50 Weird AF Ways Men Try To Assert Dominance (As Told By Men)

1. I hear a lot of dudes that brag about how many hours they work in a day or week. Guys that are like “yeah I worked 20 out of 24 hours yesterday and only got 2 hours of sleep”.

Like… sorry that you have poor work/life balance and time management skills? How are you expecting me to react?

2. Make fun of the way I take my coffee.

I hate the toxic shit where unless you drink it black, you’re not a real man.

Like BITCH I’LL DRINK IT HOW EVER I DAMN WELL LIKE!

3. Pee super forcefully directly into the water, so that the lesser males know how powerful my stream is.

4. I’m 5’9” and 170lbs and for some reason guys taller or larger than me feel the need to call me “big guy” in a belittling way. I find it so odd, I’ve done nothing to you and am neither excessively small or large and yet you feel the need to try and take shots at my size.

Shits weird and I now perceive you as insecure.

5. One guy I know tried to get everyone to whip out their dicks and compare sizes, and honestly it came across as one of the most insecure and childish efforts to assert dominance ever. Because dick size has nothing to do with dominance.

6. Was out having a drink. Started chatting to the guy next to me when I learn he, too, is a musician. He then tells me: “You’re not a musician. I find it offensive when people tell me they’re a musician when they haven’t put in the time and dedication that I have.” Ok dude come down off your ego trip, christ.

7. I had someone stand on their tippy toes to seem taller when we where talking.

8. When asked about what his hobbies are, he responded with “Hobbies are for children and single women. I work.”

9. Was on a 4 hour flight. In a 2 person row. The guy demanded to have full access to the middle armrest. Would push my arm off it if I ever got near it.

10. We once had a candidate come into the interview and legit say he wanted to sit behind the desk because he was going to be asking the questions to decide if he wanted to work with us. I think he’d gotten some bad advice about having confidence. I laughed but our HR manager flipped her shit. The only time I have ever seen her call security.

11. One time at a house party, a few of us were talking to some of the girls there and one of the guys randomly started talking about how he does MMA, then another guy joined in and those 2 started wrestling in front of the girls. I don’t think their shirts needed to come off either but what the fuck do I know…

12. I used to tend bar in Milwaukee, and there is nothing that triggers self-conscious weiners more than seeing someone drinking something they don’t like. I cannot tell you how many arguments began with some dude – always unsolicited/unprovoked, mind you – feeling compelled to judge and “educate” other guys about what they’re drinking (or not drinking).

“You drink that piss, you pussy?” and it goes downhill from there.

No one cares. Drink what you like and shut up.

13. Generally guys purposely bumping into you when you walk past them, especially if they’re with friends.

14. My neighbor in front of my (I’m a guy) house had a boyfriend that would literally rip his shirt off and come outside every single time I was in my front yard. It could be 7 AM or Midnight but it wouldn’t matter to him. I could be walking to my car and here comes Mr. Globogym flexing all around his yard. He would immediately go back inside when I went back inside. This went on for almost half a year until one day I saw him hop into his mega lifted truck and drive away never to be seen again. He did have pretty sweet pecs though.

15. The overly firm handshake is always annoying. I’m not a freak show of strength but I have a good enough grip that I can get them to back off.

16. The people that try to act like a psychological genius and try to analyze you and figure out what kind of person you are. My friend’s dad does this constantly with me and misses the mark every time and it just makes him look like a dumbass.

17. Recently got my first tattoo. It’s a small, minimalistic one. A guy at a party keeps making fun of it when I throw the ball in beer pong as it’s on my right arm I use to throw. Reason he’s making fun of it is his arm is filled with big, detailed tattoos. He clearly felt I was somehow inferior due to my small tattoo. Didn’t bother me too much, but that, along with other shit he’d brag about, convinced me he’s not a person worth giving a damn about.

18. When I was on a trip to Iceland my friends and I were out drinking at the bars and I met a local guy outside and as we were talking he kept trying to get close enough to me so he could put his foot on my foot. The first time he did it I just thought it was accidental. Then I could see it was what he was trying to do. I ended up telling the dude to fuck off and the situation de-escalated from there. Other local guys told me after that it’s a thing they do there in Iceland to show dominance/start fights with tourists.

19. A guy was mad at me while sitting at a light and was revving his engine. It sounded like He held it at the red line, and there was a big crack sound and smoke started coming out of the front Of his car.

The dummy blew his engine.

