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> Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone

> Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone is sexual? That’s hairy,” shuddered one man. When I read things like this, I can't understand whether american culture has gotten weirdly puritan or this is a wild exaggeration. There's such a huge distance between politely and respectfully expressing sexual interest in someone, especially in a BAR, and being creepy and offensive. Edit: just to clarify, I've never lived in US or in countries in the similar #metoo zeitgest, so this is an uneducated view from the outside.

spacesword 8y ago
Welcome to the post #MeToo era
- huehehue 8y ago
  This is unsubstantive. It's one thing to express concern over what you might perceive as encroaching Puritan morality. It's another to blast a movement focused on giving a voice to sexual abuse victims.
  - lesdeuxmagots 8y ago
    I think it'd be wrong to not think through this though. When we talk about #metoo, we don't talk about the movement itself. #metoo is a symptom, indicative of a broader social sea change. I'm on the more progressive end in a coastal city, but have been in a uniquely diverse environment when it comes to political views, international views. People that are more socially liberal tend to have changed their stances because of a change in the general understanding of what is proper or acceptable. People who are more socially conservative have also changes their stances, but specifically blame the fear around #metoo. And I totally understand why they feel this way - it's difficult to place that shift on some nebulous generational change of social mores. It's much easier to place that shift on a specific, well-defined, well-publicized movement. That's not to say anyone is blasting that movement by saying this is how people feel. Neither is it blaming the movement for actually doing anything. However, it is likely what this change is mentally attributed to for many people.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - colordrops 8y ago
    There have been some very public cases of men being ostracized in the public eye through the #meetoo movement for behaviors that many would be considered acceptable, or at least bordering on it. Examples are Aziz Ansari and John Lasseter. Then you've got a constant barrage in newspapers, Twitter, and Facebook about consent, and what needs explicit consent encroaching ever closer to normal behaviors such as conversation. There is the concept of "enthusiastic consent". All of this is spearheaded by the #meetoo movement. Obviously consent is a good thing. But to pretend that the boundaries of what are reasonable regarding consent aren't overstepped and people aren't attacked unfairly is to deny the evidence. This fuzzy and changing boundary creates an environment of fear among men, especially when considering the consequences. There are forums were people discuss these issues in depth. Are they all hallucinating?
  - ArtDev 8y ago
    I am not so sure. Read about the Aziz Anzari situation. Everyone makes mistakes. But consent is not revokable the next day. To claim abuse later, and not take responsibility, is absurd and offensive to real victims. But this is how it is until women can take responsibility and say clearly "no" or accept the consequences of saying "yes" and possibly regretting it later.
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      Read about the Aziz Anzari situation. You mean the part where consent wasn't given in the first place? Here's the original article: https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355 https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355 “I wasn’t really even thinking of that, I didn’t want to be engaged in that with him. But he kept asking, so I said, ‘Next time.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you mean second date?’ and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ and he goes, ‘Well, if I poured you another glass of wine now, would it count as our second date?’”
      - wnoise 8y ago
        What you have quoted is just talking. It isn't something that needs any strong worry about consent. Read standalone, it could be anything from mutually flirtatious banter to the cringiest of escalation attempts. Read in the context of the rest of the article, it's clearly the latter. But being bad at flirting, bad at trying to get to yes is in no way a violation of consent. That said, other parts of the babe.net article do paint a much worse picture, of physically escalating both inappropriately (e.g. repeatedly putting her hand on his dick) and bizarrely (what's up with that fingers in mouth thing she described?)
        inferiorhuman 8y ago
        What you have quoted is just talking. Sure, but it's a very unambiguous example of her communicating lack of consent. One of many, yes. The Pixar debacle is even more clear cut IMO — don't insist on touching your subordinates.
- Tostino 8y ago
  > Welcome to the post #MeToo era Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Politely approaching someone in a bar is not something under attack, nor has it ever been.
chrischen 8y ago
The distance depends on how attractive you are to the other person, which is usually out of one's control.
nixarian 8y ago
