Men don’t approach women in public because we told them it was annoying and creepy. In retrospect we probably should have just taught them what we don’t think is creepy but we didn’t so if you’re attracted to men you’re gonna have to approach them now, they won’t do it anymore.
my hot take and they’re going to burn me at the stake: PART of the reason men don’t approach women anymore is because of unisex fashion. the jorts, baggy jeans, oversized everything. men are drawn to dimorphism, things that are undeniably “woman.” dresses, skirts, heels
Jul 9, 2026 · 2:10 AM UTC
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Women aren’t a monolith, and “women told men not to approach” was never a universal message.
Most women objected to disrespectful, persistent, or inappropriate approaches, not polite, situational conversations. Women shouldn’t have to tolerate disrespect just to spare men’s feelings.
Reducing a complex shift in dating culture to “women told men to stop” ignores dating apps, social media, changing social norms, and many men’s fear of rejection. A lack of confidence and poor social skills are separate issues, and they’re not women’s responsibility to fix.
We also shouldn’t have to teach grown adults that respecting others is part of respecting yourself. Most people can tell the difference between being friendly and making someone uncomfortable. The real problem is that some people have learned to dismiss women’s discomfort or treat violating boundaries as harmless or even entertaining.
That’s the behavior that needs to change not women’s standards and traditional norms.
Women think that if men that aren’t 3 out of 10 better looking or don’t have lots of money approach them in public it’s creepy.
And men have no way of estimating if they are in the allowed box or not for a given woman. So it became unsafe for all but top tier rich men or 10/10 to do so.
It’s way more nefarious than you outlined. But credit for stating it.
There was a girl I used to talk to a lot 14 years ago. We lived in different states but we played the same game together with some other people. She would be one of these creep shaming girls who had a story every time some guy shot his shot with her. I told her that kinda mentality is gonna come back to bite women in the ass one day.
When I asked her what was creepy about this guy, she couldn't pinpoint to anything specific. I saw a photo of the friend group, he was friends with one of her friends and it dawned on me that she just didn't find the guy attractive and called him creepy.
And now you have girls sitting in their car just putting dudes on blast over tiktok. Just seems like way too much effort.
No. This is not actually a choice that women need to make.
Almost everyone is confused about this, because the actual, functional mating customs of civilized humanity were almost entirely lost in the baby boomer great reset.
In civilized humans, courtship between the sexes is initiated by the female.
This is why civilized men hate cold approaching, and only r-selecting knuckledraggers are comfortable with the practice... along with men who have killed off their natural distaste for it because they had to learn it out of sheer necessity.
Women generally hate this idea, because they don't like cold approaching, either.
But I did not say cold approach. I said "initiate".
What a woman is supposed to do, according the customs of actual civilization with functional mating rituals, is see a man she thinks she might like, and covertly signal an invitation to approach.
This invitation is the first measure of a graceful social dance, where the steps are known to both partners. The signal is to be clear enough that the man understands its intent, but subtle enough that it can be plausibly denied if he proves to be distasteful on closer examination.
It is then the man's responsibility to overtly approach and court. But this is not a cold approach, because he knows he has been invited. His responsibility is to not screw up a good beginning.
Thus, no one is cold approaching.
Look at the cartoon. You've seen it before. And this indeed how it works... but only in a broken culture.
Because when both sexes understand their roles, the difference between the top and bottom panels isn't whether the man is objectively attractive or not, but whether Susan dropped a hint.
The reason things work this way now is that Susan was brought up without the slightest inkling of what she was supposed to do.
In fact, if you told her now that she's supposed to know how to accidentally drop a handkerchief, she'd probably resent the implication that she has any duties or bears any responsibility for doing anything at all.
But power and responsibility together in both directions. If women have no responsibility to invite an approach, then they have no power to control who approaches them.
And this is a power they desperately want. This is the true reason why they complain about how being approached is "creepy". They have an instinctive sense that men they don't want are not supposed to make a pass, but they have no idea how this is supposed to not happen.
So they try to leave it to men to work out. And men, like women, and like every other carbon-based life form on the planet, are noted for their inability to read minds.
There is no individual solution to a broken collective.
Dire misunderstandings between men and women trying to find mates are simply one more symptom of the disease that caused the late twentieth century West to try to wipe the cultural slate clean, and reinvent all social customs from an undifferentiated soup of naive postwar liberalism.
An individual woman who learns to drop a hint — and more importantly, understands that she should — is still powerless to force men around her to learn to pick one up, or to refrain from being a sex pest when she doesn't drop one.
An individual man who learns to spot a hint is still powerless to read the minds of women who don't even know they are supposed to drop one, much less how.
Humans, unlike almost all other animals, are not creatures of instinct alone. We are evolved to develop and use rituals. And thus we need to have those rituals, and to transmit them to the next generation. Or we will not thrive.
Did every culture have a genteel lexicon of hints and winks and dropped handkerchiefs and how to hold a lace fan?
Of course not. Mongol horse archers would think this was all effete nonsense.
But Mongol horse archers never invented the radio or the airplane or machine tools or the air conditioner, either. So who cares what they would have thought?
We had a way of courting. It was a dance, not a war. It worked. People were happy with it.
Then some hippies decided it didn't work with their abstract and stupid philosophy. So it all had to go. And now even conservatives don't always remember what it is we're supposed to be conserving.
At least in my case, this is a major reason. I don't even like walking on the same side of the street as a woman after what some have told me goes through their heads about men. Basically the internet has made me feel like some women spend their lives constantly worried about what men will do to them. Which gives me 0 confidence in approaching a woman I do not know, since I can't know how uncomfortable I am making them let alone how they may respond to me.
I was at a restaurant and a male customer told the waitress that he thought she was very beautiful and was interested in taking her out. She declined and after he left she mentioned to me that she was offended by this.
I asked her why she was offended since he wasn’t rude or gross or whatever, and she said that it was inappropriate for him to ask her out. But he was not inappropriate with her, he was very polite and respectful. To the life of me, TO THIS DAY, I don’t understand what he did wrong 🤷♂️
