Devon Eriksen@Devon_Eriksen_
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.