More often than not, the 'difference' is whether or not the woman decided it's creepy or not, which is, more often than not, attached to the physical attractiveness of the man, or her mood at the time. Benefit of the doubt doesn't enter into it, especially after #MeToo And you might have noticed that women aren't having much less sex. It's because women are all having sex with a small number of men. Attractive, successful men. This is, sadly, the result of female, and to a lesser extent male, freedom of choice. Most women would choose to only have sex with attractive, successful men. And unlike men, they have that option.
im3w1l 8y ago
Couple puritanical norms with men who aren't that great at reading social norms and err on the side of caution and this is what happens. A significant minority is not able to make sense of it.
feministincel 8y ago
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I’ve never been in a context where that’s even acceptable. None of my friends pick up women (or are successful) and the only person I know in a long term relationship met his fiancé in middle school. I dont think it’s Puritanism but it is being risk averse. I know how hard it is for women and how many creeps they do have to deal with so I’d rather not even create the possibility of coming off as one. Add to this the tinderification of the hiring market (see Google’s top 1% of intelligence) and dating scene have put the bottom 80-90% in a bit of a bind because in many large metro areas there are more straight men than women and women are not culturally expected to make the first move. Couple that with increased expectations and lower social cohesion and it becomes...well, expected. Source - non-homeschooled straight 23 year old, never once asked a girl out.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  I suggest asking some girls out. I had social anxiety and the kind of social skills that lead to an Asperger’s diagnosis and I had more romantic experience than you by the time I was 18. The chances of a girl being offended by being asked out are relatively low in any case; most people are nice. They’re really, really low if you’re attractive. When an ugly, charmless or poor man asks out a certain kind of girl they’re offended not just at having been asked out, but that the thought even occurred. Most girls aren’t like that. They’ll deflect the question or say that they’re busy and make no effort to reschedule. My email is in my profile for anyone who has similar problems.
  - feministincel 8y ago
    Well I’m not exactly attractive either :) Honestly, putting myself in the type of women I’m most intrigued by i wouldn’t put up with myself. The closest I got was when I chatted up a girl on a train, but just couldn’t tell if she was just being super polite. Although I did end up getting her LinkedIn... I guess I’m not smooth either.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      If you’re not attractive become attractive. If you’re not the kind of person you’d put up with change, become better. If you’re not smooth or confident work on them, they’re learnable skills. Don’t be yourself, that’s a crock of shit those born on third base say, work on becoming better, on becoming someone you respect and who you think is worth dating.
mellow-lake-day 8y ago
Tinder and other hook up apps are the solution. No more approaching strangers in a bar who are either there to hang out with friends or just want to be left alone.
- feministincel 8y ago
  They are the solution because the intentions are clearer but then... you don’t get matches, because in straight pairings more women get orders of magnitude more attention than most men. Source - I don’t get matches. And if I do, I’m boring.
- CuriouslyC 8y ago
  Tinder is garbage. They have intentionally created a horribly imbalanced market to hook women with unrealistic prospects while extracting as much money as possible from the bottom 80% of men. Singles meetups organized around a shared hobby or activity are a million times better.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
autokad 8y ago
I dont think it has anything to do with puritan, as its not related to religion at all. well for one, sex in college is extremely dangerous. the Obama administration basically threatened Universities to treat male students as guilty (not even guilty until proven innocent). https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-campus-rape-policy/538974/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-un...
- tdb7893 8y ago
  I've never met any male college student where that was why they aren't having sex. I highly doubt this is a major factor for any but a very small number of people (and those people are unlikely to have sex for other reasons anyway).
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  American culture has deep roots, just like everywhere else. Just because the ideology of human rights or progressivism doesn’t identify itself as a post-Christian movement that doesn’t really make sense except on light of Christianity doesn’t make it untrue. The line from the Quakers with God’s inner light in each person to the inherent dignity of man is not exactly subtle. Likewise sex worker hostile feminism in Sweden or Norway uses similar rhetoric of concern for sex workers while doing everything in their power to make their lives hell. Just because the feminists in question don’t talk about Christ that doesn’t mean they’re not the same kind of judgmental bourgeois Lutherans their grandmothers were.
Pfhreak 8y ago
