I will say as a dude in his 30's, not asking people out was the single thing that most hurt my romantic life, and I found a partner very soon after I figured out how to overcome my anxiety and actually do it.
One phenomenen I've especially noticed is that certain men who are trying to be progressive think that asking women out is somehow "unfeminist" and they should feel guilty about it. I'm sure you can find feminists who think that, but on the whole they are just concerned about the whole harassment thing that you detailed here, not on people who politely ask others out and take no for an answer.
You want to laugh, I basically avoided any women who gave off any signs of left-wing politics at all for a very long time because I figured any mistake would be met with a harassment accusation. At least, I figured, a nonfeminist woman would see me as a human being who made a mistake rather than an enemy.
I kept finding women who were interested in me turned out to be feminists, and then wanting out but being terrified of what they would do to me if I broke up with them.
I think you're right, but I want to add the way I've come to understand why it was so hard back in the day (like a decade ago, back when discourse about how threatening it is for women to be sexually approached was really rampant) to see this clearly.
The fact is that the social media -fueled rhetoric back then coming from young progressive people tended to lay down certain rules that *really made it sound like there was no non-threatening way for a man to initiate romantic/sexual things with a woman* outside of certain stilted acts like asking a woman permission to kiss her (in the context of already being out on a date) before ever doing so (and that can be really hot, because explicitly checking for consent is sexy!). It's hard to point to one article or one common phrase; it's hard to describe what the effect of the sum total of the rhetoric was to someone who wasn't in online or real-life progressive spaces at that time. But it genuinely felt like it led to contradictions and impossible rules for a straight guy who didn't want to stay single forever and didn't have 100% certain knowledge of a woman who would be interested in him.
And then I realized something simple and in retrospect obvious that changed how I think about it and made me get a healthier view of all this as a result: *in the context of political/social movement rhetoric, most people don't actually say literally what they believe or feel in practical situations; they talk in a way that makes them feel good for cheering for the right team*. So, for instance, when Laci Green said in a video that she considered it *so hot* for a man to ask her permission to kiss her before he did, she probably didn't actually feel that way, and she probably wasn't consciously *lying* about feeling that way, but her "activism discourse" mode and her "living her life with her actual preferences" mode was compartmentalized and slightly disconnected. And when woman feminists were going around talking as if it always sucked to be asked out by men they weren't already interested in, in most cases this probably wasn't actually how they felt in practice; it was how they were convincing themselves they felt in the context of activism-motivated speech.
This whole "professing beliefs that you don't actually believe in practice" thing is counterintuitive to those who don't do it and kind of hard to grasp -- possibly particularly for autistic people, one might imagine -- but it really is a rampant thing.
So, yeah, *the whole time* the concern that early-mid-2010's internet feminists' rhetoric stemmed from was not the universal creepiness of being asked out but concerns about genuine harassment, and that makes sense and was kind of obvious the whole time but simultaneously not at all obvious to someone who may have interpreted their rhetoric literally.
(I'll also add that the idea of "asking women out is somehow 'unfeminist'" should be modified to "assuming that it's the man's role to ask women out should be considered 'unfeminist'", but I see little evidence of many people so much as lifting a finger to make that happen in our culture.)
> So, yeah, *the whole time* the concern that early-mid-2010's internet feminists' rhetoric stemmed from was not the universal creepiness of being asked out but concerns about genuine harassment, and that makes sense and was kind of obvious the whole time but simultaneously not at all obvious to someone who may have interpreted their rhetoric literally.
How would you possibly know this? What differentiates this from their actual concern having been this at the time, and them just being hypocritical, and/or actually trying to implement it in their own life? AFAIK there is no hard evidence that say, Laci Green does or does not like a particular behavior, or did or didn't like it at the time.
Important note (from someone who was bad at dating but is now 10 years into a great marriage): Ask out your crush.
BUT! Do not confess your eternal, undying love to your crush. Do not tell your crush that you have pined for them, from a distance, for weeks or months or years, that you are soulmates, that you are in love with them, or whatever.
The bit Ozy wrote about how sexual harassment is implying negative consequences for saying no is really the whole ballgame here. Doing this isn't *really* sexual harassment, but it is adding pressure - dialing up the awkwardness of saying "no" to you while not really enhancing the upside. You're telling this person that you don't just want to hang out and see if you click. You're instead saying that you have pinned your whole self-image on this request to go to Olive Garden, and will be absolutely *crushed* if they don't reciprocate. That feels really bad to be on the receiving end of.
Try to keep the pressure low. This is good for them and also for you. You don't need to tie your whole sense of self to this one request working out, and they don't need to feel like they kicked a puppy if this isn't their thing. That's actually one of the benefits of asking more people out. It becomes a less big deal if someone says no.
one part of this post I want to emphasise and generalise is that IMO awkward conversations are much less bad than people seem to think? like, not only dating but other stuff like talking to your friend about their one habit that you find difficult -- it's gonna be weird and you're gonna stumble over it, and have to do a bunch of clarifying and misunderstanding and fixing misunderstandings, but like, generally you *will* get there, and as you say, in the cases that matter most both people *want* to get there, so once you've muddled through the embarrassing mess of words you'll often find out that you have actually ended up where you wanted to be?
so, next time your hindbrain says "we can't say that, it'd be awkward", at least ask the question "so what?"
this really helped me really drive through my brain that i don't want to date people that don't want me. I would have thought that it would be obvious to myself, but after being really embarrassingly rejected recently, and still wanting to pursue said guy, i realize now that it would be terrible if i actually ended up with him!!
It also doesn't help as a trans gay man that many people still view me as a woman, but that just helps me filter out the dating pool even more, right? i want to remain optimistic about this (´･ᴗ･ ` )
thank you very much for writing and sharing with us!!!
> as long as you’re steering clear of professional contexts and not hitting on teenagers while an adult—it doesn’t cause serious harm.
I expect that, to people without much of a social life (who I expect are a significant part of your intended audience here), the "steering clear of professional contexts" part makes this much more difficult: "professional contexts" may be the only place where such people already interact with other people in person enough to become acquainted with them (if they are no longer in school), & thus the main place where they might have an opportunity to Ask Someone Out who they know something about rather than a complete stranger. Therefore the message this post may send to a person in that situation is not 'you should ask people out' in general, but rather 'you should not ask anyone out without first either becoming socially brave enough to ask out complete strangers or developing a substantial nonromantic friend group to select from, because asking those people out with whom you are already acquainted is socially unacceptable.'
(Since I have literally zero personal experience in this area, it is likely that I am missing something important that partly or entirely obviates this problem, but I thought this comment worth posting anyway in case that is not the case. It would also be entirely reasonable for you to say that someone in the situation I describe has bigger problems that they should fix before even seriously thinking about asking someone out.)
To be clear, there are *plenty* of professional contexts where it's fine to hit on people. But I do think it's possible for a well-intentioned but socially unaware person to cause actual harm hitting on people in a professional context, in a way that just is never going to happen if you hit on people at a book group.
