Some people don’t want friendly relationships with their neighbors. One survey found that 65% of Americans hide from their neighbors, while 48% interact with them once a month or less.
One woman decided to shame her female neighbor for cleaning her house in workout clothes. The reason? Her husband was watching her through the window and it was making the wife uncomfortable.
But the neighbor stood her ground, refusing to let a woman dictate how she should dress in her own house and suggested she keep her husband in check instead.
RELATED:A woman got shamed by her neighbor for cleaning her house in revealing clothes
It turns out her husband was ogling the neighbor, but the wife chose to blame the woman
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Spying on neighbors may be more common than we think
The stalker tendencies the neighbor in this story is exhibiting are definitely worrisome. However, spying on your neighbor is a more common thing that people do than we might think.
In a 2014 UK survey by home security providers Yale, one in three adults admitted to spying on their neighbors. One in 10 even say they have been caught by their neighbor peering at them from a window.
However, most people say they don’t have any bad intentions. The most cited reason people check on their neighbors daily was ‘to check if they are all right.’ “This shows just how closely the people who live next to us are watching and the things that don’t go unnoticed,” Nigel Fisher of Yale told The Daily Mail.
Many neighbors also say they’re familiar with their neighbors’ schedules. They can tell when they leave and come home from work, if they’ve bought a new car, when and if they get food delivered, and so on.
It might be just neighborly nosiness, but some people have also done strange things in order to ‘check’ on their neighbors. 30% of the Britons surveyed admitted to watch their neighbors through the window out of a dark room so they wouldn’t be detected.
It’s ironic that most homeowners find their neighbors to be too nosy, too. Over a fifth of Britons seem to think so, and a third say that neighborly spying had gotten so bad in the past that they had to avoid that neighbor whenever they saw them.
The myth that ‘men just can’t help themselves’ is not backed by science
As you scroll through this story, you might think: “Why are people still policing women’s clothing choices in the year of Our Lord 2025?” The wife in this story seems to believe in the myth of women wearing ‘revealing’ clothing (in their own home!) to invite attention.
She chooses to blame the woman for ‘provoking’ her husband to spy on her with her outfit choice. Aside from the obvious victim-blaming, the wife also perpetuates the derivative assumption that men just can’t help themselves when they see a woman in a more revealing outfit.
However, that myth has no scientific proof. Researchers say there are neurological processes that help our brains decide when it’s appropriate to be aroused. Some point to the amygdala as the part of our brain that aids us in this process.
Essentially, it tells us that it’s okay to be aroused if a person wearing revealing clothes is standing in front of us in the bedroom. If we see the same in a supermarket, the amygdala sends the response that it would be wrong to be aroused there.
The orbitofrontal cortex helps us regulate and suppress sexual behavior. If we’re aroused or excited by an opportunity, it’s the orbitofrontal cortex that tells us, “That’s not a good idea, don’t do it.”
These neurological processes might not work as well when we’re intoxicated. More primitive urges might take the wheel instead of the orbitofrontal cortex. The amygdala, then, is left to make decisions with the information that it is given, and might make the wrong call. Still, getting intoxicated is a choice.
Women should be able to wear the clothes they want in their own houses without being ashamed of it or ogled by their neighbors.
Commenters were weirded out by the Peeping Tom and questioned why the wife wasn’t blaming him
Commenters also offered some hilarious and on-point comebacks: “So your husband is a pervert?”