This is a wild exaggeration. Men used to be able to basically hit on women in all contexts with zero consequence (e.g. hitting on women at work was ok, let alone butting into a group at a bar). More recently, people have been pushing back on men who are inappropriate. This leads to some men who don't understand the new boundaries having a very large overreaction and essentially saying that it's impossible or scary to 'chat someone up'. See also the men who won't work/game in mixed gender groups because it's "too difficult". The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'. They aren't complicated rules.
- amvalo 8y ago
  Actually the rules are even simpler than that: 1. don't.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    They really aren't? You can flirt, you can come on to people. Some people want that, and it's ok in some contexts.
    - Mirioron 8y ago
      And there is no way to tell which people are okay with this and which aren't without taking risks that can have severe consequences. Some men are just going to say "no thanks" to this, and on the scale of society that some men is a large number.
      - golergka 8y ago
        > And there is no way to tell which people are okay with this and which aren't without taking risks that can have severe consequences. Ask?
        Mirioron 8y ago
        Just asking can be considered creepy or harassment.
duxup 8y ago
There is a sort of sexual paranoia in the US, but it isn't religious and puritan....it shows up in corporations and academic institutions. Laura Kipnis had a wonderful essay about it, and as if to drive the point home it resulted in a series of absurd investigations by the University she works at. http://5d5.3dd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes-Academe.pdf http://5d5.3dd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Se...
mirimir 8y ago
Sure. But the lead in to that makes it pretty clear: > But that still does not seem to explain the persistence of America’s sex recession, or its most extreme feature: how concentrated it is among men. Since 2008 there has been almost a threefold rise in the share of men under the age of 30 who claim to be having no sex. At the same time, the portion of sexless women increased by only 8%. A range of possible explanations for the disparity has been suggested, and the students seemed to corroborate several of them. Many felt men’s social skills had been especially eroded by over-reliance on technology. Overindulgence in porn meanwhile offered them an escape route from reality. Yet the most compelling answer, because it contains elements of all that and more, may be signalled by young people’s increasing reluctance to date. > This is often blamed on the “hook-up culture” of college campuses. Yet casual sex and dating coexisted in the 1990s. It is also easy to exaggerate—now as then—how many people are hooking up. Half the Northwestern students said they rarely or never did. Yet they also rattled off reasons not to date which, among the men, who would traditionally take the lead in such encounters, included uncertainty about how they were even managed. Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone is sexual? That’s hairy,” shuddered one man. I didn't get comfortable "chatting someone up in a bar" until my mid 30s. After a few ~long-term relationships, and a failed marriage. And this was during the 60s-80s. I can't imagine what it's like now.
- cybersnowflake 8y ago
  Its not rocket science. All but the ugliest women can get sex/relationships more easily than all but perhaps the most attractive men. You have the top 90% of women competing for the top 10% (guessimate but its around there) of men while the other men are left completely in the dust.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    That doesn't seem plausible. How can the "top 10%" of men be having sex with anywhere near the " top 90% of women"? That'd be a lot of sex for those men. And wouldn't they be kept busy enough by the top 20%-40% of women? I do suspect that social media is a huge part of it. With such a focus on superficial attractiveness. And the potential for mobbing. There was lots more slack, back in the day.
jetrink 8y ago
When 50% of the population smoked, smoking in bars was accepted. Non-smokers who didn't want to spend an evening wreathed in smoke didn't go to bars. Those who did knew what they were in for. I think approaching people to try to get them into bed is a lot like smoking. At one time, 50% of people in a bar were engaged in that activity. If you went to a bar in the evening, you knew that would be a part of the environment. That doesn't mean it wasn't annoying or awkward for the people being hit on who just wanted to enjoy an evening with friends. It's understandable too that as it becomes rarer, it also is more likely to be seen as creepy, just as smoking has become more offensive as it becomes more rare.
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  Counterpoint: showing up at a bar that encourages smoking is a much stronger signal when there are less people that do it. A human voluntarily showing up at a bar in the age of Tinder is a strong signal, too. So in theory the "creepiness" of assuming their intention to meet others as potential dating material should reduce as well. And just like it would be gauche to go as a nonsmoker to a smoking bar and complain about the smoke in your face, it would be the same to go to a singles bar and complain about the unwanted attention of other patrons.