But ultimately if you're in that situation you have to go on The Apps, meet people outside of a professional context, or learn to read signals well enough that you can be confident no one thinks their job depends on saying 'yes' to your advances.
The thing you're also forgetting is that if you shoot your shot and miss at a book group (or board game club), you now have to avoid that person for the rest of the time to avoid awkwardness or being seen as 'pushy'.
Yeah, and this reminds me of the part in the post about "if your friend group is the type that would unreasonably turn it into a scandal if you asked someone out who wasn't interested in you, you really just need to find a new friend group". I think this post is overall really good, but that bit did bother me, because from my experience it feels really unrealistic. Over the past 15 years, the only sort of properly congealed "friend groups" that I've managed to have were via my professional environment. And I'd wager that I'm a lot less introverted and socially anxious than the average reader of this blog, and I made strenuous efforts over the past decade to find/establish a real friend group outside of work. (Individual friends, absolutely, but not a group. And also, *very temporary* groups which tended to collapse due to either everyone being too busy or to their own internal dysfunction, and in the latter case, which came across as being at very high risk of making a Big Scary Scandal over someone asking someone out.)
And as I traverse past my mid-30's into my late-30's, it's only getting harder. It's a general problem that's bigger and broader than the difficulties of initiating romantic relationships and which I don't see an obvious solution to.
One thing I want to disagree with you on -- depending on context, if someone says no, I would say that it might be OK to make a quick confirmation of that. This doesn't really apply using your script, because it proposes no specific time or activity and is pretty overt about it being intended as a date. But not everyone is going to do things that way. Now, if you ask someone on a date, and they're interested in that but not in the particular activity you suggested, what they *should* do is make a counter-offer... but I have heard of people failing to do that! So in such a case I don't think it's so bad to quickly suggest an alternative to be sure. I guess this does require the social skill of being able to ask in a way that makes it clear it's a quick ask for confirmation -- the sort you willl *definitely* not continue past -- and not, like, you starting from scratch, which would be obnoxious. I suppose when you consider Ozy's target audience with this post (see the bits about asking out coworkers), maybe the people reading this actually shouldn't do that after all. :P Still, thought it was worth noting...
I once asked someone out to a comedy show, and they said something to the effect of “sounds fun but my grandma is visiting that weekend”. I *assumed* this was a gentle way of turning me down. Later, after a long time of crushing on this girl and friendzoning myself, it turns out *her grandma really was visiting that weekend* and things may well have worked out if I’d simply said, “oh too bad - maybe we can meet up another time?”
Anyway, yes: definitely don’t pester, and “no means no”, but there are qualified and unqualified nos!
I think it's superficially pretty reasonable to take this as a soft no, because I think if your grandma really is visiting that weekend, it's on you to counterpropose. On the other hand, IME people (a) may not have the same policies about things like this or (b) may agree in principle but then like, forget? Or not notice? Or be awkward about it for some reason? There's just like a million reasons why people don't do things and it's often better to adopt a communication style that is robust to mistakes or mismatches.
This is annoying and I don't think there's a great compromise :/
Oh, I don’t think I was completely unreasonable to take it as a *soft* no, but it wasn’t nearly as hard a no as I took it.
For additional context, the girl was herself a bit awkward and probably didn’t consider the signal “can’t, visiting grandma” sent. For my part, I didn’t sell it hard enough that my ask was an expression of romantic interest. Basically, both of us left way too much open for interpretation and failed to clarify.
also though, straight / bisexual women, please do ask men out if you like them. that nice feeling you get when someone you like flatters you, even if you're not ultimately into them? men reportedly also like that feeling
Obviously I think this is good pushback against the batshit people you speak of, but I think it's worth taking a moment to go further and say *why* so many people are convinced by these batshit people. Remember, if someone believes P and you want to convince them of Q which contradicts P, it's not enough to argue for Q; you have to explicitly say "not P"!
So, to do that real quick -- a lot of people are convinced by these "batshit" people because such people don't present themselves as batshit. They present themselves as normal and reasonable and good feminists. And those fooled by them lack the social experience to realize that this is not the case. So they expect *everyone* to act as the batshit people describe, and for this to be normal and reasonable and to be considered normal and reasonable, and if you disagree you're a sexist and nobody will listen to anything you have to say.
So, while you are basically already saying this (we definitely don't disagree on this point), I want to also say more explicitly: No, these people are batshit. What they describe as normal is not normal, and is not how most people will act. Most people are reasonable, and reasonable does not mean what the batshit people are describing as reasonable -- it means what you already know as reasonable from more general social interaction. Stop listening to these people and judge right and wrong for yourself instead (yeah OK that's a hard transition to make but you will have to). But you already know what reasonability actually looks like, so apply that!
From a straight male perspective -- The online ratio of women complaining about excess male attention, to women complaining about insufficient male attention, seems fairly high.
I do remember seeing a twitter poll which found that men tended to think that women wanted more male attention, but in actuality, women were more likely to want *less* male attention. Unfortunately I can't find it right now.
I think it's plausible that your readers should be asking more people out on their current margin. But I think you're presenting this as a bit too much of a one-sided tradeoff. I think women don't like turning men down. For example, I sometimes notice what feels like pre-emptive frostiness to ward off me asking them out. (Naturally, I don't ask them out at that point.)
Don't forget the abundant online dating matches that almost all women have access to. And of course, the high prevalence of ghosting is an important revealed preference fact. (I used to ask a lot of women for their numbers. Generally I would have a friendly positive-seeming interaction, then just get silence when I texted her later.)
If women really want us to ask more, they should say so, and they mostly aren't saying so.
I think the actually-useful guide here would be a guide on how to figure out the difference between a woman who's experiencing some social anxiety because she thinks you're attractive, vs a woman who wants you to go away, but doesn't want to cause conflict by saying it directly.
Another factor to consider here: Supposing that about 10% of the male population consists of "scumbags" -- men who approach women for sex frequently and don't take "no" for an answer. In that case, women could be very justified in complaining about excess attention from scumbags, yet still want more approaches from the 90% non-scumbag male population.
>74% of women aged 25 and below want to be approached more; 77% in the full 18-30 cohort. 68% wish to be approached more between 30-40, while for women 41 and older 45% wish to be approached more.
This doesn't appear to be coming through on social media. I'm not sure if that's because his sample is unrepresentative, or desires people share on social media are unrepresentative, or some combination.
This is going to sound like a very stupid question, but this reads like the post of a person who is OK with stupid questions. What is the difference between asking someone out in the sense that this post is talking about versus just inviting someone to hang out/get coffee together/whatever? Should you only ask someone out if you have “special feelings” for them? Should you only ask someone out if you think you might be able to have romantic interest in them? Will a person being asked out think this means you might want to have sex at some point? Where does kink fit in?
