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That's where it's inexorably trending, not because most people explicitly want that, but because nobody wants to get sued for unwanted sexual attention but nobody has any principled way to handle the situation because, the minute romance is involved, it'll get messy and complicated and people will be hurt (especially since there seem to be gendered cognitive biases here like men having an optimism bias or some men & women being bad at cross-sex mind-reading). To say nothing of the fact that modern norms are in flux and messy.
And, as we've seen, faced with being hurt, some women* lack any moral vocabulary (or tools for revenge, frankly) for describing it beyond sexual harassment/sexual assault. Which companies must take seriously. But, of course, the "validity" of the case varies but must go through litigation first.
The uncertainty here gives corporations an incentive to be proactive (and thus more restrictive).
So it's simpler to just try to cut it out, even though I doubt that's optimal for even most feminists actually (obviously, people of all stripes want the right kind of attention).
* It's mostly women reporting abuse lbh
To be honest, I think you’re spot on the nose with women(or at least a subset thereof) not having any way to describe unwanted attention beyond sexual harassment. Feminism has reduced thinking about the ethics of sexual relationships to a consent binary which leads to redefining lots of things as consent issues, so women who want to complain about more typical bad behavior have to frame it as somehow leading up to rape. Which is ridiculous, obviously, for a lot of these cases.
Good point, except it's probably not feminism but a natural effect of male status differentiation in the presence of women and their observable reactions (yes, "hello, human resources?!" meme), recreating low-class school social dynamics.
I think this is a major source of differences in attitude – in this thread and elsewhere – toward mixed workspaces and generally the idea of adding women to environments where they were historically absent. People who believe that it's an unalloyed good since you can meet your soulmate or something are, probably, just not ugly; for less lucky ones (and who are also not exceptional in some way), flirting in the workspace is a non-starter, so they just lose the possibility to make a living without humiliation. When one looks up blackpill content on the distribution of attractiveness and growing proportion of sexless men, and non-infrequent incel-type assessments like this one on Quora –
– it's hard not to come away with the feeling «holy shit, tens of millions of guys are forced into a lifetime of being severely bullied». It's the kind of thing non-targets aren't prone to notice or connect to external factors (did you care that they were suicidal losers in your school?) so it may be arbitrarily intense. Even if it's an exaggeration based on insecurity and not an accurate stereotype, the very fact that there exists strong social pressure to dismiss it as a delusion is telling. There's no «lived experience» clause for ugly men.
And contrariwise, it may be the case that the incessant wringing of hands about sexism and harassment, and demand for National Incel Strategy, generalized tyranny, censorship, surveillance etc are products of many women being unable to remove uggos from their life, developing chronic stress and fear, and growing desperately violent as a result (in their own passive-aggressive socially manipulative manner).
We may underestimate how much gendered animosity the society contains at the margins; and the consensus about its direction is very likely wrong.
Yeah, that's kind of a keen observation, and a really bitter pill to swallow. The exact mechanism here is that they are offended that (they think) a low-status male believes he has a chance with them. In their mind, that means he thinks they are low status too. That's where the insult comes from. In reality the man probably has not thought about it all that deeply, or indeed at all. This is high-neurotic behaviour.
But a great many first world women are utterly incapable of not typical-minding, or of empathising with anyone who is very different from themselves. Many women go through life without ever considering the male experience, or even realising that there is one that is separate to the female experience. They simply never need to -- thanks to rampant feminism, society is built and centered almost entirely around the female perspective. (Men are inculcated with the extreme importance of considering the feelings of girls and women almost from the cradle -- women are never told any such thing about men.) So they assume that this interaction must have been thought about as deeply as they consider their own interactions, with all the high-school politics and status gaming that entails.
Because the men in this example don't think about it that deeply, they go away confused and hurt by the reaction. Naturally, they wonder why. They band together with others also wondering why. And those groups slowly, piece by piece, reverse engineer the social mechanics that caused the situation. And this realisation is often terrible for them, because it reveals that there is no escape and it will never get better for them unless they can increase their status. All the fairy tales about true love overcoming all -- the princess and the frog -- that they held onto, were just stories. The real world doesn't work that way. These groups, by the way, are vilified for piecing this together, because the most important thing about the rules is you're not supposed to state them explicitly. Everyone playing is well aware of how utterly vile and two-faced this game is, and dragging that out into the light makes them look bad. Which lowers their status, so it is not acceptable. And so any attempts to lay this all out plainly and explicitly must be railed against.
