Oops, We Forgot Some Women Like Flirting

The 2010s messaging that women never wanted men to talk to them was driven by a minority of extreme introverts. Modern-day singles are paying the price.

Photo by Ruben Mavarez on Unsplash

Obviously this is nothing new, but over the weekend I got worked up about something on Twitter. The discussion surrounded a short clip of a woman on a night out, complaining that men don’t approach women anymore. There were a bunch of stupid responses, such as “Maybe she’d be approached if she wasn’t so fat and old” (she was, at oldest, in her early thirties, and maybe a dress size 6.) But the resounding response from men was, “Deal with it. You made your bed when you made flirting illegal, now lie in it.”

Given the woman’s age, she probably wasn’t part of any kind of anti-flirting propaganda campaign in the era of the mid-2010s. But it made me remember what life was like in the pivotal moments of that era, when the Internet became the primary place for narratives to begin, and when cynical introverts—the type of people who prided themselves on having “resting bitch faces” that sent men running for the hills—had a bigger microphone than ever before. One example of this phenomenon was, of course, the changing norms around when it was appropriate to flirt with a woman in public.

When I first saw this talk about flirting going the way of the dinosaurs, I wanted to chalk this up to a bad-faith reading of MeToo, from younger people who probably weren’t fully sentient in the 2010s. When I think of the MeToo movement, I think about powerful rapists like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, or even lower-level powerful men who leverage quid pro quo arrangements in the workplace to procure sexual favors. I also think about more common forms of bad behavior, like harassment or refusing to take no for an answer after hitting on someone. These things (some of which I’ve personally experienced) are all bad, and I don’t think you have to be a radical feminist to agree with me!

But increasingly, I see young men claiming that they’re afraid to flirt with women in social settings, even at bars or parties, because the woman could “ruin their lives.” I saw one insisting that there’s a 50% chance any woman you approach will send you to jail. I think (or at least, I thought) most men know that women won’t really ruin their lives for talking to them at a club. The worst thing that will happen is rude rejection and ridicule, which sucks for a bunch of other reasons (I’d have a hard time with that if it happened to me!) but isn’t life-ruining. And as any established pickup artist will tell you, the key to success is to lose the fear of rejection, and that happens when you see it all as a low-stakes numbers game.

Although I think this was a paranoid worldview, I think it comes from a portrayal of women that started in the 2010s, which is somewhat related to third-wave feminism, but more broadly related to the rise of an apolitical misanthropic narrative for all genders: the idea that women just never want to interact with men, and see the vast majority of male attention as an annoyance in a best-case scenario. Women’s sexual attraction to men, according to this worldview, is negligible. This talk seemed to erase a pretty big group of women, if not the majority: the women who actually like men and want to date them.