Also, great post, thanks, gonna be thinking about this one.
Asking people out on a date isn't very different from asking someone to hang out-- in fact, I have occasionally gone to hang out with someone unsure whether it was a date or not.
My suggested script includes "you're cute" because this is a compliment that you're generally not going to give a platonic friend,* and so it establishes right away that this is on a dating footing. In addition to physical appearance compliments, dates generally involve more physical touching: you begin with normal touch (like touching them on the shoulder for emphasis), wait for them to reciprocate, and if they do gradually escalate to kinds of touch that people don't do in platonic relationships (such as handholding or putting your head on their shoulder). Dates also often have more conversation about future plans-- things like kids or career plans-- because people are trying to learn whether the other person has any obvious dealbreakers.
You can also just ask whether it's a date! Script: "um, this is kind of awkward, but I can't figure out if this is a date or not?" Once they're already hanging out with you, they're not going to be mad at you, even if it is transiently awkward.
If an orientationally appropriate person invites you into their bedroom without providing a clear reason ("my xbox is there"), they are usually subtly attempting to initiate something between makeouts and sex. If you don't want it, don't make a big deal about it, just say "nah." (This is also a good way to initiate sex, but you generally shouldn't do it unless you've already held their hand or put your head on their shoulder or kissed.)
In general, people who are dating assume that sex is on the table. If you're uninterested in sex (which is what I got from your comment), it's usually a good idea to bring this up in the first few dates. Don't explicitly say "I don't want to have sex with you"-- people tend to find that hurtful. Bring up your reason naturally in conversation: for example, if you're talking about religion, you might say "my faith is very important to me, so I don't want to have sex before marriage"; if you're sharing funny memes, you might show them a meme about being asexual and say you find it relatable.
Often, people don't talk about kink until after they've had sex for the first time. (I agree this is very silly.) It is generally acceptable to talk about kinks in private after you've had sex for the first time. Otherwise, you generally shouldn't bring up kink (or any sexual topic) totally out of the blue, but you can bring it up if it seems like a natural way to continue the conversation. Unfortunately all the natural ways *I* have to bring up kink are very Bay-Area-specific ("I'm looking forward to Folsom this year!") and I don't know how everyone else does it. >.>
*Sometimes women platonically call each other cute, which is one reason that lesbian sheep syndrome is so common!
**Unless you're a man on a date with a man, in which case go wild.
It really depends on the group what's platonic or not: in my little corner of ace space and mostly autistic sensory-seekers, if someone's openly cuddly you can absolutely ask them about holding hands and putting your head on their shoulder and many more things. But that's a very little corner of the world.
> you begin with normal touch (like touching them on the shoulder for emphasis), wait for them to reciprocate, and if they do gradually escalate to kinds of touch that people don't do in platonic relationships (such as handholding or putting your head on their shoulder).
I could definitely benefit from a whole post about this, or a link to someone else who has talked about it. I can't remember any times when I've touched a friend/acquaintance on the shoulder for emphasis, or when anyone has done that to me; the same goes for other platonic physical touch. I always feel like I should initiate some kind of touch on a first date, but I have no idea what or how and end up never touching my date at all. (I can't tell if this is contributing to my first dates all being uninterested in second dates.)
> A lot of straight men assume that straight women are constantly turning down suitors. This isn't true.
The modal straight woman isn't, but people's preferences are correlated in the real world, and chances are that if you're interested in a woman, she's one with a lot of suitors. This is especially true of women whose interests and personalities put them in predominantly male social circles (or make them particularly appealing to certain kinds of otherwise-picky men). And from listening to what women I'm interested in say about dating, it does sound like they're fending men off pretty often.
Ozy’s advice is still great in those cases, IMO! Most “fending off” effort is about dealing with latching-on behavior where you haven’t been asked out - you know someone is interested in you and you’re not interested in them, and things are awkward because you like having them in your life (or at least you like being in the place they frequent too) but you don’t want them to slide into a romantic way of relating to you, and it’s gauche/socially risky to say “I don’t want to date you” if it’s plausibly deniable that they’re interested. Being asked out directly in that case is a gift! You can cut back on the amount of calculus you have to do about how friendly you can be without it being interpreted as reciprocating sexual interest, and it’s easier to go on being friends/teammates/whatever. And the asker can move on - it’s win/win.
I'm sorry, this is positive and pleasant and all, but you really easily dismiss the prevalence of "batshit" people and their influence. I've had a women ask ME out and a batshit third party intervened because as an unattended male I MUST have been up to no good.
Also, this leaves out the part where people say yes to a date, then flake, because it's easier than saying no, and this happens with such universal regularity you wind up a wreck that doesn't believe the things people say anymore.
I think you have to do a realistic risk calculus. What is the harm a batshit person can do to you? If you’re behaving decently and staying away from well known danger areas like dating a coworker, student, or much-younger woman, most likely the risk here is « crazy people disapprove of you, » not anything really dangerous.
Yeah. I agree with this. I'm somehow happily married and I was basically one of these guys. If I read this then, this would have not convinced me, and it's primarily the "batshit" problem. If it was just them that was batshit I'd probably say that's fine if uncomfortable and deal with it after asking her out and getting shot down. But part of being batshit is spreading your batshittery to your friends, who are probably also acquainted with you, the asking her out guy. And batshit people tend to be quite good at convincing normies that they're not the problem, the evil man who dared presume I like them and ask me out, is the actual problem. And this can snowball very quickly and destroy your standing in a social group (a social group that you, as an awkward guy, probably value quite highly because when you're awkward it's often quite tough to replace a social scene).
2010's feminism was really rough on guys in this dynamic, and I have a very hard time getting too upset at them for voicing this.
The full situation was a new years party at a nerd/gamer themed bar, I'd moved to a new city and didn't know anyone yet. A woman approached me and asked me to hang out/dance, and to hold her drink while she went to the bathroom. While she was in the bathroom, another woman got in my face demanding to know who I was and who I was with. This second woman didn't even seem to know the first, because when the first came out of the bathroom she ignored the second one, just grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the floor.
Then while I was dancing with the first woman, security appears to pull us apart and start interrogating me as to who I was with, looping over and over with the same questions after I'd already answered them, telling me Im not being asked to leave, but refusing to let me speak to the first woman (I have no idea what happened to her), while the second one screams in my face. I'm getting angry at this point and don't trust three-drinks-me to not go on a shouting rant and causing an incident, so I show myself out. It was 11:58 pm, December 31st, 2017.
So I did ignore the batshit person. Then that person sicced security on me. I'm particularly annoyed about it because it probably wouldn't have happened at a normie venue, while my own subculture treats me with suspicion and contempt.
Last year we collectively had a fairly long discussion (in internet terms) about whether women would feel safer around a man or a bear.
The vast majority of them said bear, and were only too eager to explain why in the context of seeing all men as a potential threat to them.
And like, this wasn't a crazy fringe movement, this was like, everyone was in agreement except for salty Andrew Tate style conservatives.
