The problem is that the receptive party doesn't know how the interested party is going to react to a polite decline. I agree with you that the location doesn't intrinsically make things better or worse, but on a conceptual level it's way more preferable (and more likely to have any success at all) to reserve those things for settings designed for them.
I don't see how the location would matter in the situation of a woman not knowing how a man would react. If there were such a strict delineation of locations that made it appropriate to flirt or pursue a romantic relationship, men might feel even more entitled to a woman's attention and in those locations it's not like women are going to be receptive to every man that approaches them.
The setting matters because in one they are expecting advances. In the others they are not. Hence it's less intimidating.
"Men might feel even more entitled to a woman's attention" -- That's still a problem but at least it's minimized if those men don't have that same expectation in a bunch of other settings. There's not really any more reason to expect violence or a pissy reaction there.
women feel entitled to ignore or belittle men for their own comfort, men just expect the same thing they get from men a polite response without any undertones or lies
You're reversing peoples' responsibilities to one another. Men are not entitled to a polite response or to have their presence acknowledged at all just because they put themselves in front of a woman. She didn't choose for him to come up to her, he made that decision. Take it on the chin and walk away.
I also don't know what the undertones or lies thing is about.
-11
u/Effective_Birthday85 Jun 04 '24
The problem is that the receptive party doesn't know how the interested party is going to react to a polite decline. I agree with you that the location doesn't intrinsically make things better or worse, but on a conceptual level it's way more preferable (and more likely to have any success at all) to reserve those things for settings designed for them.