Being clear about your desire also means that rejection is clear, and that hurts.

Probably because historically the patriarchy took away women's rights to be able to choose mates and had years and years of arranged marriages. Then couple that with women being in those forced relationships who could not chose their partners looking for comfort outside of the inhumane treatment of forced marriages and you get societal pressures that taught women they dont get a say in romantic relationships and as such them showing interest had to be covert as it was typically to those outside their prescribed marriage and if caught they could at the very least be socially disowned or at worst be literally killed for it. So yeah im not surprised women have a tendency to be less obvious about it its only very recently in human history that they got to have a say in finding partners.

This is a selfmade problem, don't try to pin it on anyone but women.

plausible deniability. if you don't actually try, you can't actually be rejected.

This is a selfmade problem, don’t try to pin it on anyone but women.

I imagine, it has also manifested in our culture for women to exert an abundance of caution and to try to gauge reactions as long as possible, because playing it entirely open can lead to the man developing feelings, and if you then have to break things off, it can get ugly. Some men, even if it is just a tiny fraction, may then turn to violence and rape.

In particular, the men may "blame" you for their feelings and they might feel """justified""" in raping you, because you did tell them that you find them attractive. No, none of this makes sense and I'd need to order another bucket of quotation marks, if I wanted to try to continue making sense of it, which I don't, so let's not do that.

Yes, the same can happen with the genders reversed, but typically the men are physically stronger, which is why this power dynamic made it into our culture, at least according to my pet theory here.