How does that square with your points about men asking women out in ways that make it comfortable to say no? From the sound of it, it's already uncomfortable even before the flirting has started!
I think Callie is being much nicer to the bear people than I am! I think people were just shitposting and not saying what they actually believe or things that influence their actual behavior in real life. If you have met a cool stranger in the woods and had a normal conversation with them, feel free to get their phone number.
The point of the Man-vs-Bear thing was explicitly to get men to think about how much of a threat they are perceived as by women, the people advancing it said so at the time.
If what they really wanted was for men who are already shy and awkward nerds to socially self-sabotage over talking to women because they now conceptualise themselves as a potential threat, I'd say it was an unqualified success.
There isn't really a meaningful extent to which you can tell a socially awkward man to just brush that off and act like it doesn't matter.
Not intending to be snarky: don't hit on girls who are stuck alone in a forest.
This is covered by rule three: if you're stuck alone in a forest, you can't say no to an advance without risking negative consequences. If the question was "would you rather be at a friend's birthday party with a bear or a man," responses would be much more evenly split.
Having a man's attention and interest is going to trigger a threat assessment no matter what, but if conditions are basically safe, the incremental discomfort of being asked out is small, and I agree with Ozy that the benefits usually outweigh the discomfort. It can even alleviate the discomfort if it's done in a chill way.
I think the reason feminism comes into this conversation so frequently, despite a woman's politics not being much correlated to how receptive she is to being asked out by a guy*, is that it's taboo to talk about our fears of the people around us, and feminism advocates breaking that taboo in the case of women's fears of men, in order to have conversations about the effects of gendered violence. But, as revealed by the man vs. bear meme, conservative women aren't any less apprehensive about men, they just respect the taboo more. Feminism doesn't make women scared of men, it just demands space to talk about it.
But chill asking-out conversations don't make that situation any worse. I'm much more apprehensive of a man I keep running into who I repeatedly catch looking at at me who never has a conversation about it than one I've politely turned down who's been cool about it.
* okay, yeah, there's probably a correlation between being gay and IDing as a feminist, but aside from that.
Ozy's article was explicitly written with a target audience of shy, awkward nerds in mind, and I think what we will find going forward is that shy, awkward nerds would simply rather never ask people out so that they never trigger a threat assessment, particularly if they've already been told that they have an assumed inherent threat level.
I don't agree that conservative women don't tend to view men differently, having actually interacted with many of them, viewing men primarily through a lens of fear very much comes across as a niche left-wing woman thing rather than something predominant among women as a whole, TBQH. The advice I got from certain southern women on "what a man should do" to ask a woman out is absolutely against Ozzy's advice, and pretty much all of my personal common sense (one suggestion involved vaulting over a public bench and resting your arm around a woman from behind as she sits there, for example).
I think the best tact here is to understand that women's fear of men is essentially irrational. It is like a cat who spooks at the vacuum. Asking someone out by itself simply isn't a good indicator that someone is about to commit a violent crime (even if they're turned down, the odds are absurdly low). You just aren't responsible for someone else's irrational fear of you.
Ozzy's advice is critically weak in that it misses that in trying to push the idea that women are reasonable, misses that there are indeed unreasonable women out there, specifically unreasonable women who men will end up asking out anyway. The important lesson shouldn't be that women are less scared of you than you think on average, but that it is not men's responsibility to deal with women's emotional problems, like struggling to cope with being approached by strangers with no actual sign of a threat present.
If women really don't like it, all they have to do is ask men out. The entire problem would go away if they did, but they don't, because it sucks. If feminists really don't like the dynamic, then they should try to get women to ask out men, since that's the only way that this can be navigated.
To address your points more thoroughly, it's not about how much of a threat men actually are, it's about how much they are perceived as a threat. The woods are just a convenient setting as a metaphor for vulnerability. The intent of the Man-vs-Bear people was explicitly to get men to think of how much women see them as a threat all the time.
You say that the incremental discomfort is small (and that doesn't really square with saying man/bear responses would be 'evenly split' if the setting was a birthday party, but anyway), but this isn't a guarantee! Sure, men want to be chill and confident about it, but doing so when you've had little success doing so before predisposes you to microanalyse every word you say down to their inflection, and often in real time! Saying the wrong thing, or in the wrong way, will absolutely turn the situation awkward - no 'nice tits' necessary, and men who are aware of this are often hyper-aware, to the point of self-sabotage.
This makes any conversation in which they are trying to ask someone out anything but chill and comfortable. They have to fight against an impulse to abort mission, and focus on saying the right thing, in a chill and approachable way, and of course handle the looming possibility of being rejected afterwards.
Again, this is all before being told by the entire internet that they are perceived as more threatening than a bear, whether or not they actually are. And before they are told that having feelings without addressing them to the person directly makes them more creepy, not less.
My personal take is that I'd rather never ask anyone out again if it meant I could not be perceived as a threat.
Thanks for this thoughtful response. I don't mean to minimize in any way the fact that it takes a bunch of guts to ask people out. I know it's scary! And I know most people don't want to be scary!
It's impossible to exist in the world and never trigger a threat assessment. (For anyone, though obviously the degree & circumstances & impact of that vary wildly.) But that's not a big deal. It's okay to ask someone to take a risk with you - often, it's a gift to them. There's no way to have other people in your life without exposing yourself to risk from them.
Women who date men know that, and they don't expect a man to disable their threat warning systems, and they don't want them disabled. They don't need men to score zero on the threat-o-meter to be open to them. I doubt my personal threat-o-meter ever goes to zero outside my front door. But that doesn't mean I don't want to go outside! Most of the women who would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear than a man would rather date a man than a bear!
"Chill" might not have been the best word. I don't mean slick or suave or confident - I mean the stakes are low (in the way that this essay covers, not that the asker is indifferent to the outcome). Saying just the right thing or being non-awkward is not a requirement: relationships are often fumbling and awkward and that's part of the fun!
My mom used to say: “you can always ask a woman out. It either gives her the joy of saying yes and feeling flattered, or saying no and feeling flattered”.
I will say as a dude in his 30's, not asking people out was the single thing that most hurt my romantic life, and I found a partner very soon after I figured out how to overcome my anxiety and actually do it.
One phenomenen I've especially noticed is that certain men who are trying to be progressive think that asking women out is somehow "unfeminist" and they should feel guilty about it. I'm sure you can find feminists who think that, but on the whole they are just concerned about the whole harassment thing that you detailed here, not on people who politely ask others out and take no for an answer.
You want to laugh, I basically avoided any women who gave off any signs of left-wing politics at all for a very long time because I figured any mistake would be met with a harassment accusation. At least, I figured, a nonfeminist woman would see me as a human being who made a mistake rather than an enemy.
I kept finding women who were interested in me turned out to be feminists, and then wanting out but being terrified of what they would do to me if I broke up with them.
