Is It Women’s Fault Men Don’t Approach Anymore?

Liberal third wave feminists working at Buzzfeed would get together to make low effort listicles and thinkpieces assigning collective guilt to all men for the crimes of a few, and I’m not even talking about the real crimes of which it’d be perfectly rational to be on-guard about. 

This era was all about first-world problems breaking containment from Tumblr blogs authored by 13 year-olds into popular tech and mainstream media journalism. The focus lay in insignificant perceived slights like manspreading, mansplaining, earnings gaps conflated as wage gaps, pathologizing normal expressions of masculinity as toxic, and all other sorts of paranoid neuroses turning into ideological stances. They often involved an imagined moral violation, attributing malice where it didn’t exist, and reading between the lines of ordinary human interactions with seven layers of feminist psychological warfare. 

2010s Feminism and Its Discontents

The mountains made out of molehills, the lack of charitability, the bad faith interpretations in every conversation (see: Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson) often felt like they desperately wanted for an oppression they narrowly escaped so they could moralize about it. Sometimes they approached a point—shaming antisocial behavior like catcalling or advocating for pro-family positions like maternity leave. 

But the over-emphasis of performative clapback feminism lacking any real depth combined with vocal advocates that seemed to be a detriment to their own cause by virtue of being overly sensitive, mentally unstable, and erratic, eventually lost them any good will they once had by the end of the decade. They’d shamed most of their allies out of association and seemed to be driven more by pettiness and “say it louder for the people in the back” style praise on Twitter than logical consistency or truth. 

The collective moral guilt they attributed to all men for the most minor or nonexistent infractions, erasing their humanity while expecting allyship, eventually wore them thin. Then came the accompanying social reckoning of Me Too, which snowballed out of the Hollywood casting couch and into your local reality. Title IX penalized accused male students through kangaroo courts that denied them a fair trial and jeopardized their entire future based on hearsay. A movement that began calling out the quiet sexual abuse that was occurring to countless men and women in the entertainment industry evolved into “believe all women” absolutism. 

The pressure to believe women was so palpable we were thrust into a new culture of presumed guilt.

Post-2017, the broader culture’s attitude towards sex turned into what can only be described as a moral panic. Our standards for due process and burden of proof were slipping. The pressure to believe women was so palpable we were thrust into a new culture of presumed guilt. Consent paranoia convinced countless people that unless women agreed to have sex in a formal legal document, it wasn’t sufficient “enthusiastic consent.” Op-eds consisting of nothing but embarrassing awkward date encounters were reframed as “sexual misconduct.” 

Men everywhere faced cultural and institutional whiplash. Just knowing how little it took to upend their lives, no matter how unlikely, was enough to stir up considerable fear in a not insignificant percentage of the male population. These co-existing forces ushered in a counter-movement: men who didn’t want to grovel at women’s feet, flog themselves, or self-flagellate about how bad men are for a crumb of their attention began to see the need for self-protection. 

Me Too, Social Atomization, & Retreat into Online Worlds Brewed a Perfect Storm for Risk Aversion 

Liberal punitive culture around accusations bred a generation of men who felt exceedingly risk-averse, like they were just one uncomfortable moment away from catching a charge in any interaction. That’s not the entire explanation for the seeming asocial, celibate plight of too many young modern men. People have smaller social circles, which are increasingly shifting online, so countless young people are under socialized and delayed milestones of adulthood have plunged them into extended adolescence. 

There are lots of theories surrounding Gen Z’s pronounced risk aversion, including the preponderance of rejection young people are exposed to in the job market, the dating market (thanks to dating apps), and university admissions as well as economic insecurity and over exposure to news alerts and rage bait that overemphasize their threat level. Research has shown Gen Z views risk as either the presence or absence of safety in a situation, with no room for gray areas.

This bred a generation of men who felt exceedingly risk-averse, like they were just one uncomfortable moment away from catching a charge in any interaction.

