Why Do Women Hate Single Men?

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Dr NL,

Why are women so anti men nowadays?

I’ve heard women complain and chide any form of male attention as harassment, and they perceive the very notion of men having a sex drive as unsettling.

Oh he said hi to me, I’m not here to talk to other people.

Oh he tried to flirt with me, doesn’t he know I’m not here for that.

I should just wait for a woman to take initiative.

Wait no women don’t take initiative in a culture where men make the first move.

I should wait for women to send me some faint signals to make the first move.

No, she doesn’t go anywhere without 8 other friends, and so she’s not going to notice me.

She already has options so she’s not going to put in the effort to talk to someone new.

I should just force my way into a conversation.

No that’s not respectful of boundaries and her time.

I should just be empathetic and understand that women don’t want male attention and not approach her.

Wow I’ve been single for a while. How do I get out of this?

You should get to know her first as a friend and then ask her out.

Oops, now she’s creeped out because I was supposed to hit on her right away, and now she thinks I’ve been disingenuous about being her friend.

But if I’m upfront right away, I’m just one of a dozen other guys that harassed her today.

Nobody wants a single guy lurking about because he might ask somebody out, and that’s not an okay thing to do, because I didn’t get her consent to be attracted to her.

Even if I do make a move, there’s a 40% chance she’ll get offended and then tell everyone and now I have a bad reputation.

The outcome is “you guessed correctly that I like you and now we can go on a date”, or the more likely “I’m not comfortable talking to you anymore”. There’s no option for a simple rejection.

Why is dating or meeting women as a man just a catch 22?

I’m either single or a predator.

–Catch-22

Well it’s been a while since I’ve gotten one of these. I figured most of the usual sources had moved on to complaining that guys had to be built like Marvel heroes instead.

But hey since it’s been a while, I’m going to do you a favor and actually take your question seriously instead of just snarking on it for a thousand words. And the answer is: you’re not even wrong, you have a list of assumptions that’re based off other dudes’ assumptions and the transitive property of this means that they don’t even manage to fit into to an actual state of wrongness. That would require operating in what we know as “reality” and not the fever-swamps of various sub-Reddits and wackadoo YouTube channels.

The issue isn’t that women are “anti-men”, it’s that women’ve gotten fed up with assholes and dudes who can’t be bothered to act like women are people. And, I dunno if you’ve looked around recently but that attitude is very much a top-down sort of situation. When you’ve got state legislatures restricting basic health care for women and trying to legislate what women are allowed to wear, while also coming after no-fault divorce because prominent YouTubers complain that women are allowed to divorce their husbands “without his permission”… it’s hard to fault ‘em for it.

(And that’s before we even get into the folks trying to use cottagecore and hilariously misguided ideas about subsistence farming as backdoors into fascism and taking away women’s rights.)

But I digress. Let’s talk about some of the examples you mentioned.

I’m not gonna dig into every single one of them because a) many are redundant and b) this is gonna be long enough as it is, but we can at least poke some holes into the highlights.

We’ll start with “I’ve heard women complain and chide any form of male attention as harassment, and they perceive the very notion of men having a sex drive as unsettling.”

Cool story bro, cite me some actual sources that say those exact things. But since we’re in the world of r/thathappened, how about the fact that a whole lot of guys treat women happening to exist in physical proximity as an indication that they’re an object to be consumed and not a person with automony and agency and their own interests and goals. What they’re complaining about, if you actually listen, are guys who ignore their obvious disinterest or take their “no, thank you” as “please try harder”.

Women who complain about guys approaching them in public spaces don’t mean someone being polite or who takes “no thanks” with good grace, they are talking about trying to go through the world with the sexual equivalent of walking down a street lined with carnival barkers, clipboard holders asking for donations and signatures and dudes trying to get you to take their mixtape. Except all of them are hawking dick. And not even high-quality dick marketed to an interested audience in the market for it. Literally “you look like an appropriately shaped hole, let me tell you the good news about my dick.”