I think you're right, but I want to add the way I've come to understand why it was so hard back in the day (like a decade ago, back when discourse about how threatening it is for women to be sexually approached was really rampant) to see this clearly.
The fact is that the social media -fueled rhetoric back then coming from young progressive people tended to lay down certain rules that *really made it sound like there was no non-threatening way for a man to initiate romantic/sexual things with a woman* outside of certain stilted acts like asking a woman permission to kiss her (in the context of already being out on a date) before ever doing so (and that can be really hot, because explicitly checking for consent is sexy!). It's hard to point to one article or one common phrase; it's hard to describe what the effect of the sum total of the rhetoric was to someone who wasn't in online or real-life progressive spaces at that time. But it genuinely felt like it led to contradictions and impossible rules for a straight guy who didn't want to stay single forever and didn't have 100% certain knowledge of a woman who would be interested in him.
And then I realized something simple and in retrospect obvious that changed how I think about it and made me get a healthier view of all this as a result: *in the context of political/social movement rhetoric, most people don't actually say literally what they believe or feel in practical situations; they talk in a way that makes them feel good for cheering for the right team*. So, for instance, when Laci Green said in a video that she considered it *so hot* for a man to ask her permission to kiss her before he did, she probably didn't actually feel that way, and she probably wasn't consciously *lying* about feeling that way, but her "activism discourse" mode and her "living her life with her actual preferences" mode was compartmentalized and slightly disconnected. And when woman feminists were going around talking as if it always sucked to be asked out by men they weren't already interested in, in most cases this probably wasn't actually how they felt in practice; it was how they were convincing themselves they felt in the context of activism-motivated speech.
This whole "professing beliefs that you don't actually believe in practice" thing is counterintuitive to those who don't do it and kind of hard to grasp -- possibly particularly for autistic people, one might imagine -- but it really is a rampant thing.
So, yeah, *the whole time* the concern that early-mid-2010's internet feminists' rhetoric stemmed from was not the universal creepiness of being asked out but concerns about genuine harassment, and that makes sense and was kind of obvious the whole time but simultaneously not at all obvious to someone who may have interpreted their rhetoric literally.
(I'll also add that the idea of "asking women out is somehow 'unfeminist'" should be modified to "assuming that it's the man's role to ask women out should be considered 'unfeminist'", but I see little evidence of many people so much as lifting a finger to make that happen in our culture.)
> So, yeah, *the whole time* the concern that early-mid-2010's internet feminists' rhetoric stemmed from was not the universal creepiness of being asked out but concerns about genuine harassment, and that makes sense and was kind of obvious the whole time but simultaneously not at all obvious to someone who may have interpreted their rhetoric literally.
How would you possibly know this? What differentiates this from their actual concern having been this at the time, and them just being hypocritical, and/or actually trying to implement it in their own life? AFAIK there is no hard evidence that say, Laci Green does or does not like a particular behavior, or did or didn't like it at the time.
Important note (from someone who was bad at dating but is now 10 years into a great marriage): Ask out your crush.
BUT! Do not confess your eternal, undying love to your crush. Do not tell your crush that you have pined for them, from a distance, for weeks or months or years, that you are soulmates, that you are in love with them, or whatever.
The bit Ozy wrote about how sexual harassment is implying negative consequences for saying no is really the whole ballgame here. Doing this isn't *really* sexual harassment, but it is adding pressure - dialing up the awkwardness of saying "no" to you while not really enhancing the upside. You're telling this person that you don't just want to hang out and see if you click. You're instead saying that you have pinned your whole self-image on this request to go to Olive Garden, and will be absolutely *crushed* if they don't reciprocate. That feels really bad to be on the receiving end of.
Try to keep the pressure low. This is good for them and also for you. You don't need to tie your whole sense of self to this one request working out, and they don't need to feel like they kicked a puppy if this isn't their thing. That's actually one of the benefits of asking more people out. It becomes a less big deal if someone says no.
I appreciated this Ozy, thank you! I feel significantly more prepared to Ask Someone Out.
To be honest I am still stuck at the stage of Find Someone I Like Enough To Ask Out, but that's a different problem 😅
What do your friend groups and event calendar look like? Shifting that could help you
one trick I have found useful for scary conversations:
1. isolate some extremely short, non-scary prefix of the conversation, like "hi" or perhaps "hi, I'd like to ask you something"
2. form an intention to do 1 (you can't do it yet, because it's scary, but get attached to the idea anyway)
3. deliberately distance yourself mentally from the reason why you wanted to do 1, while keeping the intention to do it
4. do 1, it's not scary because you're not thinking about why you're doing it
5. remember why you're doing it
6. oh no! it's now *more* awkward to back out of the conversation than to just continue with the scary part
7. congratulations you did it
(I phrase this sort of facetiously but it really works on me)
one part of this post I want to emphasise and generalise is that IMO awkward conversations are much less bad than people seem to think? like, not only dating but other stuff like talking to your friend about their one habit that you find difficult -- it's gonna be weird and you're gonna stumble over it, and have to do a bunch of clarifying and misunderstanding and fixing misunderstandings, but like, generally you *will* get there, and as you say, in the cases that matter most both people *want* to get there, so once you've muddled through the embarrassing mess of words you'll often find out that you have actually ended up where you wanted to be?
so, next time your hindbrain says "we can't say that, it'd be awkward", at least ask the question "so what?"
this really helped me really drive through my brain that i don't want to date people that don't want me. I would have thought that it would be obvious to myself, but after being really embarrassingly rejected recently, and still wanting to pursue said guy, i realize now that it would be terrible if i actually ended up with him!!
It also doesn't help as a trans gay man that many people still view me as a woman, but that just helps me filter out the dating pool even more, right? i want to remain optimistic about this (´･ᴗ･ ` )
thank you very much for writing and sharing with us!!!
> as long as you’re steering clear of professional contexts and not hitting on teenagers while an adult—it doesn’t cause serious harm.
I expect that, to people without much of a social life (who I expect are a significant part of your intended audience here), the "steering clear of professional contexts" part makes this much more difficult: "professional contexts" may be the only place where such people already interact with other people in person enough to become acquainted with them (if they are no longer in school), & thus the main place where they might have an opportunity to Ask Someone Out who they know something about rather than a complete stranger. Therefore the message this post may send to a person in that situation is not 'you should ask people out' in general, but rather 'you should not ask anyone out without first either becoming socially brave enough to ask out complete strangers or developing a substantial nonromantic friend group to select from, because asking those people out with whom you are already acquainted is socially unacceptable.'
(Since I have literally zero personal experience in this area, it is likely that I am missing something important that partly or entirely obviates this problem, but I thought this comment worth posting anyway in case that is not the case. It would also be entirely reasonable for you to say that someone in the situation I describe has bigger problems that they should fix before even seriously thinking about asking someone out.)
Yeah, it's a hard problem!