As a result, Zoomers have been characterized as the sexless, friendless, teetotaler generation. They’re not drinking, going to parties, having sex, or partnering up, they’re just… scrolling. It’s to the point where 45% of 18 to 45-year old men have never approached a woman in person. This is reflected in the discourse through popular online anecdotes observing the comparative social aloofness of modern men. Women have started to vocally lament the lack of approaches, and research bears this out too. 74% of women under the age of 25 and 77% of women aged 18-30 express a strong desire to be approached more often.

The Accountability Wars 

A recent viral video circulated on X showing a group of well-groomed women dressed up for a night on the town. One of them vented, "you guys better pay attention to me tonight, I'm so f***ing sick of this s***. Touch a boob, buy a drink, I mean, it's like very f***ing simple.” The video boasted the caption, "Why are so few young men approaching girls now? Massive shifts underway where you have 8-9s yearning to be chatted up. They get dressed up to go out, but all for nothing." Another video circulated of a woman complaining that no matter how revealing she dresses or how good she looks, nobody ever hits on or approaches her and jokes that she'd settle for a construction worker catcall at this point.

The reaction to their frustration from men online, however, was less sympathetic. The general sentiment seemed to be they were reaping what they sowed. But are we sure the same women doing the sowing are the ones who did the reaping? One of my favorite writers and cultural hot takers, Cartoons Hate Her, said exactly what I’d been thinking for the past few years, reading this discourse: “The young women today who are upset that men don’t approach them aren’t the same women who decided any approach was harassment in 2015. We don’t all attend an annual bitch conference.”

But men online seem unconvinced—despite young women shouting in the streets and three quarters of the demographic expressing in surveys that they wish men would approach them more—that the women begging for men to step into their masculine energy and approach them at a bar and the snarkiest radical feminist writer from Jezebel condemning literally everything as rape-coded circa 2015 are not in fact the same person. And not just because one was in elementary school when the other was pumping out manspreading articles. 

The female species is, in fact, composed of many individuals, each with distinct personalities, thoughts, and ideas. While many seem to blend together in their likeness, you can’t presume to know what any random woman you see pop on your feed or who you pass in real life believes by deciding what you think she believes in your head. That’s the empath meme. Stop doing that. 

Allowing a subset of loud and emotionally immature women who worked for liberal media outlets in the 2010s to be perpetually conflated with all modern women so that reasonable women with heterodox opinions who have always voiced their opposition get shut down when they speak on these topics as if they’re “part of the problem” or singlehandedly caused it is incredibly unproductive. This is no different than the third wave feminist insistence that men take accountability for all historical (and some modern imagined) injustices against women. 

I agree that injustices against men, whether they were legal, social, or cultural, should be condemned and pushed back against, but the idea that young 20-something year old women who weren’t even around when this shift was occurring need to be “held accountable” for the wrongs of their forebearers? That sounds like an argument for reparations.

Collective responsibility and retroactive guilt are culturally marxist ideas that force us to accept a heap of untenable premises. It forces people who weren’t there and didn’t cause modern social problems to bear the brunt of responsibility: men for women’s historical oppression, white people for enslaving black people, straight people for discriminating against gays. We punish the wrong people, effectively brewing new sentiments of righteous indignation for their wrongful scapegoating, and most importantly, it never ends. There’s always a new scapegoat to find, even if it’s just a ping pong being lobbed back and forth.

The Women Who Never Wanted This & Socially Anxious Men

Remaining one of the last few temperamentally trad but politically liberal men-enjoyers, CHH remembers the heyday of 2010s “men ain’t shit” pop feminism. “I kept seeing heterosexual women's preferences boiled down to generalizations that felt really oddly specific to a small cohort of people who clearly needed to work through some personal issues: all men annoy me, I don't want to interact with them, I just want to be left alone. And yet, somehow, I will get married someday,” she wrote in a recent Substack essay.

Modern women are now paying the price for the resentment and fear that has befallen men as a result.

