This is a photo on my (f28)Instagram. My brother in law (m42) reacted to it in DM, and said the above. I feel I replied normally, but now my sister (f39) apparently saw the message and is saying that I engaged in hot discussions with her man! I am myself married and I feel so bad now. I told my husband who said I did nothing wrong. Any idea how I could approach my sister ?
You are totally right and I’m mad at myself for having written that. I replied too quickly. She thinks I wanted to engage on a chat about the size of my titties 😓
How the fuck is one supposed to respond to this bullshit? We try to avoid uncomfortable situations even after other people have already created them, so we tend to entertain people a bit too long.
Of course in retrospect it would have been better to not engage with him at all, but it’s hard to completely understand what’s going on at the spot, and as humans we feel a need to respond.
Don’t be mad at yourself. You’re not the creep here.
For the record for anybody else reading this in the future- if my BIL (who my sister married when I was 11) had said that to me, I would’ve replied, “Ew, what the fuck are you doing?” And immediately called my sister.
I get that we are giving grace to the person who received the thirst message, that’s fine, but you don’t have to “play nice” to anyone making comments about your body. If you need to, stop and think about what you’d want your sister to say if your husband was being a creepy asshole. (My sister would just want me to call her immediately. The ‘ew’ message is gratis.)
Yeah, that would be the better thing to do, but women tend to have been trained to try to salvage men’s fragile emotions in situations like this.Especially when similar things happen in real life it’s all about trying to escape without making the man upset/escalating the situation, and a text message from someone you know can feel similar.
I don’t think it’s a good thing to try to maintain civility, but I think it’s the natural and understandable reaction from anyone who is not prepared for this kind of situation.
I think it’s a common pattern that men do unacceptable things and that women are left questioning their own behaviour afterwards. On a societal level I think it contributes to a shortage of accountability for men.
Guy was being an absolute creeper and you should have said “what the fuck?” But instead you did as you have been programmed and tried to maintain civility and not embaress the man who decided to harass you unprompted and continue when you gave the indication that you were uncomfortable.
You did nothing wrong here and now it’s your fault because you are the woman in the exchange. Your sister would do welll to be an ally but if she doesn’t want to you ought to ask her how many DM’s her husband has sent out like that to other woman that she hasn’t seen. Then tell her to fuck off, tell him to fuck off and block him on whatever platforms you share.
Fuck that’s so infuriating.
You even called it out as an uncomfortable question. You’re as far from wrong here as one can be. I hope your sister comes around and can have an equally uncomfortable conversation with her husband.
Oh no absolutely not, don’t be mad at yourself - you replied in a very normal way, and haven’t done anything wrong – his intentions are colouring the chat.
I’m trying to understand what were his intentions though. Like, what was his best possible outcome? That I would say “hey here is what they look like”?! It’s really weird. I don’t get. And he is a smart guy normally
I don’t think he was thinking particularly far ahead, and it’s really not overly deep; he’s being a perv. You haven’t done anything wrong.
He is some flavor of perv or addict. He probably does or thinks about doing these type of things all the time, but he chose you because you’re family which gave him some sort of an “in” and more likely to respond to him than if he just DM’ed any other woman he’s creeping on.
His intention imo was just masturbatory fodder and it probably wasn’t much more than that. He may be smart normally but if he’s perving or an addict then his judgement is being clouded. And him trying to talk to you like this is an escalation because he was trying to establish some type of connection rather than do his creeping in silence.
What your sister should realize that if he’s done this to you then he absolutely has been creeping on other women. Your sister should be concerned about that because if he isn’t sending creepy messages to other women already then he will be.
What do you mean he’s an addict?
I mean that he has shown bad judgement and couldn’t help himself from messaging his SIL in an escalation that is clearly against the bounds of his relationship with the sister. So in the case of an addict he would be addicted to the feeling of doing this type of behavior. People can get addicted to all sorts of things, behaviors or activities. In this case i think he “couldn’t help himself” from making a bad decision, which does show to me on some level he could be addicted to some part of this.
It’s not like he had some sort of master plan with this. He just found it exciting to be creeping off to instagram pictures of his wife’s sister, and figured he could take it to the next level by contacting you about it. The fact that it’s a fundamentally bad idea is part of what makes it exciting to him.
But it’s a basic photo… I mean it’s not like my titties were out ! Or that I was in a bikini !
It’s a normal photo of you looking normal in a normal dress. It’s not that he couldn’t find juicier things on the internet, he just finds random pictures of you to be exciting because he knows it’s wrong. Combine that with an apparent lack of impulse control and you got yourself a nice little red flag.
There’s no point in looking for something you did “wrong” here. It’s not about the photo, and it’s not about your response. It’s about him, and nothing else.
There’s no picture you could have posted on Instagram which would have made this somehow your fault. Women post bikini pictures in social media all the time without it being an open invitation for harassment.