To be clear, there are *plenty* of professional contexts where it's fine to hit on people. But I do think it's possible for a well-intentioned but socially unaware person to cause actual harm hitting on people in a professional context, in a way that just is never going to happen if you hit on people at a book group.
But ultimately if you're in that situation you have to go on The Apps, meet people outside of a professional context, or learn to read signals well enough that you can be confident no one thinks their job depends on saying 'yes' to your advances.
Right. I went on the Apps.
The thing you're also forgetting is that if you shoot your shot and miss at a book group (or board game club), you now have to avoid that person for the rest of the time to avoid awkwardness or being seen as 'pushy'.
If a person has absolutely no interaction with people outside of work, I do think they need to fix that problem before dating.
Yeah, and this reminds me of the part in the post about "if your friend group is the type that would unreasonably turn it into a scandal if you asked someone out who wasn't interested in you, you really just need to find a new friend group". I think this post is overall really good, but that bit did bother me, because from my experience it feels really unrealistic. Over the past 15 years, the only sort of properly congealed "friend groups" that I've managed to have were via my professional environment. And I'd wager that I'm a lot less introverted and socially anxious than the average reader of this blog, and I made strenuous efforts over the past decade to find/establish a real friend group outside of work. (Individual friends, absolutely, but not a group. And also, *very temporary* groups which tended to collapse due to either everyone being too busy or to their own internal dysfunction, and in the latter case, which came across as being at very high risk of making a Big Scary Scandal over someone asking someone out.)
And as I traverse past my mid-30's into my late-30's, it's only getting harder. It's a general problem that's bigger and broader than the difficulties of initiating romantic relationships and which I don't see an obvious solution to.
One thing I want to disagree with you on -- depending on context, if someone says no, I would say that it might be OK to make a quick confirmation of that. This doesn't really apply using your script, because it proposes no specific time or activity and is pretty overt about it being intended as a date. But not everyone is going to do things that way. Now, if you ask someone on a date, and they're interested in that but not in the particular activity you suggested, what they *should* do is make a counter-offer... but I have heard of people failing to do that! So in such a case I don't think it's so bad to quickly suggest an alternative to be sure. I guess this does require the social skill of being able to ask in a way that makes it clear it's a quick ask for confirmation -- the sort you willl *definitely* not continue past -- and not, like, you starting from scratch, which would be obnoxious. I suppose when you consider Ozy's target audience with this post (see the bits about asking out coworkers), maybe the people reading this actually shouldn't do that after all. :P Still, thought it was worth noting...
I once asked someone out to a comedy show, and they said something to the effect of “sounds fun but my grandma is visiting that weekend”. I *assumed* this was a gentle way of turning me down. Later, after a long time of crushing on this girl and friendzoning myself, it turns out *her grandma really was visiting that weekend* and things may well have worked out if I’d simply said, “oh too bad - maybe we can meet up another time?”
Anyway, yes: definitely don’t pester, and “no means no”, but there are qualified and unqualified nos!
I think it's superficially pretty reasonable to take this as a soft no, because I think if your grandma really is visiting that weekend, it's on you to counterpropose. On the other hand, IME people (a) may not have the same policies about things like this or (b) may agree in principle but then like, forget? Or not notice? Or be awkward about it for some reason? There's just like a million reasons why people don't do things and it's often better to adopt a communication style that is robust to mistakes or mismatches.
This is annoying and I don't think there's a great compromise :/
Oh, I don’t think I was completely unreasonable to take it as a *soft* no, but it wasn’t nearly as hard a no as I took it.
For additional context, the girl was herself a bit awkward and probably didn’t consider the signal “can’t, visiting grandma” sent. For my part, I didn’t sell it hard enough that my ask was an expression of romantic interest. Basically, both of us left way too much open for interpretation and failed to clarify.
also though, straight / bisexual women, please do ask men out if you like them. that nice feeling you get when someone you like flatters you, even if you're not ultimately into them? men reportedly also like that feeling
see also https://eudai.substack.com/p/the-odds-are-good-and-the-goods-are
Obviously I think this is good pushback against the batshit people you speak of, but I think it's worth taking a moment to go further and say *why* so many people are convinced by these batshit people. Remember, if someone believes P and you want to convince them of Q which contradicts P, it's not enough to argue for Q; you have to explicitly say "not P"!
So, to do that real quick -- a lot of people are convinced by these "batshit" people because such people don't present themselves as batshit. They present themselves as normal and reasonable and good feminists. And those fooled by them lack the social experience to realize that this is not the case. So they expect *everyone* to act as the batshit people describe, and for this to be normal and reasonable and to be considered normal and reasonable, and if you disagree you're a sexist and nobody will listen to anything you have to say.
So, while you are basically already saying this (we definitely don't disagree on this point), I want to also say more explicitly: No, these people are batshit. What they describe as normal is not normal, and is not how most people will act. Most people are reasonable, and reasonable does not mean what the batshit people are describing as reasonable -- it means what you already know as reasonable from more general social interaction. Stop listening to these people and judge right and wrong for yourself instead (yeah OK that's a hard transition to make but you will have to). But you already know what reasonability actually looks like, so apply that!
From a straight male perspective -- The online ratio of women complaining about excess male attention, to women complaining about insufficient male attention, seems fairly high.
I do remember seeing a twitter poll which found that men tended to think that women wanted more male attention, but in actuality, women were more likely to want *less* male attention. Unfortunately I can't find it right now.
I think it's plausible that your readers should be asking more people out on their current margin. But I think you're presenting this as a bit too much of a one-sided tradeoff. I think women don't like turning men down. For example, I sometimes notice what feels like pre-emptive frostiness to ward off me asking them out. (Naturally, I don't ask them out at that point.)
Don't forget the abundant online dating matches that almost all women have access to. And of course, the high prevalence of ghosting is an important revealed preference fact. (I used to ask a lot of women for their numbers. Generally I would have a friendly positive-seeming interaction, then just get silence when I texted her later.)
If women really want us to ask more, they should say so, and they mostly aren't saying so.
I think the actually-useful guide here would be a guide on how to figure out the difference between a woman who's experiencing some social anxiety because she thinks you're attractive, vs a woman who wants you to go away, but doesn't want to cause conflict by saying it directly.
I couldn't write that guide, because I always just shoot my shot.
So the cynical view here would be that you are actually annoying people and they are just too polite to say so.
Perhaps this is true! I think it is justified consequentially though.
Another factor to consider here: Supposing that about 10% of the male population consists of "scumbags" -- men who approach women for sex frequently and don't take "no" for an answer. In that case, women could be very justified in complaining about excess attention from scumbags, yet still want more approaches from the 90% non-scumbag male population.
I suppose this is also relevant:
>74% of women aged 25 and below want to be approached more; 77% in the full 18-30 cohort. 68% wish to be approached more between 30-40, while for women 41 and older 45% wish to be approached more.
https://datepsychology.com/risk-aversion-and-dating/
This doesn't appear to be coming through on social media. I'm not sure if that's because his sample is unrepresentative, or desires people share on social media are unrepresentative, or some combination.