Now, one of the things that gets tricky about trying to get guys to understand what this would feel like frequently means relying on either homophobia, transphobia or otherwise spreading shitty ideas about age, size, ethnicity or what-not. Other metaphors rarely convey the same dynamic or otherwise don’t break through to the sense of empathy that’s really needed to understand why this is an unpleasant and alienating experience. Dudes frequently think that it’s awesome having strangers hitting on you when you’re not into it – and I can tell you from personal experience that no, not it is not. So all I can say is “imagine folks who you don’t find appealing demanding that you let them see your dick.” Constantly. Everywhere you go. Going for coffee? “eeeeeey, lemme see your dick”. Trying to get to class? “Come on sweetness, whip that sucker out I got my ruler right here”. Out having dinner with the family? “Come on baby, I can suck it better than them!”

Now imagine that’s your daily existence. Next!

“Oh he said hi to me, I’m not here to talk to other people.
Oh he tried to flirt with me, doesn’t he know I’m not here for that.”

First: if you can take “no” with grace, then this isn’t your problem.

Second: if you’re running into this, perhaps the issue is that you’re trying to hit on people in places where it’s not generally expected or appropriate to hit on folks.

Third: odds are also good that you’re not just choosing people who aren’t showing interest in you, but also you’re doing it badly. Work on your social calibration and learn how to read the room or else stick to places where it’s generally accepted that people are looking to talk to strangers and possibly get dates. NEXT!

“I should just wait for a woman to take initiative.
Wait no women don’t take initiative in a culture where men make the first move.”

Or women are just as shy and worried about talking to men they find attractive as men can be. OR – and stick with me here – because we have a culture that still insists men are supposed to make the first move, guys tend to react badly when women make the first move and either assume far more interest than she actually has or that this is some sort of trick and either she’s setting him up or a sex-worker looking for a client.

And hey wanna know who established and enforce the “men initiate, women receive” social order? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t women. NEXT!

“I should wait for women to send me some faint signals to make the first move. No, she doesn’t go anywhere without 8 other friends, and so she’s not going to notice me.”

My dude, being noticed is easy. Show up in a fuzzy top hat and a mesh shirt; everyone will notice you then. Wait, is that not the attention you were hoping for and you’re not a professional magician who tried to model his look on Criss Angel? Probably should work on being more noticeable in a positive fashion then. Because it turns out that women do notice guys they’re into, even when they’re with their friends.

If you’re able to see an attractive woman while you’re out with the boys, then it stands to reason that women are capable of doing the same. NEXT!

“She already has options so she’s not going to put in the effort to talk to someone new.”

Ah, we’ve reached the “making all sorts of unwarranted assumptions based on what a couple of Braincel subreddit regulars, who’ve never actually talked to a woman that didn’t involve placing an order at Arby’s, said on a podcast” portion of the rant.

This is an IMAX problem, because it’s just straight projection. It’s not real, it’s what a bunch of guys think is real because they have a lot of really weird ideas about how women think and operate that has no basis in reality. It’s the sort of thing you come up with when your only concept of how attractive women behave came from watching High-School Musical at too formative an age when you didn’t realize that Sharpay is a caricature and not an actual person.

(Insert whatever fictional Mean Girl is appropriate to your generation here, cultural osmosis will only carry me so far.)

NEXT!

“You should get to know her first as a friend and then ask her out. Oops, now she’s creeped out because I was supposed to hit on her right away, and now she thinks I’ve been disingenuous about being her friend.”

You might have a point if it weren’t for the sheer number of dudes who talk about being a Nice Guy and a woman’s friend but then get actively pissy because she didn’t reward his friendship with sex.

Now I’ve written fairly extensively about how to ask out a friend, but here’s what you can expect if you ask out a friend who isn’t interested when you’ve not only genuinely been her friend, but also didn’t act like a dickhead in the process: a little bit of awkwardness that you both eventually power through because you’re friends who understand each other and are also grown-ass adults who can see that just because someone wants to date you or doesn’t want to date you doesn’t mean that the friendship never existed. 