20. Total bro around you and your friends. But the second there’s a girl there all of a sudden they try to impress them by shitting on the gang.

21. I had a guy yell at me at a bar when he over heard me saying I was 6’2 to a friend. He claimed he was measured at the NFL combine at 6’0. we were the same height. He just kept yelling “I’m 6 foot, I’m 6 foot, bitch” at me. I’m legit 6’2 but this guy was just not having it. Like dude, why are you selling yourself 2 inches short? It was such an odd and unprompted interaction.

22. Talked about the MBA program at his Alma mater was superior to where I was getting my MBA.

For clarification, he doesn’t have and isn’t working on an MBA, but wanted to be sure I knew he was better because he went to a school with a perceived better program.

23. Not letting go of a handshake. It’s happened a few times and always make me wanna treat it as a hostile action. Last time it happened I just started caressing their hand with my finger and the guy jerked away. I winked at him after.

24. I was walking to my car after school and this guy getting in his car just yells at me “you ugly af, bro.” I flipped him off without even looking at him and he yelled “bitch!” and drove off. How petty do you have to be to tell someone minding their own business that they’re ugly?

25. Earlier this year my boss asked me to do something, and then leaned over me and said, “You are going to do it.” He was like, literally leaning over me because he was 6’8″. Dude acted like a cliche high school bully from an 80s movie and was like 40 years old so I assume he was at some point. Anyways he quit

26. I’m not a fan of the shoulder touch. If it’s a close friend giving advice, it’s reassuring. But if it’s someone trying to assert some dominance and does the shoulder touch in an attempt to be friendly, no dude. Every person who’s done that is trying to sell me on something and I HATE being hustled. One person I worked alongside with (more like he was a brother to the owner) would try to do that with my friends and I. He was a burly dude, weight lifter, but was always trying to get us involved in the company and convincing us that doing things for free would help build the company which will further lead to future revenue. No, dude. I’d smile and nod and be polite. But we parted ways shortly after because I know my worth and Zero Dollars is not how i’d like my checks signed, thankyouverymuch.

27. Challenge me to fight over a girl.

Yeah man, that’s how this works. You can totally “win” a girl in a fight.

28. A friend tried to make himself look good in front of his crush by literally putting me in a random choke hold “for a laugh”. Turns out it was because I was talking to her (I had a girlfriend at the time, we were just talking).

It wasn’t a choke hold though, it was basically just a headlock, so I decided to correct him. I was fairly oblivious and didn’t realise this was a failed “alpha move”.

Creeped the shit out of his crush that he would do that out of no-where and she stopped talking to him. Apparently she quite liked him up until that point, so he kinda shot himself in the foot.

29. This guy from work gave me a lift which was decent, but he had a chip on his shoulder about it. He put on the child locks, I couldn’t get out.

So he came around to let me out of the back, and I got out and walked off, didn’t close the door I let him do it like a chauffeur.

30. Just shove me out of nowhere without absolutely no context whatsoever. Basically, high school all over again.

31. My best female friend’s boyfriend, who is 100% jealous/threatened by how close I am to her, will constantly try to one-up me in conversation whenever I talk to her. He keeps an eye on me the whole time that I’m with her and as soon as I make a joke or tell a story, he jumps right in with his own thing to try and top what I said. Like, Every. Single. Time. That I speak.

Oh, that and he’ll roll up his sleeves and sit with his elbows on the table in a not-so-subtle effort to compare his biceps to mine.

32. Was at a party and was given the task of handing out beers to people. This guy flipped a shit, screaming saying he only drink REAL beer.

Dude, it was cold and free, that is the best beer there is.

33. The guys that start a lot of their sentences with “Only real men…”.

We were drinking in a pub and after seeing I was drinking Guinness had to attest that “Only real men drink whiskey”.

34. A friend of mine would be obsessed about making sure his voice sounded deep enough when talking to others.

35. Mocked me on Facebook when I posted a picture of my new car for buying a Lexus IS250 and not something faster and more powerful.

He drives a 15 year old Jetta.

36. I don’t know if it was necessarily dominance assertion or misplaced chivalry, but my SO and I have a deal where I cover all the other bills in the house as long as she covers food and does more chores. We both came to that agreement, it just works easiest. That includes covering eating out to a reasonable amount, and then I’ll chip in. So we’re just getting some BK I think and the guy at the register saw that my SO was about to pay, so he said “No, he pays” probably assuming I was some deadbeat or something. Instead of putting up a fuss, I just covered the $10 or whatever it cost.