This is going to sound like a very stupid question, but this reads like the post of a person who is OK with stupid questions. What is the difference between asking someone out in the sense that this post is talking about versus just inviting someone to hang out/get coffee together/whatever? Should you only ask someone out if you have “special feelings” for them? Should you only ask someone out if you think you might be able to have romantic interest in them? Will a person being asked out think this means you might want to have sex at some point? Where does kink fit in?
Also, great post, thanks, gonna be thinking about this one.
Asking people out on a date isn't very different from asking someone to hang out-- in fact, I have occasionally gone to hang out with someone unsure whether it was a date or not.
My suggested script includes "you're cute" because this is a compliment that you're generally not going to give a platonic friend,* and so it establishes right away that this is on a dating footing. In addition to physical appearance compliments, dates generally involve more physical touching: you begin with normal touch (like touching them on the shoulder for emphasis), wait for them to reciprocate, and if they do gradually escalate to kinds of touch that people don't do in platonic relationships (such as handholding or putting your head on their shoulder). Dates also often have more conversation about future plans-- things like kids or career plans-- because people are trying to learn whether the other person has any obvious dealbreakers.
You can also just ask whether it's a date! Script: "um, this is kind of awkward, but I can't figure out if this is a date or not?" Once they're already hanging out with you, they're not going to be mad at you, even if it is transiently awkward.
If an orientationally appropriate person invites you into their bedroom without providing a clear reason ("my xbox is there"), they are usually subtly attempting to initiate something between makeouts and sex. If you don't want it, don't make a big deal about it, just say "nah." (This is also a good way to initiate sex, but you generally shouldn't do it unless you've already held their hand or put your head on their shoulder or kissed.)
In general, people who are dating assume that sex is on the table. If you're uninterested in sex (which is what I got from your comment), it's usually a good idea to bring this up in the first few dates. Don't explicitly say "I don't want to have sex with you"-- people tend to find that hurtful. Bring up your reason naturally in conversation: for example, if you're talking about religion, you might say "my faith is very important to me, so I don't want to have sex before marriage"; if you're sharing funny memes, you might show them a meme about being asexual and say you find it relatable.
Often, people don't talk about kink until after they've had sex for the first time. (I agree this is very silly.) It is generally acceptable to talk about kinks in private after you've had sex for the first time. Otherwise, you generally shouldn't bring up kink (or any sexual topic) totally out of the blue, but you can bring it up if it seems like a natural way to continue the conversation. Unfortunately all the natural ways *I* have to bring up kink are very Bay-Area-specific ("I'm looking forward to Folsom this year!") and I don't know how everyone else does it. >.>
*Sometimes women platonically call each other cute, which is one reason that lesbian sheep syndrome is so common!
**Unless you're a man on a date with a man, in which case go wild.
It really depends on the group what's platonic or not: in my little corner of ace space and mostly autistic sensory-seekers, if someone's openly cuddly you can absolutely ask them about holding hands and putting your head on their shoulder and many more things. But that's a very little corner of the world.
Platonic cuddle piles are a wonderful thing.
I've never been to the Bay Area, but 10-15 years ago you would leave 'Secretary' in your list of movies on your OKCupid profile. ;)
> you begin with normal touch (like touching them on the shoulder for emphasis), wait for them to reciprocate, and if they do gradually escalate to kinds of touch that people don't do in platonic relationships (such as handholding or putting your head on their shoulder).
I could definitely benefit from a whole post about this, or a link to someone else who has talked about it. I can't remember any times when I've touched a friend/acquaintance on the shoulder for emphasis, or when anyone has done that to me; the same goes for other platonic physical touch. I always feel like I should initiate some kind of touch on a first date, but I have no idea what or how and end up never touching my date at all. (I can't tell if this is contributing to my first dates all being uninterested in second dates.)
> A lot of straight men assume that straight women are constantly turning down suitors. This isn't true.
The modal straight woman isn't, but people's preferences are correlated in the real world, and chances are that if you're interested in a woman, she's one with a lot of suitors. This is especially true of women whose interests and personalities put them in predominantly male social circles (or make them particularly appealing to certain kinds of otherwise-picky men). And from listening to what women I'm interested in say about dating, it does sound like they're fending men off pretty often.
Ozy’s advice is still great in those cases, IMO! Most “fending off” effort is about dealing with latching-on behavior where you haven’t been asked out - you know someone is interested in you and you’re not interested in them, and things are awkward because you like having them in your life (or at least you like being in the place they frequent too) but you don’t want them to slide into a romantic way of relating to you, and it’s gauche/socially risky to say “I don’t want to date you” if it’s plausibly deniable that they’re interested. Being asked out directly in that case is a gift! You can cut back on the amount of calculus you have to do about how friendly you can be without it being interpreted as reciprocating sexual interest, and it’s easier to go on being friends/teammates/whatever. And the asker can move on - it’s win/win.
I'm sorry, this is positive and pleasant and all, but you really easily dismiss the prevalence of "batshit" people and their influence. I've had a women ask ME out and a batshit third party intervened because as an unattended male I MUST have been up to no good.
Also, this leaves out the part where people say yes to a date, then flake, because it's easier than saying no, and this happens with such universal regularity you wind up a wreck that doesn't believe the things people say anymore.
I think you have to do a realistic risk calculus. What is the harm a batshit person can do to you? If you’re behaving decently and staying away from well known danger areas like dating a coworker, student, or much-younger woman, most likely the risk here is « crazy people disapprove of you, » not anything really dangerous.
Yeah. I agree with this. I'm somehow happily married and I was basically one of these guys. If I read this then, this would have not convinced me, and it's primarily the "batshit" problem. If it was just them that was batshit I'd probably say that's fine if uncomfortable and deal with it after asking her out and getting shot down. But part of being batshit is spreading your batshittery to your friends, who are probably also acquainted with you, the asking her out guy. And batshit people tend to be quite good at convincing normies that they're not the problem, the evil man who dared presume I like them and ask me out, is the actual problem. And this can snowball very quickly and destroy your standing in a social group (a social group that you, as an awkward guy, probably value quite highly because when you're awkward it's often quite tough to replace a social scene).
2010's feminism was really rough on guys in this dynamic, and I have a very hard time getting too upset at them for voicing this.
In that situation, the correct response is to not care about the batshit third party?
The full situation was a new years party at a nerd/gamer themed bar, I'd moved to a new city and didn't know anyone yet. A woman approached me and asked me to hang out/dance, and to hold her drink while she went to the bathroom. While she was in the bathroom, another woman got in my face demanding to know who I was and who I was with. This second woman didn't even seem to know the first, because when the first came out of the bathroom she ignored the second one, just grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the floor.