OK this next one needs to be split up into two parts. First:  

“Nobody wants a single guy lurking about because he might ask somebody out, and that’s not an okay thing to do,”

If the way you behave can be accurately described as “lurking”, then that would imply that you’re not actually part of that group and also behaving in ways that would already make people uncomfortable.

Now a more charitable read on this would be “guy who’s quiet/ on the fringes of the conversation or social gathering/ relatively new and doesn’t know many people yet.” At which point this falls apart because a) nobody would know if he were single unless he actively told them and b) his presence is rarely a problem unless he’s acting in a weird way that would make reasonable people uncomfortable. And just “listening to the conversation without actively participating because he doesn’t have anything to say” isn’t the sort of thing that makes people uncomfortable, especially in social situations where the context is groups of folks stand around talking – like a party. If you’re lingering around a private conversation or hovering around a group of friends at a bar, then yeah your behavior’s weird and off-putting. Because that’s not how folks join conversations with strangers at bars. There’re ways of doing this successfully but it requires understanding the social context and a willingness to talk to the group and not just focus your entire attention on a single person because you think they’re hot.

And once again: check my archives, check my YouTube channel and read my books. I have given extensive amounts of information about how to handle those situations.

But this next part here? This part’s a tell.

“…because I didn’t get her consent to be attracted to her.”

Ah, the disingenuous misunderstanding of consent. There are two possibilities here – either you literally believe that this is something that people think, in which case you need to get off Reddit, YouTube and whatever weird Manfluencer podcasts you’re listening to until the brain-poison drains away, or you’re mocking the idea of consent which is going to be why women don’t want to talk to you in the first place. Either way: THERE’S YOUR PROBLEM.

See, this sort of attitude tends to radiate out of folks like a cleanup crew at a particularly passive-aggressive nuclear spill. These are the sort of jokey-jokes that turn out to not actually be jokes; its’ the sort of “said in frustration but meant with sincerity” kind of situation that tells the people around you a lot that you may not have intended. It’s a sign that, at best, you’re the sort of person who says “but don’t you think #metoo/political correctness has gone too far?”, especially in conversations about how Andrew Tate was arrested for human trafficking or Harvey Weinstein getting sentenced.

But for education’s sake, let’s say that you actually believe this is true, without malice. Here’s the thing: nobody – and certainly nobody serious – cares about what’s going on in the privacy of your ears. If you run into somebody who actually, literally and sincerely believes that you need their consent to be attracted to them, then you have run into a deeply unserious person and I would love to know how they move through this world without constantly throwing fits at the unwary.

But the fact of the matter is that you can be attracted to somebody all you want and nobody is going to give a shit. The time anyone is going to care and be bothered by it is when you make it their problem. And no, “asked them out on a date, once” isn’t “making it their problem”. More often than not, what you’re likely to find is that it wasn’t “once”, it certainly wasn’t polite or respectful and usually also includes doing something that would make reasonable people say “um, what the fuck, Charlie?”

Now it’s certainly possible that you may run into some Mean Girl who reacts to your asking them out (politely!) with “ew”; it’s an infinite universe and that means it’s certainly possible to encounter someone who acts like they came out of a bad 80s teen boner jam. But that’s where you’re right back to “this is a deeply unserious person,” and you’re better off asking yourself why you’d want to date someone who acts like that in the first place.

But in the real world, the time you’re most likely to run into someone who has a problem with your being attracted to them, it’s almost always because you made your interest in them an issue that they can’t ignore or avoid. There’re a lot of folks who would consider themselves to be “supreme gentlemen” who act like entitled asshats and do end-runs around things like ”didn’t actually give you her contact information” and show up in her DMs or texts anyway. Which is not just presumptive as fuck but creepy as hell, because it indicates that he does think that her desire to not be bothered is less important than his desire to try to get into her pants.

“Even if I do make a move, there’s a 40% chance she’ll get offended and then tell everyone and now I have a bad reputation.”