With enough amplification of this specific cohort’s voices, to the exclusion of normal, prosocial women with healthy male relationships or just a healthy view of men, the normal women got drowned out. She continues, "I knew that if I were single, I would have wanted men to approach me, as long as they weren't disrespectful, but I was reminded repeatedly that women don't actually want this. It felt like completely valid complaints about chauvinistic bosses and predatory street harassers bled into the personal quirks of introverts, like women who believed their personal space was being violated if a man tried to sit near them at Starbuck's—the same women who likely wouldn't have welcomed small talk from a friendly old lady either.” 

The central thesis of her essay is this: a minority of extreme, whacky introverts with misanthropic temperaments hijacked the conversation, effectively silencing or omitting the voices of women who expressed normal female heterosexuality. Modern women are now paying the price for the resentment and fear that has befallen men as a result. The irony is this didn’t stop the usual suspects from doing the thing again: informing her it's her fault for "letting them represent [her] without objection for a decade and a half." Is anyone sentient? Is it computing that she literally just articulated ad nauseam exactly how that isn’t what she did?

The other issue is that the “threat of false allegations ruined it for everyone” crowd seems like they really just want the plausible deniability to leave their social anxiety unchallenged. I don’t think anyone with normal socialization thinks “damn I’d love to rizz up that baddie if only the Me Too movement didn’t have so many far-reaching sociopolitical implications.” It seems like the real fear here might not be an arrest or HR violation but the public humiliation of rejection. A large reported reason for not approaching is a fear of being perceived as creepy.

But can’t anyone see this is a self-fulfilling prophecy? This dynamic perpetuates an endless cycle: perceived male misconduct breeds feminist backlash, prompting male withdrawal, escalating isolation and resentment on both sides. Margaret Atwood aptly summarized the stakes: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Women’s caution toward male strangers is rational. But this understandable vigilance should not devolve into blanket hostility toward men, nor should men's reasonable fear of rejection devolve into total withdrawal.

To Approach or Not to Approach, That Is the Question

I once jokingly tweeted about this particular male plight. “I would hate being a man, approaching women seems like a nightmare (I know because I genuinely hated when men ever approached me in public, like just magically figure out that I don't want to talk to you),” I said, before suggesting that if I were born a man I would watch Ryan Gosling movies every single night and repeat in the mirror "he's literally me" until I internalized skibidi rizz and then women would never feel burdened by me approaching them because of my magnetic charisma and audacity. 

You might think I just contradicted my entire article’s premise with this admission, but I didn’t. There are plenty of valid reasons for women to feel less than thrilled about random men coming onto them when they’re just trying to get their errands done. Maybe they have a boyfriend or are having an off day, or are on a mission and want to be left alone for now. Whatever the reason is, it's probably valid. People are entitled to their preferences. But for me, it was the inverse of the male fear of rejection. I had a fear of rejecting. I loathed being the bearer of bad news, the bitch who ruined their day. It felt burdensome. Painful. Secondhand embarrassing. I sometimes felt resentment that they put me in this situation at all. 

45% of 18 to 45-year old men have never approached a woman in person.

Why couldn’t they foresee my lack of interest through intuition? Theory of mind? Prescient visions? Maybe the expectation that they know my inner thoughts was unreasonable, but I didn’t actually expect it. I just hated turning people down. Forget fight, flight, or freeze, I was fawn. I wasn’t really someone who could feel palpable attraction to someone without knowing them either, so I was always uninterested. My boyfriend and I met online through similar interest groups. Now that was the sort of dynamic that facilitated attraction. At least, for me. But I’m not walking around begging for men to come talk to me. I’m in a long term relationship that didn’t arise from a random soliciting of attention in the public square.

And yet, this fear of mine was a first-world problem. One I eventually got over. But it’s a real and valid emotion. I suspect a lot of women feel like this: wanting to be polite, so hoping he’ll take the hint without you actually saying so. I’m not suggesting people aren’t entitled to their own feelings, preferences, and quirks. 

