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Suppose there is an 18-year-old guy. He respects women. He cares about their wellbeing, and he cares about not making them uncomfortable. He also has basic reasoning capabilities. He notices that every time he hits on or asks out a women, the response is at best neutral. The overwhelming majority are straight rejection (n = 10-20 or so). He knows (or at least thinks) that hitting on women and getting turned down is not only embarrassing for him, but deeply uncomfortable for the women. He reasons that because the probability of success on any further attempts is so low, the expected discomfort he will almost certainly cause to the woman cannot be ethically justified. He thus decides to stop approaching women in person.
That person was me. This was, without exaggeration, the worst decision I have ever made in my life. I don't harbor resentment for any of these women. They were all well within their rights to reject me if they so wanted. Nobody made me stop approaching women. I made the decision myself.
Tell me, what was my mistake? Did I respect women not enough, or too much? Or was this in fact the right decision? Maybe there are inherently adversarial aspects of dating such that maxing out the "Respect Women™ " parameter zeroes out actual romantic prospects.
IMO, thinking about this in terms of "respect" is the wrong perspective. That concept doesn't map coherently onto human sexuality.
Your mistake was making generalization of all women based on the individual experiences you had which prevented you from interacting with any women. Assuming all women are deeply uncomfortable with men asking them out assumes all women share the same preferences of who, what and where they want to be asked out. There are women who do not feel terribly uncomfortable with men, friend or not, asking them out. There are women who do. There are women who you should care about making uncomfortable because they are your friends, and women who you don't need to worry too much about making uncomfortable because they are a stranger you just met. You may have been in an area that literally just didn't have someone who wanted to date you.
Assuming that you "probably" were going to fail again assumes all women have the same preferences and reactions. You should have continued to meet women, get rejected, meet more women, and eventually you would have found someone who got along with you through luck. It would have been painful to be rejected so many times, but you would have gotten used to it to the point it wouldn't be so painful it would prevent you from achieving your goals. It is not any different than making friends; would it be reasonable for me, someone who wants friends, to stop talking to other girls to try to be their friend because I have had many girls in my past who rejected my friendship with them? No. I would be told that there are so many people out there I can find at least one who wants to be my friend, if not friendly. Respecting women starts with respecting that they, like men, are not a monolithic "them" who can be controlled with a grand theory of behavior.
I probably should make a more substantial reply.
There's nothing wrong with what you're saying, by itself. Men should respect women, but respecting women doesn't mean "do all you can to see that they're not uncomfortable". Someone who is too worried about whether women feel uncomfortable isn't respecting women at all.
But then consider: this whole thread started with an example (though maybe fake) of someone whose big crime was that he made a woman feel uncomfortable. If all you mean by "respect" is to treat women like people, asking a woman for sex--something that he himself, also a person, wants, is treating women like people. So he misunderstood this particular woman. He made a mistake. But he's human; that happens. The woman can just say no. She didn't need to shame him. The idea that women are supposed to shame people like this is based around the idea that yes, respecting women does mean "don't ever make a woman feel uncomfortable" and that someone who might sometimes make a woman feel uncomfortable is a dangerous creep.
I suppose the disconnect is that where you see shame, I don't. If my study buddy randomly asked me to have sex with him with no basis of platonic or romantic intimacy, I would totally tell my friends about it, because I like to tell my friends about weird things that happen in my day, not because I have this notion I must socially shame my study buddy so he doesn't make other girls uncomfortable. There are some girls out there who don't feel the need to tell their friends about things like this, and so in another world OP's example wouldn't even be complaining. OP's example and the study girl were not friends, and she felt no obligation to keep their matters private. It happens, and I believe is not indicative that there is a grand narrative being fed to myself and other women and more indicative that OP severely misjudged his entire study group and how close they were.
Do you think the comments on that post are people just telling their friends about weird things? Because a lot of them look like shaming to me.
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Your study buddy still ends up shamed and worse off for having ask you out regardless. An ugly man who asks out dozens of girls(even politely) until they get even one yes will end up with a poor social status. At best he'd be regarded as pitiful and sad, at worst he'd be regarded as a borderline sex offender. Especially given all the people out there who underestimate how difficult it is for an ugly man to get a date, so they assume he must just be an asshole who's trying to fuck everything or an egoist who's asking out girls who're out of his league.
You're getting dogpiled on a lot here, I think a lot of men here haven't had great experiences with romance and have a negative bias to your position, and are being too harsh. But I still think that the current status quo of dating in the west(which it sounds like you're advocating for) is very, very harsh on below average men, and even above average men who're just introverted/shy. And I don't think women are getting a good deal out of things either, although their problems are very different from men's in dating.
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His mistake was both, because he stopped respecting the women around him as individuals with their own preferences and instead as a monolithic "them" who will respond the same.
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