37. When I was in the military during our PT tests there was a “max” for everything, so once you hit the magical max number there really is no reason for going on. I always had to PT test the same time as my supervisor who was more physically fit than me so when it came time to test he would always go beyond the max number unlike me, who would hit the number and just stop because there was no point. After every test phase, he would get up and yell at me for not “giving it my all” but I would just look at him and ask him what the point was. He made me go to my commander and explain myself, I think he was hoping I would get in trouble, but luckily my commander understood there was no point is “going beyond” when you hit the max number.

Really stupid.

38. In college, we were having a conversation about which animals we thought closely matched our personalities. One guy was a psych major, one of those that weaponize Psychology by trying to psychoanalyze strangers and all that stuff. So he said he was probably a lion, and then would say everyone else were like hippos or manatees or other ugly-looking fat animals. Seemed a bit transparent to me but I think he really thought he was getting away with some subversive psych trick.

39. Threatened to beat me up if I so much as look at his girlfriend again. His girlfriend was my sister.

I maintained eye contact whilst laughing, as she dumped him on the spot.

40. In college, I got into an elevator and was followed in by a younger guy I didn’t know. He eyed my (pretty standard in every way) backpack and said “My backpack is way bigger than yours.”

Fair enough, he had a military, jumbo pack. Could’ve easily gone on a hike/camp with it. I smiled and agreed, but he kept talking about how much bigger his was and how he couldn’t fit anything into one like mine.

“Weird flex” as the kids say.

41. That one guy who refuses to walk on the correct side of the hall/lane/aisle/etc. Like, do you drive on the wrong side of the road, too?

42. Once when I was walking on a street a guy was walking behind me and started to walk faster so he could pass me. I didn’t care but then he just stared at me straight in the eyes and walks into a tree.

43. Playing a game of pool at a bar for a beer, dude missed an easy shot and broke the cue stick on his knee. He then gets in my face to try to intimidate me, I just simple tell him, Look dude you are at a locals bar.”

He shut up and left after that. Dummy.

44. Had a dude get mad at me for “talking to his girl all the time.”

I was her Econ tutor.

45. I was standing in the breezeway outside a friend’s apartment while in college, and a guy coming down the stairs from an upper floor kinda tripped near the bottom of the stairs and stumbled into me. It was clear he super drunk and immediately got aggressive. He was so worked up about being tougher than me for some reason that he started doing push ups at me while me and my friends just laughed.

Fortunately his friends came and apologized and took him back up stairs, but it was definitely the most bizarre assertion of dominance I’ve ever encountered.

46. I work in a grocery store and sometimes help unload the delivery trucks and our delivery comes in on what we call cages, like a 6 foot cage on wheels and obviously one that’s full of toilet paper will be really light and one filled with 2 litre bottles of juice are the heavy ones. The lift that lowers them from the truck has that patterned metal floor and you have to pull the heavy cages hard to get them off, now Im 5’8″ and don’t have a lot of weight on me but I can pull these cages off just fine but there’s a guy who’s like 6’2″ and is always trying to show how strong he is, so whenever Im helping and he’s there he always insists he gets the heavy cages and that I get the “little guy cages”. Everyone agrees he needs to grow up.

47. A former coworker. He would just stand in the way and refuse to move. Even if he wasn’t in the way he would purposely get in the way. I work in a narrow kitchen so you can imagine how annoying that could be.

At one particular moment I was carrying a bulky 20 lbs box and he decided to do that. I pretended to not see him and barreled into him. He fell over and got incredibly mad at me. Started talking about how I have no muscle. It was pretty funny.

It was a display of the most fragile masculinity I’ve ever seen.

48. In jr high I remember this one bully that would get on his tip toes and bow out his chest like a gorilla and get all in your face whenever he felt threatened. It was such a funny stereotype maneuver.

49. Worked as a lifeguard at a summer camp years ago. During safety training we had to do a missing persons search which required all available staff to join hands and walk from the beach to into the water as far as we could while feeling with our feet for the missing swimmer. (During training there was a sandbag we had to find.)

The guy next to me kept insisting on holding mine in a certain way because “*I* will take the upper hand in this situation,” said at me while staring me down. Whatever, dude. We’re theoretically looking for a drowned child right now.

50. He tried to drink water faster than me.

No one drinks water faster than me.