"Every species has mating rituals. If those mating rituals cannot be performed, they will not breed. That's why we say of some animals that they "won't breed in captivity". It isn't because they have abstract philosophical ideas about freedom and want to take a stand. It's because the zoo environment has some restriction that disrupts their mating rituals. In humans, these rituals are partially instinctive, but also must be adapted to culture, so parts of them must be learned. If these parts are not taught, because they're not understood, or because speaking of them openly is politically off-limits, the next generation will have trouble mating. If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls, in a room with music, and they don't dance with each other, that disruption, that failure to teach, has clearly happened. But most people don't understand what was disrupted, or how it's supposed to work… and that's why they can't teach it. They think that young men are supposed to just have the courage to approach girls. That this is a failure of character. Wrong. That's not how the human mating ritual works at all. If that was how human mating worked, young men would not be afraid to approach women. They wouldn't just be "brave enough" to do it. It wouldn't be scary at all, because the men who were scared by it would have less descendants. If you're a keen observer of old books and movies, you already know what the basic human mating ritual really is. But if you aren't, it can be logicked out from what boys and girls are afraid of. Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward. Boys are afraid of embarrassment from being rejected. So, it's pretty clear that girls aren't supposed to be overt, and boys aren't supposed to cold approach. Which tells us everything we need to know. Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited. That's how it actually works. But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one. And before they can learn how to do it, they have to learn that this is what they need to do. If you don't understand this, then you try to shame young men into cold approaching, then girls complain about being cold approached, because they instinctively don't like it, and it takes a lot of charisma to overcome that. Don't bother me at the gym, don't bother me at the coffee shop, don't stop me on the street out in public, etc, etc, etc. But when men ask them, when should we approach you, then, they immediately bluescreen and start giving nonsense answers, because the real answer is they only want to be approached by men they like, and even they realize that this is impossible without telepathy. Because they've never been taught how to send a signal that says "I want you to come talk to me" with no telepathy required. They don't even know that's what they are supposed to do. And with zero instruction or examples, young men would be equally inept at spotting the hints she doesn't know how to drop. Idealistic political notions about how people "should" be hurt everyone, because they prevent us from dealing with them as they are."
—Devon Eriksen
