As an isolated incident, it's charming. When it's every day of your life, it gets to be upsetting. Especially when past experiences have included more than on incident where the charming line was followed by anger and insults when it wasn't properly appreciated.

Ask your female friends if it's ever happened to them. I expect a large majority of them will be able to tell you a story.

Here's the best way I've been able to come up with, to get a feel for it. Suppose you have a nice watch. When somebody says, "Nice watch!", you say, "Thanks". But when you start meeting more than one person who won't stop talking about your watch, you get a little antsy. When somebody follows up with "Give me your fucking watch!" you start to think about leaving it at home some times.

Except that when you're a woman, you can never leave that at home.

This experience really isn't just about her. It's something practically all women experience. She seems to have just assumed her audience would share that context -- perhaps a side effect of being in academia.

I still get flashes of the traumatic day when I was in the kitchen area at work making myself a cup of tea and one of the female employees came in and said "You are a strong and tall man, can you get that heavy box from the top shelf for me".

I think this is one of those cases where a strong majority of the population in question can handle the interactions just fine, but the ones who can not are extremely vocal about it. The complainers get their way and company policy is changed for everybody. Many people go "well, it was for the best I guess", but for others it is some whiner ruining the fun for everybody. In extreme cases we have national examples where people's entire careers have ended over a tasteless but largely harmless joke told decades earlier (See: Al Franken) and that kind of threat feels scary.

It sounds like from your perspective, being better looking than their co-workers is a good thing. By and large, men are going to find women better looking than other men. That means the "better looking" comment is directly pointing out that the recipient of the comment is a woman.

This article is talking specifically about the ways in which it is detrimental to be a tradeswoman. So in this context, being a woman makes it more difficult for this person to their job.

Looking at another example of something that would make being a tradesperson difficult: Would you call it harassment if customers were consistently making flippant remarks about a co-worker that was missing a hand?

I often wonder what my life would be like if I'd been told as a child that I would face discrimination. Would I attribute every failure, rejection, misfortune, and unfair treatment to systematic discrimination? I think I probably would.

> If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.

Especially seen that people pushing for this to be considered harassment are the exact same demographic closing their eyes when it's pointed to them that number of actual rapes are going through the roof in Europe.

White men joking about a woman looking good: harassment. White women getting raped: eyes closed, don't want to hear about it.

And of course the overlap between polite people complimenting women that they're good looking and actual rapists is approximately zero.

Priorities, priorities.