that herself and other women (who shared their images on Tumblr) received when they started accepting compliments:

social experiment: whenever a boy compliments you, agree with him. pic.twitter.com/rb8S4VQMCj

— gwen (@spiritualvodka) January 11, 2015

“As predicted the response is still the same: hateful,” Bateman said.

A Tumblr user, Claire Boniface (whose images are pictured above) told Buzzfeed: “I’ve received an incredible amount of both support and negative responses for this, from insults to people telling me they hope I get cancer”.

Bateman said the responses that she and other women had received perfectly showed how uncomfortable boys are “when women own their own awesomeness”.

“The response to the tweet has been mostly negative,” she said. “I think this is because when faced with information that they dislike, people feel the need to lash out.

“For many men, beauty, coolness, [and] desirability are gifts they alone can bestow upon women. They get baffled, even aggressive when you show you’ve known you possess those things all along.”

“It just seems a little crazy to me how people believe is perfectly OK for women to doubt a compliment they receive, [but] when they actually believe the compliment they receive, they get shamed and branded as ‘vain’ or ‘conceited’.”

why is it okay for you to tell a girl she's pretty, but as soon as she believes it she's "full of herself" and "vain"?

— gwen (@spiritualvodka) January 11, 2015

When she shared the screengrabs on Twitter, she got many responses like this: 

What do you think of the experiment? 

Source: Buzzfeed