It's the ignorance of reality mostly. Whenever my girlfriend gets a guy approaching/messaging her both of us default to an immediate suspicion of romantic intent. It doesn't require them treating her in a dehumanizing way or harassing her (although those certainly happen and quickly remove all doubt about his motives), they just have to turn up and the suspicion starts. That suspicion alone (especially in an environment with third parties who are watching and talking) can be quite damaging, no hysteria about false accusations of harassment required.

It sure doesn’t match the reality I live in. I see guys with really bad social skills struggling with this, but that can be overcome.

Well perhaps it's regional to some degree, I can't say, but I certainly know other people who think this way and it's what I'm scared of when approaching women. I'm not scared of harassment accusations (that seems like it's been blown out of all proportion). I just don't want to be perceived as sexually interested in them and I know that if the tables were turned I would immediately assume exactly that.

It's the suggestion that someone's assessment of risk-to-reward ratio in this case is wrong spiced with the implication that he is bad at socializing, I would guess.

Consider the same exchange with different subject matter: "A: I don't race my car because it's dangerous" "B: Dude, if you're so bad at driving how do you even get to work? Learn to drive and get onto the track! It's awesome and I had been racing with no injures so why can't you?"

Sure, it’s exactly like the car thing, except racing cars is a recreational activity enjoyed by only a few people, while talking to people is an essential human skill done by virtually everyone.

Racing is traveling, traveling is an essential human skill done by virtually everyone.

Please, let us not get into bad faith argument even deeper. Nobody here is arguing against talking to people. The question is about the safe and dangerous modes of talking to people.

Commenters here are literally talking about avoiding interaction with half of the people in the world because they don’t know how to do it without getting into trouble.

Can you please give an example? I only see comments from people avoiding interaction with women at work. And they are doing this because of the potential trouble such an interaction might bring not because they are getting into trouble by doing so.

I don't think adding "at work" really makes it better.

The original comment I replied to is basically saying that men just avoid women as an "one of the unfortunate unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement." My point is that this is not due to #MeToo, it's due to people with bad social skills who think avoiding women is better than improving them.

Well, if you honestly believe the original comment was about not interacting with any and all women then I don't know what to say. I guess what I tried to explain will remain a mystery to you.

Yes. Do some research and improve your skills. There are panels and podcasts, articles and threads where women explain the dos and don'ts in the workplace.

This is a good comment. You're being downvoted because this thread is swarming with misogynists.

I don't know why this is being downvoted. This should be the top response to this thread...

For the same reason that "Just don't drink, what's so hard about that?" would be in a discussion of alcoholism.

If the rest of the discussion revolves around how to drink as much as possible without going broke or getting caught then that would be a fine response.

Yes, improving your social skills can be damned hard. But that’s irrelevant if you don’t even want to do it. First we need to convince people that self improvement is the solution, not isolation. Then we can talk about how.

> Yes, improving your social skills can be damned hard. But that’s irrelevant if you don’t even want to do it.

Er... your theory is that "too shy/awkward to carry on a casual conversation with a woman" is something that some men prefer? That they could overcome it, but don't want to? That seems more likely to you than "they would like to overcome it, but haven't been able to"?

When the discussion consists entirely of people saying they just avoid talking to women entirely, yes, that seems much more likely.

I’m not saying they’re happy with it, but prefer it over self improvement? You bet. People usually hate trying to change themselves.

> I’m not saying they’re happy with it, but prefer it over self improvement?

You can want something yet fail to achieve it, that's fairly obvious, no? Compare: fat people who want to be not-fat.

Of course, the blatant counter-argument would be that those just don't want it enough; this entire train of thought seems rather damning to me.

You can, but I see no indication of such a desire here.

They are talking about the workplace in particular. They are saying, why risk your job being social with women at work when you can be social elsewhere.

Why risk your job being social with anyone at work? Why ever do anything other than exactly what your job requires?

I'm saying, if your social skills are so bad that you're risking your job by being social with women at work, you should make fixing that a top priority.

Okay, but if my social skills are that bad then I certainly wouldn't try fixing them at work.

Also, in response to your first sentence, it's about relative risk.

It was at -4 when I added that edit, and now it’s at -2, so clearly not.