Gweneth Bateman, like many women online, finds that she gets a lot of unwanted and unsolicited compliments from men, so instead of not responding, which was her usual course of action, she changed tact and decided to accept them instead.

The idea came from a Tumblr page where the poster said she was conducting a social experiment, asking women to agree when they were complimented on social media or apps such as Tinder,  to see how the men giving the compliments reacted.

The motivation behind it was to gauge the reaction in contrast to when a woman didn't reply, in which scenario they often got a negative and sometimes abusive message back, and it seems that, unfortunately, a lot of the responses to this tactic were largely similar.

Speaking to BuzzFeed, Bateman said that "The response to the tweet has been mostly negative. I think this is because when faced with information that they dislike, people feel the need to lash out". Her tweets became hugely popular however, and were retweeted thousands of times, and encouraged others to weigh in on the topic, including student Katie Smith, who said "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".

The response that Bateman got to posting the messages she received online was also fairly unpleasant, with a lot of further abuse getting directed her way. 

Pic via Gweneth Bateman/Buzzfeed

Via BuzzFeed