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There's a lot of advice out there that says, literally, just treat women like people/your guy friends.
So consider: doing something like he did in the gay community would be on the awkward side, but it would still have some chance of success and certainly wouldn't get him buried under accusations of being a would-be rapist. He's just stating he wants something, directly and honestly, and men are told to do just that with the expectation that the worst that can happen is rejection, and nothing bad will happen if you take that rejection in stride. Not the case. His mistake was treating his friend like someone who has agency to accept or turn down a reasonable proposition and move on with life.
Men have to navigate a whole lot of unstated norms and rules when it comes to dating, and those don't come embedded in our heads at birth: it takes learning and trial and error to discover them. (For some of us, clearly a lot more trial and error.) Many women don't like to acknowledge this ("it's easy for the average man to have casual sex, you just have to ask!"), and so when a learning example comes up, they want to attribute malice or evil intent to the rule violator.
It's also worth considering things with the genders flipped: a woman approaches a man in her study group and says she wants to have sex with him, he rejects her, and he then warns everyone in all their shared social circles that she's a desperate slut. It's unlikely that Reddit would pile on and say norm violator is a would-be rapist.
The social response in the original scenario is to be expected, although it's probably miscalibrated: if men are to learn the rules through trial and error, then they need to be granted the space for low stakes, non-harmful trial and error.
I can't say I've ever heard a woman say that, but if someone does I think that most people (even other women) would laugh at it as remarkably naive. All the women I've ever encountered know damn well (and will acknowledge) that it's easy for them to get casual sex and hard for men to do so.
Just my personal experience, but I haven't experienced the same thing you have. Generally, I've seen a lot of women indicating both that is easy for men to get casual sex, and also women who indicate that it's not super easy for women to do that. Just my 2 cents.
And I can't recall exactly the articles, but I remember seeing a few articles back in like 2018 decrying how put upon women were by dating apps like tinder, and how men there are having tons of string free sex, and stringing along the women, taking advantage of them, and how devastating this is to women and how hard it is for them. Anyone in real life knows how much easier it is for women on tinder than 99% of men.
If they genuinely think that it's because they're comparing themselves only to the top few percent of men - the ones they'd actually consider for casual sex, that bar being far higher for most women than most men. At least in that context, virtually all men outside those few percent are invisible to them. It may literally not cross their minds (again, in that context) that other men besides those few percent exist.
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Yes, I remember the most infamous one: Tinder and the Dating Apocalypse by Nancy Jo Sales, who I remember mainly cause I hate a lot of stuff she wrote.
But I do recall her getting pushback from journalists who did actually cite the dropping sex rate as a counter to the anecdotes in her article.
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It's an effect of online dating - a women can see and match with a lot of men, but those men will disproportionately be from the small group of popular men who can easily have casual sex. Hence the woman can imagine that it's easy for men (she's met a lot of men who are doing it, and many of them did her) while women have it hard (she doesn't like her own results and wants to be treated better). I'm not sure how common this belief is, but I recognize it.
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Your second paragraph makes perfect sense to me, but I think it's important to bear in mind that women aren't (in my experience) complaining about casual sex there. Rather, what women complain they find difficult is how hard it is to find a stable relationship. It's easy for them to find someone to have sex with, but harder to find a boyfriend. Which is why in the articles you mentioned, those women are complaining about Tinder and getting strung along by men trying to have no-strings sex. They aren't after sex (which, idk why you're on Tinder if you aren't because that's explicitly the point of Tinder), they're after a boyfriend and are upset it's hard to get one.
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