And because society is, once again, built and centered around female feelings first and foremost, there is no justice to be had. They're branded as toxic and disgusting and entitled for expecting to be able to partake in the same core parts of the human experience as everyone else. "Don't they know their place?!" is the undertone carried throughout all this. Other men go along with this characterisation to win points from the women, because men are taught to please women at all costs from a very young age. There is no brotherhood or solidarity -- why would there be? They're all competing for favour. Men are taught outgroup bias their whole lives.
So while women with ugly friends will stick by them in solidarity and try and inflict them on unsuspecting men on blind dates or whatever (because being the queen bee, the best looking one in your circle of friends raises your status), men are pressured into ditching their ugly friends by women who don't want to be around those types of guys because it lowers her implied social standing to be seen with them. They apply this pressure through accusations of creepiness or malfeasance, as others have noted, typically centered on actions they would tolerate or welcome from higher status men (because attracting high status men means you are high status).
It's social climbing all the way fucking down.
Feminists may overplay "male gaze" theory and the claim that everything is centered around the male perspective, but I think they are not wrong that many women are, in fact, raised exactly the opposite of what you claim, to learn how to cater to men and male preferences. Neither men nor women are a monolith; your description may accurately describe young urban white women raised in a deep blue bubble on a steady diet of anti-male grievance, but it's not the experience of all women in the first world, let alone the entire world. You did qualify this screed with "many" women, but when you then project it onto a claim about society being built and centered around female feelings and "no justice to be had" for men, you're just mirroring the feminists who blame all their negative feelings on men.
As another aspect, men typically have to make multiple approaches for a single success. If only 20% of women have the extreme negative reaction described, that amounts to a significant number of experiences that, to men on the sensitive side of things, are traumatic. Those experiences will play an outsized role in the mental universe of those men and make them overstate how ubiquitous they are.
Awkward approaches are bad and should be reduced as much as possible for the benefit of everyone involved, but they're also correctable and learning is possible with only a slight negative reinforcement. Rhetorically claiming they're rape-adjacent, on the other hand, drives men to extreme positions. Heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room, while heterosexual women have the obligation to respond commensurate with the offense to allow that learning to happen. The issue is that, although the large majority of people of both genders follow this, defectors on both sides make it an unsustainable system.
I agree with all this. Most people learn pretty early that men approach, women get approached. Men take the risk of rejection and humiliation, because the risk for women is an entirely different calculation. You could say all the risk for men comes before they get a "yes," and all the risk for women comes after it.
There's nothing pernicious or oppressive about acknowledging that men are less choosy (for both social and biological reasons) and therefore any woman who wants to get laid probably can, much more easily than a man, but that comes with definite drawbacks on the female side of the equation.
The problem every time these threads get spawned is that the aggrieved men complain only about the disadvantage they perceive (namely, that they can't get laid as easily as they'd like while the women they desire get to pick and choose and aren't punished for it), and won't acknowledge the real risks (not just "feeling bad" or "offended that an ugly guy approached me") that women have to contend with. A lot of them will react to "heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room" the way feminists react to "women should learn to have situational awareness and exercise good judgment in choosing partners" - both get really pissed off at being "victim blamed" for being told that some negative consequences are actually avoidable.
I'm not a fan of the Rebecca Watsons of the world making a big cause out of being approached in an uncomfortable way, or the "defectors" you refer to turning every approach into sexual harassment. But yeah, Elevator Guy should have "read the room" - it is pretty creepy to ask a woman you're alone in an elevator with late at night to "come back to your room for coffee" unless you have been given prior signals that she might be receptive to such a proposition.
One potential issue here: what is the rate of violence women are intuitively expecting vs the rate at which nerdy tech dudes actually lash out? I would expect a very large discrepancy between "ancestral environment" or "feminist paranoid take" versus "low T nerd convention".
I think the actual physical threat presented by the average nerd hitting on a woman at a convention is very low. That said, while I don't think women should react to every creepy come-on as a rape threat, I don't think they should just be expected to put up with creepy come-ons without protest. Rebecca Watson arguably overreacted, but otoh, she wasn't even trying to get the guy punished, even informally - she just embarrassed him a little.
If women have to put up with ill-conceived come-ons, men can put up with embarrassment for an ill-conceived come-on.
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