almost tempted to let it pass if it was gonna, but one more point re the whole dredged-up subject:
I just don't remember "wait for women to ask you out" ever especially being a part of what 2010s pop feminism/Etiquette of Hitting On Women Bloggers were saying.
(It wouldn't surprise me if some were, but it wasn't the party line to the extent that there ever was one, which, to be clear, there wasn't.)
A much more accurate criticism would be to say that the question of "if men stop hitting on women, how will there still be heterosexual dating?" is not one they particularly concerned themselves with or had an answer for.
And I don't find that surprising, because at the end of the day this was just young women with blogs doing a mishmash of experimentation with amateur sociopolitical theorising and venting about their personal experiences. Various survey statistics (always a dodgy source of information to be fair) have suggested that in general, women are more content with not being in a relationship than men. Additionally, while I think it's often overestimated in general how much attention/offers women as a whole get, I think women in their early twenties often do experience a very high number of come-ons, due to the fact that men their own age preferentially hit on them but so do a significant proportion of men in their late twenties, 30s, 40s etc.
Very much agreed.
I don't remember ever even once in my era of being engulfed in 2010's pop feminism hearing "wait for women to ask you out", I think principally because women don't particularly want it to become more normalized to ask men out so the idea was just never going to gain much momentum in any feminist movement. The fact that there was no suggestion whatsoever that we should shift the asker-out role in a direction less ridiculously skewed towards men was actually pretty close to the crux of my issues with that movement's mindset and rhetoric, as I wrote about extensively around 2017.
I generally share Morlock Holmes's frustrations with the messages of 2010's pop feminism, but I have been slightly perplexed at the way he often frames it as, "2010's-style pop feminists, especially fellow straight men, constantly imply that if we just treat women like human beings they'll ask us out, and yet I came to notice that when I treat women like human beings they still don't ask me out." I may not have interacted with the same guys that Morlock has, but I got a lot of the "just treat women like human beings" thing as well, and never did I sense the slightest implication that this would make women ask me out as opposed to, maybe, make women receptive to going out with me or drop hints that I should ask them out or say yes if I were to ask them out. And in fact, when I talked to both man and woman 2010's-style pop feminists about this, they never bothered pretending that women were ever going to start asking men-in-general or me-in-particular more often and only put the mildest hint of apology in their voices when acknowledging this.
(I still remember my grad school colleague, a very very 2010's-pop-feminism-espousing guy whose attractiveness was 90th percentile and who had a very easy time getting dates, telling me, "There's no need to be so worried about asking a woman out. You just try, and it's like rolling dice, if you're lucky they share your interest, and if you're unlucky they don't and it's no big deal." Never at any point in this conversation did he suggest that he or I lived in a world where women would ask us out, and indeed I don't think I knew of a time when a woman ever asked him out, as attractive as he was.)
A brief side-point that I've intended to make in an upcoming response to Morlock (contending a different claim about a distinct issue) is that the feminist side of what we might call early SJ mainly came about from women and male allies (quite reasonably and understandably) deciding that enough was enough when it came to constantly being approached in a discomforting/pressuring way as well as a cluster of other "rape culture" phenomena that hadn't received enough societal attention. They collectively had certain blind spots and went about it in a way that I formed a lot of resentments about, but at the bottom of it, as you say, they were not a political movement but a spontaneous social movement complaining about certain (legitimately bad) things on behalf of a certain group (mainly-young women) with no particular motivation or obligation to address all related concerns of other groups (straight men who weren't sure how to get dates). That said, of course, the fact that they had major blind spots to the points of view and concerns and needs of this other party involved and their rhetoric often displayed a blatant lack of sympathy there meant, as a natural consequence, that they were going to alienate and push away and sometimes even radicalize single men who were not already sufficiently attractive / neurotypical / socially confident to have an easy time getting dates.
Beginning Premises:
There isn't some secret to getting women, they aren't video game characters where you win by doing a specific thing;
The only secret is to treat women like people;
Gender roles are fake;
Men are constantly hitting on women in pressuring, gross ways;
I have a diagnosed disability that impacts my ability to read social cues, so I am more likely than the average man to hit on women in gross ways, and ordinary men are already so gross it's a problem everybody was talking to.
Conclusion: Women are just people, and people often ask each other out. Everybody I talk to agrees gender roles are fake and outdated so there's no reason to think they'd adhere to those roles. I can reduce the risk of being a gross creep by waiting for women to do things people do.
This was wrong.
What I was actually supposed to take from those above premises was:
"People are going to expect you to follow traditional gender roles, which are harmless and fun. These involve very specific actions and behaviors that you always ought to be taking. Just the very fact of how those gender roles work mean that you'll occasionally put people off but that's fine and you shouldn't worry excessively about it."
To this day I don't understand how I was supposed to get there, other than "Not be autistic."
And it's annoying because it's perfectly possible to talk openly about this stuff but I basically never encountered anybody who did, you were supposed to talk about how men are gross and gender roles are a prison then just sort of quietly realize everybody still expected you to conform and silently pick up on what you were supposed to do but definitely don't bring any of it up in public.
I wasn't told that I was supposed to be getting out my secret decoder ring and I was told explicitly that it was really important for men to listen to and internalize the stuff I was being told.
To this day I don't understand how I was supposed to get there, other than "Not be autistic."
You were supposed to not be autistic.
Did you think that the ADA applied to social norm formation, or something?
Yes, fuck, dude, you were supposed to not be autistic. These are maladptive strategies that you adopted because you are autistic, and they significantly impacted your life quality. Find a way to increase your life quality, then.
I wasn't told that I was supposed to be getting out my secret decoder ring and I was told explicitly that it was really important for men to listen to and internalize the stuff I was being told.
You were also told that Santa Clause was real.
>It wouldn't surprise me if some were [saying the thing I've claimed they never said], but
>You were also told that Santa Clause was real
