Bloke’s a good man.
He really is.
And…seriously…keep the wang-dang-doodle concealed until such time as she sees fit. Is it that difficult of a concept to understand?
The fourth. Really.
Admittedly, it’s a kind of white shoes after labor day rule, but if a person says no, thank you three times, stop. It doesn’t matter if it’s a curt ‘no’ or an “Oh, I’d love to but …”, stop asking. If s/he wants to go out with you, s/he can ask the next time.
Unless s/he suggests an alternative time, then it doesn’t count as a no.
And unless it’s lunch that day. You can stop by some one’s cubicle to invite someone to join you for lunch
every week for 20 years, because that’s not really a date.
Exactly.
Misreading a sign and going in for a kiss and getting rejected - it’s textbook rejection. But to keep coming after it’s already clear that the feelings aren’t mutual…that’s predatory behavior.
What if she takes it out, without securing firm verbal consent?
Where I diverge with the assessment made in the OP is that I don’t regard the continuation of this pattern to be inevitable, universal, or immutable. That female behavior is also a part of the overall pattern is true, and yes, they reinforce each other. Male behavior needs to change at least in conjunction with female behavior, if not first. Think about it. As long as males behave like this, females are going to be repulsed by it — who wouldn’t be? So they react by pulling away.
It doesn’t have to be everyone changing universally. The environment as a whole changes if a significant portion of the people change their behavior.
The ideal focus of change is among people who never wanted to behave in the prescribed / socially scripted way to begin with. The people for whom the sexually polarized patterns of behavior described in the OP are a very bad fit for their own personality and instincts and inclinations. Because it’s a bad fit, we tend to play our part poorly, and with resentment. You’re definitely better off if we aren’t making the attempt and instead select other means to the same end.
Just raising awareness of our existence and, along with that, some awareness of how we do the courting and flirting thing, instills in people’s heads the alternative possibility. For those who might be drawn towards that path as a far more comfortable one to walk, that should be a great personal benefit. The rest of the world experiences a lessening of the overall polarization.
Certainly on an individual level it’s not “inevitable, universal, or immutable”. Any number of posters to this thread have made the point that they have an unerring ability to detect what other people really think, and who knows if that might even have some truth to it in some of these cases? But on a societal level it seems fairly obvious that many people have issues with accurately deciphering other people even when those others are not doing their best to put on a false front, let alone when they are.
The entire point of “playing hard to get” is to successfully disguise one’s true feelings and attitude - otherwise it would be completely pointless. (No doubt this technique is completely useless when applied to many posters here, but its existence in society suggests that it works on a lot of people.)
My overall point is that it’s not just a matter of a simplistic “just say no” campaign, since the issue is tied up in much broader aspects of inter-gender relationships and attitudes, which are much harder to modify (even if people appreciate the connection to begin with).
Neither I nor most men I know have experienced the kinds of jeopardy you describe. Boundaries exists and they seem quite clear to me. I simply don’t buy the, “How was I to know?!” excuse.
See above.
I have yet to hear a case where a man was fired for asking a woman to lunch or dinner in a professionals setting. I have heard lots of cases where a man took liberties well beyond asking a woman out on a date. Perhaps you can enlighten me and show me these egregious overreactions by women against perfectly innocent men you say are going on.
This is the full context of what Ms. Sandburg said (bolding mine):
Why, because some of your closest relatives are women?
Look, I don’t think you’re anti-women. But your views are somewhat of a throwback.
I can understand some perspectives that I do not share.
I think there are males who fear that it is some kind of inevitable female nature that women will express disinterest in sex and expect and require men to chase them down, to make their case for why sex ought to take place, to elicit a romantic and/or erotic response from the women who otherwise would of course never have any such feelings because they’re all reactive that way;
but that — at the same time — all these women are seeking a change to the original rules, whereby if a man makes the attempt to do that chasing-down, to make his case for why sex with him is a good idea, ooh, then if it doesn’t work with the result that she isn’t into him (no romantic or erotic response having been thusly kindled), she can have him declared a perpetrator of sexual harassment, a sexist pig, a creepy male who has objectified her (etc etc).
So they’re going around whimpering “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, it’s no fucking FAIR!!”
I’m caricaturing them quite a bit here, because they kind of deserve it: they think of themselves as trapped in their situation, not wanting things to be this way but unable to get out of it by themselves — and yet they do not see women’s behavior, including feminist behavior, as being an attempt by women to get out of the situation they feel trapped in; they don’t see that if both sexes feel trapped and both sexes would like to get out of the situation, they could work together on this, at least have a dialogue about what should change and how it would be if it did change, what different alternative expectations and rules we would have to play by.
Nope, they make no effort to change the situation they say they feel trapped in, other than providing reactionary pressure to roll things back to a pre-feminist time. They don’t speak about how things could be otherwise. They express no optimism about how it could all be different. And when feminists do, they complain that all the feminists do is call men horrible and express hate and anger.
I have the suspicion that (despite decades of feminism) men think women have it the way they want it, that women won’t change, that women wouldn’t listen if men explained what part of the trap we don’t like, and that therefore men just have to accept it the way it is. I don’t understand that part. WTF?!?? Complete lack of ability to walk the proverbial mile in someone else’s pumps?? Yeah, they’re angry (who wouldn’t be? aren’t YOU, about yours?) but they’re being honest about what they’re angry about, and they’ve been pretty optimistic about how things could be, in ways that benefit men, or would, if they transpired.
When I was in high school in the dark ages it was well understood that asking a girl for a date more than twice when you got brushoffs was being a jerk. It isn’t all that hard.
The problem with expecting a direct no from a woman in the example is that she might worry about the guy getting snotty and thus harming a professional relationship which depends on communication. Two nos without an offer of a raincheck or an “I’d love to, maybe next week” should be enough for any guy to get the message.