I elaborated further in the thread: how women hate being approached not just because of lack of attraction but because of the burden of rejection. For agreeable women, it can be really uncomfortable when you're not interested but now have to feel like the bad guy. The flip side of this is that women don't understand how hard it is to gain the confidence, courage, and willingness to put yourself out there and risk rejection for men to approach you in the first place.

I also think wanting attention and interest from someone you find attractive but not from someone you don’t is a universal disposition, no matter how insistent men on X would like to imply that it’s some gotcha. “Oh, you mean the socially awkward ugly guy who can’t take a hint isn’t given the same time of day as the conventionally attractive, masculine confident guy?” Classic woman moment. And what’s the implication here, that we should have sex-communism? Or that men somehow subvert this trope by falling over themselves for ugly women? 

Reverse-Engineering Game

It’s fine to feel some type of way about being approached. Maybe you don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean you should ever be cruel about it. In fact, a few months ago, I was in the city for the day with my boyfriend. I guess it seemed like we weren't together for the brief second he sat down as I stood and checked my phone. A young man approached me to ask for my number or something to that flirting effect (this isn’t a humblebrag, he was clearly making the rounds). I politely told him that I have a boyfriend who is sitting right beside me. He said “oh, alright, have a good day” and kept it moving. 

I was thrilled for him. If he kept it up, he was sure to land some available girl’s number. I didn’t know cold approaches even still existed. “Maybe the boys will be alright,” I thought to myself. I rejected him and it wasn’t the end of the world. He didn’t deflate or get discouraged, and even though he was barking up the wrong tree, no one punched him in the face or called HR. And this could be you, too. Do I think it’s the best way to find a girlfriend? Probably not. People have historically met their partners through their real-life social networks like friends, school, or work. Today, most people are meeting online.

But it’s valuable for other reasons. It builds confidence, rejection tolerance, and resilience. Cold approaching women was a tactic that became popularized by pickup artists (PUAs) in the 2010s, and say what you will about PUA rhetoric about women, at least they taught men to have some agency and put themselves out there. That had value in itself, even if it didn’t always get them a girlfriend from a random mall encounter. 

They learned a valuable skill: how to talk to women, get over the fear of putting themselves out there and risk rejection. This made them all the more likely to succeed when they came across a girl they actually really liked when they crossed paths. They would possess more of the characteristics women find attractive: confidence, competence, bravery, decisiveness, leadership—masculine energy.  

Cold approaching builds confidence, rejection tolerance, and resilience.

That’s because it’s essentially exposure, response, prevention therapy (ERP). ERP is “a therapy that encourages you to face your fears and let obsessive thoughts occur without 'putting them right' or 'neutralising' them with compulsions.” It’s the gold standard treatment for OCD and phobias. But it’s essentially what pickup artists taught when they told men to get over their fear of rejection by asking women out. That it’s “just a numbers game.” 

And while I don’t think you should think of women permanently as “just another number,” if you can’t even talk to a woman in any context, be it social settings or dating apps or mutual connections, there are worse ways to use your time than slowly chipping away at that fear. You’re only more likely to develop charisma, resilience, and confidence. That’s a transferable skill that will benefit you everywhere: real life, dating apps, the bar, a hangout with mutual friends.

Closing Thoughts

“But women will think I’m creepy or weird and they’ll reject me and be rude to me.” So? Let them. Is that the worst thing that could happen to you? If it is, then by all means, resolve to isolation and celibacy. But if you think finding love, companionship, and connection are still worthwhile pursuits, then you will need to learn how to assert yourself and become charismatic one way or another. This is how most men successful with women learned: trial by fire.

According to Datepsych's research, the men who are approaching are doing remarkably well. More than half of the men who have approached women in person have gotten a date from it. It doesn’t have to be a totally random, unprompted approach in an unlikely setting, either. Try settings that are literally designed for these romantic meet-cutes. At least then it’s contextually expected. Everyone hates rejection. Everyone hates the risk of humiliation. You’re not special. It’s only your sensitivity to it that needs refining.