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A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
Considering who posted this it's difficult not to read it as a thinly-veiled rant. I think the responses cover most of the best answers but I'll add that the phenomenon you describe is very exaggerated online where a subset of users (especially on Reddit) have a rabid hatred of incels, Redpillers, and any group of men who have anything less than perfectly normie, bluepilled opinions on gender relations.
I'm reminded of this thread where a young man sexually propositioned a classmate he was friendly with. It did not go well for him. I think his approach was misguided and someone should nicely tell him that, he's still very young and has plenty of time to learn from the mistake. But many of the commenters jumped straight to "he's doomed to be an Andrew Tate fan or an incel". I think this is a bizarre, almost autistic response. Like telling someone posting about struggling with their faith in Christ that they're doomed to be Dawkins fan. There's definitely some people just looking for an excuse to rag on sexually unsuccessful men. Either women who just use them as an outlet for their rage or men virtue signaling their superior moral status.
/r/Tinder is similar. Every now and then a woman will post a man starting a convo with an overly forward pickup line and the comments will be filled with people saying "ha! next thing you know he'll be complaining about how women on Tinder don't wanna fuck him!". Which is especially bizarre considering that the most popular genre of post on the sub is men trying similar lines successfully. Almost like a low-effort, sexualized pickup line will sometimes get you laid on an app designed to get you laid with as little effort as possible. Shocking.
In general I wouldn't put too much stock into the opinions of people who comment things like this. Worth remembering that a lot of the content you read online is produced by insane people. In real life, women are mostly just baffled when they hear an otherwise normal guy is romantically unsuccessful. I remember an ex being shocked my college roommate was still a virgin and she said something along the lines of "why doesn't he just talk to some girls at a frat party and get it over with?". Which is sort of adorably naive. Though tbf that was in 2017, slightly before that incel discourse had reached its peak online.
It's funny you linked indirectly to that reddit thread as apparently as of two days ago the OOP is back! asking what to do since that girl is apparently in his same major and is in one of his classes again and will probably be in even more in the future. So basically everyone in his major will know. But I'd argue that pulling aside a classmate in the library you're in an informal study group with and saying directly "hey let's have sex, but also I don't want to date you" out of the blue is something that merits inclusion in the informal network of women-to-women conversations that, out of safety, exists to warn others women of potential creeps. The fact he did it as maybe sophomore/junior (21 in college?) within a cohort of frequent acquaintances and in a school setting (the library!) is a major self-inflicted L, not merely an innocent misunderstanding in my view.
I do agree though that online responses to especially dating type questions don't line up super well with real life relationships. Something about the online experience doesn't allow the same degree of nuance and sense that the person you're talking to is a complicated and occasionally self-contradictory person in their own right.
What distinguishes an "innocent misunderstanding" from, well, whatever you think it is? I lean toward "it is an innocent misunderstanding" because that sort of behavior can easily result from uncritically taking terrible mainstream dating/hookup advice at face value, such as:
#1 and #3 taken literally are retarded but they're suggested all the time online, mostly by women. In reality hooking up almost always involves a situation that starts with some plausible deniability and maybe a little alcohol. And women hardly ever complain about the setup after the fact. He might have gotten away with this had he invited her over to his place to study, rushed through a problem set and then handed her a beer and put on a movie. But were he to post about this idea there would be people, some of whom presumably understand signaling and subtext irl, who would accuse him of getting her drunk to take advantage of her or being a creep who tried to sexualize what the poor girl thought was an innocent study session. To a naive young man who doesn't have the experience or intuition to understand that advice on Reddit and from women generally is effectively designed to preserve your virginity as long as possible, the approach he actually took seems much less manipulative and therefore ethical.
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