At age nineteen and drunk, I got jumped (rather than “hit”) on by a fat older woman I was supposed to be innocently sharing a bed then, but since then, roughly minus never. IDKWTFITA.
Well, I went to Europe and the States and didn’t get hit on there either, so I can’t blame the environment in my case…
I voted “never” without even thinking, but actually my first girlfriend had to call me at home and tell me point blank that she was interested in me, because her signals weren’t enough. Even though a friend of mine had told me that she was expressing interest. (He says that often, and usually as a joke, so it didn’t necessarily mean anything.) So it happened at least once in my life. Maybe twice; there’s an event I’m not quite sure what to make of. But it’s certainly fewer than once a year.
I’m almost 50 years old I don’t think I’ve ever been hit on by a women, out of the blue, in my life.
Thank goodness I’m married now, so I don’t have to be concerned about stuff like that anymore.
But your awkwardness is part of your charm.
Or maybe not alone, if they’re lucky, but with a succession of women who are, by definition, kind of outliers (given that most women, most of the time, won’t pursue or ask out guys who are not either movie-star good lucking, super-charismatic, tall, etc.). That’s not a condemnation of the women who don’t hit on men, nor of the relative handful who are aggressive pursuers. It’s just observation (and the poll results seem to bear it out).
IME, the women who are outliers in terms of pursuing normal non-super-star guys are often outliers in other respects. In my much younger years, I was kind of quiet, passive, risk averse, lazy. I noticed after awhile that I had dated a succession of women only after they’d fairly aggressively made a play for me. I can only think of one of them in which the relationship didn’t end badly due to some outlier behavior on the girl’s part (obsessive jealousy, hysterical fits, serial sleeping with bartenders).
For men, getting the nerve up to approach and pursue and run the risk of rejection, rather than complaining that the system (which stems from fundamental human nature) is unfair, increases my, your friend’s, any middle-of-the-road guy’s, chance of hitting a more normal range of the behavioral/personality bell curve. Sucks a bit but that’s life.
That only works for John Cusack or that goofy kid in Real Genius.
Stranger
No, the American system does not stem from fundamental human nature since the system is not the same in all countries and non-Americans are also human. It stems from a society based on puritanism among other values, and that society no longer exists…so there is no reason to keep such a stupid system that does not fit our society anymore. But it’s not like you can legislate away social norms, so talking about it like this will go a long way and it will be a slow process.
It makes about as much sense as a stripper with a recent DUI conviction getting custody of the kids because her ex-husband is a “rapper” (true story), there are ways in which our society needs to catch up with reality.
Voted “once a year” but the reality is I am yet another of the “can’t really tell” brigade. All I know is that friends tell me later that they think I was being hit on, so if I am to believe them it does actually happen, just I have no idea at the time. For me the problem is that as far as I can see the look a woman gives you when she just likes you and the look she gives you when it could go further is exactly the same. I just can’t work this shit out.
It also doesn’t help that I swing dance a lot and due to that I am in physical contact a lot with women in a purely recreational manner, so the idea of someone touching my hand or something (or any sort of touching that isn’t utterly, utterly obvious) is something I just don’t even think about anymore.
To give you an idea (and bloody hell, I hope she doesn’t read this site!), I was at a swing event in the week leading up to New Year. I met someone there, danced a few times on various nights, chatted a lot, was beside each other when 2012 arrived, had a long chat into the wee hours on the last night and met up for lunch the next day before she flew home. I still have no idea if she was hitting on me or just being friendly. No. Sodding. Idea. Hell, I’ve found her on Facebook and I’m umming and aahing over whether I should send her a friend request.
Yes, it really is that bad. Some people just cannot read the signals (if there are any).
You must be a socially inept, unfun person to be around who would make a terrible partner.
Just kidding, I’m not an idiot.
I defy you to find a country/society in which women initiate contact with men more than vice versa (among the middle of the bell curve, that is, excluding super-handsome, famous, rich outlier men or crazy needy women). You can’t. Nor can you name a time in history when women were courting men by writing ballads or poetry or performing feats of derring do, as men did for women for hundreds of years of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. I don’t recall that Verona was “puritanical” and yet Juliet didn’t chase Romeo.
Your “American puritanism” theory also has to deal with the statistical fact that a substantial majority of young American women today are readily willing to have pre-marital sex, even sometimes on a very casual basis. How do you square the fact that they’re willing to give up what was historically the biggest chip in the Puritanical poker game, but that some vestige of Puritanism is inhibiting them from taking the much smaller step of asking guys out on a date? I don’t think you can.
Societies/culture differ but only at the margins. Some Continental countries may have more warm/open attitudes that allow, say, a Spanish girl (IME, and largely because Europeans are more into clubbing/dance culture (my WAG) which promotes early overt intimacy) to be a little bit more forward, some less (good luck getting the average native Japanese woman to ask you out ever). There’s another thread (don’t want to hijack this one too much) about whether the baseline reality that most women can afford to/prefer to wait to be asked out is “fair,” but I think that sort of misses the point.
