Here is the thing, this is terrible flirting. Men are not clueless or dumb. We have been told by women that a woman looking at us or smiling at us or being nice to us is not her flirting. It is her being nice because society has told women they have to be that way all the time. So now women have to use their adult voices and actually say what they want and actually flirt back.

Not sure if stupid is the word I’d use, but we tend not to pick up on subtlety very well.

Paraphrasing from memory a comment I saw in a similar thread on a different site:

• What’s subtle to you is entirely invisible to him
• What’s obvious to you is still mostly invisible to him
• What’s embarrassingly obvious to you is just starting to become subtle and therefore potentially noticeable to him

We don’t have nearly as much practice on picking up subtlety, and many of us are well aware of the potential blowback of perceiving interest and acting on it (“ew gross i’m just being nice you creep”).

We aren’t mind readers. Frankly, if I was a mindreader, I wouldn’t be hanging out on Lemmy. I’d be hanging out in the casino at the poker tables.

Now that I'm an older, very married guy I look back at the times in my late teens and twenties when women were trying to flirt with me and I was pretty clueless about it.

Hello. I'm a woman. And I'm also a dumbass who thinks she has no shot with pretty much anyone. Plus I'm easily embarrassed.

Plus if I'm interested I'm like "Ugh i don't want to be a creep who'd approach someone for their looks", projecting because I get uncomfortable if someone finds me attractive, completely ignoring in the moment that if you don't do that you'll never get to know the person.

This behaviour makes no sense. Just wanted to reassure(?) you that guys don't have a monopoly on stupidity.

I wouldn't even say it's men being stupid for the most part (everyone is stupid sometimes of course) but most men are having anxiety or other social problems AND a lot of them are afraid they come off as a creep. Unfortunately it's usually the ones that will almost never be creepy, but that's just how it is.

So yeah I totally agree, being direct is good, and also trying to pay attention to what men do over what they say, because we find the worst ways to express the best things often and that shit can be confusing. If you're not sure, you can always revert to directly asking them and most men will be honest.

But yeah, seems like there's a slow shift from men actively pursuing over to the whole thing being genderless. Some people are pursuing, and some are being pursued. I think it's a good change, because no matter the gender, usually the way to pursue someone is very similar and I think all the gender roles in all of this just enforce traditions that cease to be healthy.

More accurately, we don't get hints.

It’s so weird. Half of y’all will pull the earbuds out of our ears on the subway to shoot your shot and the other half will be actively getting motorboated and wondering if we like you.

The second type of guy is perfect, by the way. You’re doing good, stay humble.

I'm not going to proposition every woman that makes eye contact with me.

You aren't the vast majority of men on 4chan who assume any woman that glances at them is hitting on them. That's why femanon is so confused at why her approach is failing.

"Good day, m'lady!"

Girls ≠ Girls that are on 4chan

She could just be Canadian. They're really polite.

We had one lady who got a security guard fired because she said he made her feel uncomfortable

I have seen guys report women to HR because of actual, verifiable sexual harassment (physical touching, etc.) and be laughed out of the HR office because “women cannot sexually harass a man” and “men always want it”. Many of these men were also punished for attempting to report, with some even being fired.

They asymmetric societal standards currently in place are insanely misandric and bleedingly hypocritical.

If you want to show us interest, just give us a pat on the head, scratch our chin, or something.

Got to be honest, I think them doing that would confuse me even more.

This is why I have only ever reached out to women on dating sites.

Dating sites are absolutely horrendous experiences for worthless shitheads like myself, but I will not just hit on random people I see when I'm out and about. They're just trying to live their lives in peace, at least if you're on a dating site you know they are interested in meeting someone.

Unfortunately though the corpo fucks at MatchGroup bought and killed every good dating app and now that they're all useless tinder clones I don't use anything.

offer them delicious food

She's probably just being friendly.

offer to have sex with them

Yeah, still not sure, might just be her way of being friendly.

Emphasis on OR. If you do both he will turn into Al Bundy