And yet, some continue to insists that women are just “playing hard to get”. Especially when they’ll sometimes appear to accept a similar offer from another guy.
I’d think so, too, but some questions we get on this board make it seem like some guys think women are an incomprehensible alien species out to trap them. It’s like they don’t know or work with any women.
No one likes to talk to HR, so it usually has to be bad for a woman to make that trip. And, my guess is that no one is ever surprised when some guy at work finally gets the trip to HR or gets canned. For most of his co-workers, it’s probably, “what took so long.”
No it isn’t. The point is ambiguity. Case #!: She says no, then comes around a day or two later and says, “Where have you been? Grown shy or something?” (See Spooky.). Ambiguous.
Case #2: Also no, and for the rest of the time you know her, she maintains a pleasant but non-flirtatious demeanor. Not ambiguous. Ask again, maybe for something more neutral - lunch instead of dinner, or coffee instead of lunch. If it’s still no, let it go.* And really, guys, if a known coffee drinker won’t go to Starbuck’s with you, she’s not interested. Or she has good taste in coffee.
*Didn’t Johnnie Cochran say that?
SO is the problem that some guys just suck at reading other people? Because really, that’s all this boils down to. If someone can’t read other people, he goes with the BS he sees in movies and hears in popular songs: dweeby guy wants hot woman, she turns him down, he keeps trying, she falls for him. Seriously, most women don’t play that “chase me if you want me” nonsense. There may be some who don’t return a phone call, and there’s a term for those women: rude. But they don’t turn down dates unless a) they truly are busy or b) they don’t like you. Odds are they don’t dislike you because you’re not persistent, so asking again isn’t going to help.
Case in point: guy in my English class junior year in college asked me out. For various reasons, I didn’t like him, so I said I was busy. He asked me again. Still busy. The third time, I grudgingly agreed to coffee. I figured it was like root canal: get it over with. But by that time, I already resented him. No way there was going to be a second date.
If she says no twice, stop asking.
Here is the thing about harassers; they almost never just push an unwanted or inappropriate sexual advance on just one person or just one incident. It is a pattern of behavior develeoped specifically because it has worked for them in the past and because they haven’t been called out for it, or have been but have not been sufficiently penalized for it to correct their behavior. The only way anyone can claim that there is a “witch hunt” occurring is by ignoring that in every case thus far presented recently in the media, the accused has either acknowledged some degree of culpability (albeit often with an inadequate or evasive apology), has claimed the incident only to be an isolated behavior only to have other people press credible claims, or has denied the claims despite a clear pattern of behavior described consistently by multiple women over periods of years or decades. Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer do not get to claim “witch hunt” when it is apparent that multiple women have made consistent claims, often at peril to their careers and reputations.
The conflation of “playing hard to get” with confusion from not explicitly and forceful rejecting repeated advances is disingeneous to say the least. That is like arguing that it was okay to T-bone car in front of you because it was in the intersection the traffic light turned green. Just because someone doesn’t explicitly tell you to stop making advances doesn’t mean that you should persist in making repeated advances ad infinim. And in the case of Filner, or generally any vocational or classroom environment, the person making the advance should be especially sensitive to the recipient wanting to defuse the situaiton without creating a larger problem or being penalized, particularly if there is a imbalance in power in favor of the proposer. This is why many workplaces frown on excessive fraternization between managers and subordinates and often prohibit someone in a management position involved in a romantic relationship to oversee their partner.
Even when such relationships aren’t probibited and is even purportively consentual, men in positions of authority (and women, but this is predominately a male problem) should be circumspect about relationships with subordinates. Bill Clinton denying that he had sex with Monica Lewinski or casting disrepute on Gennifer Flowers, and using his office and authority to shield himself from credible accusations of sexual harassment by Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, is as much of an abuse of authority (if not the extent of assault) as Weinstein or Kevin Spacey, particularly given his influence and ability to negatively impact his accusers’ future financial and vocational opportunities, which is an issue that many on the left of the political side of the spectrum have studiously tried to avoid discussing just as much as his Republican opponents have tried to rationalize it as a legitimate justification for impeachment proceedings.
In short, if you don’t have enough social grace to intepret a polite blowoff, and don’t have the good sense to not proposition people in an inappropriate manner, you should probably be more circumspect about who you approach and how. Blaming everyone else for not making things clear and simple for you is what toddlers do in order to avoid being in blamed for misbehavior.
Stranger
Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not.
But even ambiguity itself is also a form of deception, and if the target saw through it and appreciated what was being done, then there would be no ambiguity. So the effort to create ambiguity is relying on the notion that the target will not fully appreciate what’s going on.
But as above, it’s a lot broader than that. Psychologists have put forth various theories on how and why playing hard to get works. See e.g. here, or here, et al.
I submit that “playing hard to get” =/= disinterest or repeated rejection.
That’s obviously true.
But it’s sometimes easy to confuse one for the other, especially if the target is not skilled at picking up social cues or is motivated to believe it’s not what it actually is, or if the player is not skilled at giving out social cues.
I remain confused about the point of this thread.
If you’re in a work environment, it doesn’t matter whether you’re hearing no because she’s “playing hard to get” or because she really doesn’t want to go out. After a few asks, you have to stop in order to avoid a hostile work environment, especially if the response was “no”. So, “playing hard to get”, as much as that exists, should not be a concern in a work environment, since you have to back off anyway.
If you’re not in a work environment, what negative effects do you think will happen if you persist, that wouldn’t have happened for time immemorial? You’ll either be accepted, rejected, mocked, etc., but that has always been true. You won’t get into any legal trouble if you’re hassling a friend, as long as you’re not stalking.
So, can you clarify the point of this thread?