To your last issue, the “slow process” you envision will not take place before you are too old to care about it, so I don’t even see the point in talking about it. I’ve known far too many guys to molder in bitter involuntary celibacy because the world wouldn’t agree with their elegant intellectual arguments for why women should chase them and by gum they weren’t going to take part in an unfair game until women acknowledged and accepted these arguments. That’s a very guy thing to do, constructing logical arguments for what is inherently somewhat illogical, I am probably guilty of it myself. What you do need to know is that most women don’t think of attraction and romance in “fairness” or intellectual-argument based ways, so you’ll be waiting a long time to win that argument (put differently, you’ll be putting the great majority of the female dating pool on your do not call list).
“American women need to . . .” is not a winning position (I mean, except for basic things like they shouldn’t sleep with thugs). No, they don’t really “need to” do anything, and they’re certainly not going to react well to hearing it from you or me.
Human nature has no history could be the short version of this . . . .
To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been hit on by a woman without us having some level of prior relationship.
I’ll make myself feel better by saying it’s just that I don’t realize when all the women are hitting on me.
I’m not single, I’m engaged so I don’t have skin in the game. The same way I don’t anticipate ever divorcing (here’s hoping) but I get annoyed that Kobe Bryant’s ex-wife is going to get 190 million freaking dollars from her divorce. I am a “feminist” kinda sorta because overall I do believe the sexes need as near equal treatment as possible, which means I care about women’s issues like their right to choose if they want to have children, and I care about the fact that in Washington state a man is royally, ROYALLY screwed in any divorce, no matter the circumstances.
So, even if I don’t think something is likely to change in my lifetime I am going to bitch about it, particularly on a MESSAGE board which is about exchange of ideas. And I think it’s WRONG that men have to do all the work in courtship which is only appropriate in a society where women cannot advance themselves. Considering women outnumber men in higher education nowadays (I am a janitor at a college and have my own repair business BTW), that is definitely proof that the model is outdated.
If there was some nation-wide consensus where guys refused to play along, pretty soon a lot more women would be approaching men, but of course a few scabs would break the union to benefit themselves. 
edit: To better address what you said, I can’t think of a culture that women chased the men, but there has been very few cultures until recently where women could even own property, I think it’s pretty obvious that there is a causation between women’s rights/advancement and them picking up more of the slack in courtship, and I just believe it is lagging in America because of tradition. I shouldn’t have said “puritan”, just old fashioned.
I’ve never been hit on out of the blue. I don’t think I am that ugly and I’m not fat* and I’m employed and try to dress nice but I have never had a man make a pass at me. My ex-husband met me at work and we worked on a project together and were making eyes before he asked me out.
I can’t believe how many women here have been hit on out of the blue. I wonder how to make that happen! I was going to go for online dating.
*FTR, my ex was fat and I don’t care but people often seem to think if they are fat, this is a reason they are not getting dates. I am in shape and I also don’t get dates. Hence my comment.
Nailed it in one. (It’d be a lot more than a few, if the skewed population/message ratio reported of the online dating world is any indication).
But good luck with your own impending marriage – congratulations on not having (fingers crossed) to worry about this stuff on a personal level.
You should know that there is a strong theory that just the opposite will happen/is happening.
Historically (again, in almost every time period I’ve heard of) most women have preferred to date older and more “successful” men. There is an economic dependency aspect to that but I think it’s more fundamental than that (think high school where no one’s really economically dependent but hot sophomore girls dating seniors or college boys was much more apt to happen than the converse). There’s a theory (espoused with greater and lesser degrees of statistical rigor) that professionally successful women may paint themselves into a corner, because they still have some instinct to seek a higher status men, but the shrinking number (relatively) of higher-status men means that those men have more options, and can go younger/play the field. Human nature being perverse, neither the professionally successful mid-30s women nor the even-more-successful men they may tend to want, are willing to budge from their preferences/position. This is certainly borne out by the high number of single late-30s women with advanced degrees I see in my city.
Thats the exact reason I got a crappy education, a crappy job, and live in half of a double wide. I am swimming in redneck putang around here.
Amen to that brother.
Women are chasing men, right now, and have been for decades. They don’t necessarily go all the way to asking for a number or setting a date.
They do make flirtatious gestures and facial expressions, ask leading questions, talk about the night spots they’d like to visit, and put their hands all over you. If this isn’t happening, you’re not being chased.
They just aren’t chasing most men. Left up to their own devices, a large group of women will be chasing a relatively small group of desirable men. These men typically have sex with a woman, dump her, and move on.
Hypergamy - one explanation for the situation Huerta88 refers to.
Your explanation is probably better/more nuanced than mine . . . and yes, hypergamy is the explanation.