Then while I was dancing with the first woman, security appears to pull us apart and start interrogating me as to who I was with, looping over and over with the same questions after I'd already answered them, telling me Im not being asked to leave, but refusing to let me speak to the first woman (I have no idea what happened to her), while the second one screams in my face. I'm getting angry at this point and don't trust three-drinks-me to not go on a shouting rant and causing an incident, so I show myself out. It was 11:58 pm, December 31st, 2017.
So I did ignore the batshit person. Then that person sicced security on me. I'm particularly annoyed about it because it probably wouldn't have happened at a normie venue, while my own subculture treats me with suspicion and contempt.
Last year we collectively had a fairly long discussion (in internet terms) about whether women would feel safer around a man or a bear.
The vast majority of them said bear, and were only too eager to explain why in the context of seeing all men as a potential threat to them.
And like, this wasn't a crazy fringe movement, this was like, everyone was in agreement except for salty Andrew Tate style conservatives.
How does that square with your points about men asking women out in ways that make it comfortable to say no? From the sound of it, it's already uncomfortable even before the flirting has started!
I think Callie is being much nicer to the bear people than I am! I think people were just shitposting and not saying what they actually believe or things that influence their actual behavior in real life. If you have met a cool stranger in the woods and had a normal conversation with them, feel free to get their phone number.
The point of the Man-vs-Bear thing was explicitly to get men to think about how much of a threat they are perceived as by women, the people advancing it said so at the time.
If what they really wanted was for men who are already shy and awkward nerds to socially self-sabotage over talking to women because they now conceptualise themselves as a potential threat, I'd say it was an unqualified success.
There isn't really a meaningful extent to which you can tell a socially awkward man to just brush that off and act like it doesn't matter.
Not intending to be snarky: don't hit on girls who are stuck alone in a forest.
This is covered by rule three: if you're stuck alone in a forest, you can't say no to an advance without risking negative consequences. If the question was "would you rather be at a friend's birthday party with a bear or a man," responses would be much more evenly split.
Having a man's attention and interest is going to trigger a threat assessment no matter what, but if conditions are basically safe, the incremental discomfort of being asked out is small, and I agree with Ozy that the benefits usually outweigh the discomfort. It can even alleviate the discomfort if it's done in a chill way.
I think the reason feminism comes into this conversation so frequently, despite a woman's politics not being much correlated to how receptive she is to being asked out by a guy*, is that it's taboo to talk about our fears of the people around us, and feminism advocates breaking that taboo in the case of women's fears of men, in order to have conversations about the effects of gendered violence. But, as revealed by the man vs. bear meme, conservative women aren't any less apprehensive about men, they just respect the taboo more. Feminism doesn't make women scared of men, it just demands space to talk about it.
But chill asking-out conversations don't make that situation any worse. I'm much more apprehensive of a man I keep running into who I repeatedly catch looking at at me who never has a conversation about it than one I've politely turned down who's been cool about it.
* okay, yeah, there's probably a correlation between being gay and IDing as a feminist, but aside from that.
Ozy's article was explicitly written with a target audience of shy, awkward nerds in mind, and I think what we will find going forward is that shy, awkward nerds would simply rather never ask people out so that they never trigger a threat assessment, particularly if they've already been told that they have an assumed inherent threat level.
I don't agree that conservative women don't tend to view men differently, having actually interacted with many of them, viewing men primarily through a lens of fear very much comes across as a niche left-wing woman thing rather than something predominant among women as a whole, TBQH. The advice I got from certain southern women on "what a man should do" to ask a woman out is absolutely against Ozzy's advice, and pretty much all of my personal common sense (one suggestion involved vaulting over a public bench and resting your arm around a woman from behind as she sits there, for example).
I think the best tact here is to understand that women's fear of men is essentially irrational. It is like a cat who spooks at the vacuum. Asking someone out by itself simply isn't a good indicator that someone is about to commit a violent crime (even if they're turned down, the odds are absurdly low). You just aren't responsible for someone else's irrational fear of you.
Ozzy's advice is critically weak in that it misses that in trying to push the idea that women are reasonable, misses that there are indeed unreasonable women out there, specifically unreasonable women who men will end up asking out anyway. The important lesson shouldn't be that women are less scared of you than you think on average, but that it is not men's responsibility to deal with women's emotional problems, like struggling to cope with being approached by strangers with no actual sign of a threat present.
If women really don't like it, all they have to do is ask men out. The entire problem would go away if they did, but they don't, because it sucks. If feminists really don't like the dynamic, then they should try to get women to ask out men, since that's the only way that this can be navigated.
To address your points more thoroughly, it's not about how much of a threat men actually are, it's about how much they are perceived as a threat. The woods are just a convenient setting as a metaphor for vulnerability. The intent of the Man-vs-Bear people was explicitly to get men to think of how much women see them as a threat all the time.
You say that the incremental discomfort is small (and that doesn't really square with saying man/bear responses would be 'evenly split' if the setting was a birthday party, but anyway), but this isn't a guarantee! Sure, men want to be chill and confident about it, but doing so when you've had little success doing so before predisposes you to microanalyse every word you say down to their inflection, and often in real time! Saying the wrong thing, or in the wrong way, will absolutely turn the situation awkward - no 'nice tits' necessary, and men who are aware of this are often hyper-aware, to the point of self-sabotage.
This makes any conversation in which they are trying to ask someone out anything but chill and comfortable. They have to fight against an impulse to abort mission, and focus on saying the right thing, in a chill and approachable way, and of course handle the looming possibility of being rejected afterwards.
Again, this is all before being told by the entire internet that they are perceived as more threatening than a bear, whether or not they actually are. And before they are told that having feelings without addressing them to the person directly makes them more creepy, not less.
My personal take is that I'd rather never ask anyone out again if it meant I could not be perceived as a threat.
Thanks for this thoughtful response. I don't mean to minimize in any way the fact that it takes a bunch of guts to ask people out. I know it's scary! And I know most people don't want to be scary!
It's impossible to exist in the world and never trigger a threat assessment. (For anyone, though obviously the degree & circumstances & impact of that vary wildly.) But that's not a big deal. It's okay to ask someone to take a risk with you - often, it's a gift to them. There's no way to have other people in your life without exposing yourself to risk from them.
Women who date men know that, and they don't expect a man to disable their threat warning systems, and they don't want them disabled. They don't need men to score zero on the threat-o-meter to be open to them. I doubt my personal threat-o-meter ever goes to zero outside my front door. But that doesn't mean I don't want to go outside! Most of the women who would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear than a man would rather date a man than a bear!
"Chill" might not have been the best word. I don't mean slick or suave or confident - I mean the stakes are low (in the way that this essay covers, not that the asker is indifferent to the outcome). Saying just the right thing or being non-awkward is not a requirement: relationships are often fumbling and awkward and that's part of the fun!
My mom used to say: “you can always ask a woman out. It either gives her the joy of saying yes and feeling flattered, or saying no and feeling flattered”.