A word of advice, Super Chief: if you’re trying to make a point, you should probably not frame it as having a 60% chance of working out. Those are some pretty good odds. But also I dunno if you noticed, but we recently saw a spousal abuser – someone who was found in court to have abused his wife – have his incredibly-well-documented behavior read out repeatedly, with the whole world watching, and the response of a distressingly large amount of the population was “I told you that bitch was lying!” Meanwhile he goes on to continue to work and get paid handsomely. People celebrated Bill Cosby getting out of jail, where he had been convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault, on a technicality.  Shit, people still line up to work with Roman Polanski, who not only had the most open-and-shut rape case you can possibly find but who fled the country in order to avoid jail. 

Those are men who committed literal, documented acts of violence against women and who many still see as the bee’s knees and the badger’s nadgers.

Asking someone out and being shot down isn’t going to destroy your reputation unless you’re in junior high. And that’s junior high. Just liking the wrong TV show or being bad at Fortnite will do that to you.

But now that we’ve demolished these bullshit ideas, how about some actual, practical advice that you can start implementing today?

First, get the hell off the Internet. Seriously, I can tell where you’ve been hanging out and who you’ve been listening to, and it’s given you brain worms. You don’t just need to go outside and touch grass, you desperately need to go and interact with people in person, without a keyboard or filtering your thoughts through social media. I’m not being snarky here: you legitimately need to go talk to people with your mouth and actually connect with people in person, especially women. On that note:

Second, make friends with women. Not “hang around women you’re hoping to date”, but make actual friends. Talk to them, get to know them and get some insight into what their lives are actually like instead of taking the word of a bunch of guys who hire sex workers to hang around them to try to trick social media into thinking that they’re successful with women. Getting to know women as people instead of acting like they’re your opponents will fix at least 50% of your problems here.

Third, have a life. Go out and do cool shit that you enjoy, in ways that bring you in contact with other people who enjoy that same shit. Make friends with them, build a social circle and celebrate a human connection of the sort you can only have in the flesh with other people. Some of them may even be attractive women! But wait, isn’t that a problem? No, not really because here’s the thing: if you get to know someone as a person and generally act like a decent human being who didn’t get all his talking points from the redpillteen subreddit, the more time you spend with someone, the more they like you. Part of the reason why most folks meet their partners through either mutual friends or shared interests and activities is because propinquity is one of the strongest and yet most under-appreciated forces in attraction and dating.

But also, fun thing: your female friends may not want to date you and that’s fine. But they have friends. And if women like you and think you’re a genuinely good guy, they’ll talk you up to those friends. But first you have to be their friend.

Fourth: focus way the hell less on trying to cold-approach women. It’s a nice skill to have, but not only is it varsity level difficult, but it’s inefficient as hell. Even the folks who are very good at cold approaches have to shotgun it to get results, which means that they’re still dealing with a success-to-rejection ratio that’s heavily tilted in the rejection side.

But it’s also a big part of why women get tense about guys coming up to talk to them while they’re out on about.

Once we account for overdeveloped senses of entitlement and a culture that taught men that women are just things to be consumed, the single biggest reason why guys make asses of themselves and drive women to complain about getting hit on are the dudes who are focused on cold approaches.

Too many guys think that the ultimate goal is to get a complete stranger to decide she wants to start a romantic or sexual relationship with him, never realizing that this is not how most people date. If those dudes did nothing else but slow their roll from a 10 to a 2, they’d have far better results.

They’d do even better than that if they took it at a 2 and didn’t make it clear through their behavior that what they’re looking for is a woman-shaped figure that just happens to have a hole for their dick. The dude hitting on women at the bus stop is making it clear that he’s not into her because she’s a specific person but because he’s trying to get laid and she’s the most immediate acceptable option. If it weren’t her, it’d be someone else, and let me tell you: even if you’re someone who is open to sex with someone you just met, you still aren’t going to just go with anyone who asks and especially someone who makes it clear that “you’ll do”. Nobody likes being treated like an ambulatory Real Doll. And the folks who do, like it with people they’ve already know and have a connection with.

And if your immediate response to this is to gripe about The Friend Zone, simps, cucks or betas… I refer you to step one. Because you’re still dealing with brain worms and you will never, ever find someone to willingly and consensually touch your penis until you get rid of them.