spacesword 8y ago

Welcome to the post #MeToo era

huehehue 8y ago
This is unsubstantive. It's one thing to express concern over what you might perceive as encroaching Puritan morality. It's another to blast a movement focused on giving a voice to sexual abuse victims.
- lesdeuxmagots 8y ago
  I think it'd be wrong to not think through this though. When we talk about #metoo, we don't talk about the movement itself. #metoo is a symptom, indicative of a broader social sea change. I'm on the more progressive end in a coastal city, but have been in a uniquely diverse environment when it comes to political views, international views. People that are more socially liberal tend to have changed their stances because of a change in the general understanding of what is proper or acceptable. People who are more socially conservative have also changes their stances, but specifically blame the fear around #metoo. And I totally understand why they feel this way - it's difficult to place that shift on some nebulous generational change of social mores. It's much easier to place that shift on a specific, well-defined, well-publicized movement. That's not to say anyone is blasting that movement by saying this is how people feel. Neither is it blaming the movement for actually doing anything. However, it is likely what this change is mentally attributed to for many people.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- colordrops 8y ago
  There have been some very public cases of men being ostracized in the public eye through the #meetoo movement for behaviors that many would be considered acceptable, or at least bordering on it. Examples are Aziz Ansari and John Lasseter. Then you've got a constant barrage in newspapers, Twitter, and Facebook about consent, and what needs explicit consent encroaching ever closer to normal behaviors such as conversation. There is the concept of "enthusiastic consent". All of this is spearheaded by the #meetoo movement. Obviously consent is a good thing. But to pretend that the boundaries of what are reasonable regarding consent aren't overstepped and people aren't attacked unfairly is to deny the evidence. This fuzzy and changing boundary creates an environment of fear among men, especially when considering the consequences. There are forums were people discuss these issues in depth. Are they all hallucinating?
- ArtDev 8y ago
  I am not so sure. Read about the Aziz Anzari situation. Everyone makes mistakes. But consent is not revokable the next day. To claim abuse later, and not take responsibility, is absurd and offensive to real victims. But this is how it is until women can take responsibility and say clearly "no" or accept the consequences of saying "yes" and possibly regretting it later.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    Read about the Aziz Anzari situation. You mean the part where consent wasn't given in the first place? Here's the original article: https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355 https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355 “I wasn’t really even thinking of that, I didn’t want to be engaged in that with him. But he kept asking, so I said, ‘Next time.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you mean second date?’ and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ and he goes, ‘Well, if I poured you another glass of wine now, would it count as our second date?’”
    - wnoise 8y ago
      What you have quoted is just talking. It isn't something that needs any strong worry about consent. Read standalone, it could be anything from mutually flirtatious banter to the cringiest of escalation attempts. Read in the context of the rest of the article, it's clearly the latter. But being bad at flirting, bad at trying to get to yes is in no way a violation of consent. That said, other parts of the babe.net article do paint a much worse picture, of physically escalating both inappropriately (e.g. repeatedly putting her hand on his dick) and bizarrely (what's up with that fingers in mouth thing she described?)
      - inferiorhuman 8y ago
        What you have quoted is just talking. Sure, but it's a very unambiguous example of her communicating lack of consent. One of many, yes. The Pixar debacle is even more clear cut IMO — don't insist on touching your subordinates.
Tostino 8y ago
> Welcome to the post #MeToo era Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Politely approaching someone in a bar is not something under attack, nor has it ever been.

chrischen 8y ago

The distance depends on how attractive you are to the other person, which is usually out of one's control.

nixarian 8y ago

More often than not, the 'difference' is whether or not the woman decided it's creepy or not, which is, more often than not, attached to the physical attractiveness of the man, or her mood at the time. Benefit of the doubt doesn't enter into it, especially after #MeToo And you might have noticed that women aren't having much less sex. It's because women are all having sex with a small number of men. Attractive, successful men. This is, sadly, the result of female, and to a lesser extent male, freedom of choice. Most women would choose to only have sex with attractive, successful men. And unlike men, they have that option.

im3w1l 8y ago

Couple puritanical norms with men who aren't that great at reading social norms and err on the side of caution and this is what happens. A significant minority is not able to make sense of it.

feministincel 8y ago

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I’ve never been in a context where that’s even acceptable. None of my friends pick up women (or are successful) and the only person I know in a long term relationship met his fiancé in middle school. I dont think it’s Puritanism but it is being risk averse. I know how hard it is for women and how many creeps they do have to deal with so I’d rather not even create the possibility of coming off as one. Add to this the tinderification of the hiring market (see Google’s top 1% of intelligence) and dating scene have put the bottom 80-90% in a bit of a bind because in many large metro areas there are more straight men than women and women are not culturally expected to make the first move. Couple that with increased expectations and lower social cohesion and it becomes...well, expected. Source - non-homeschooled straight 23 year old, never once asked a girl out.

barry-cotter 8y ago
I suggest asking some girls out. I had social anxiety and the kind of social skills that lead to an Asperger’s diagnosis and I had more romantic experience than you by the time I was 18. The chances of a girl being offended by being asked out are relatively low in any case; most people are nice. They’re really, really low if you’re attractive. When an ugly, charmless or poor man asks out a certain kind of girl they’re offended not just at having been asked out, but that the thought even occurred. Most girls aren’t like that. They’ll deflect the question or say that they’re busy and make no effort to reschedule. My email is in my profile for anyone who has similar problems.
- feministincel 8y ago
  Well I’m not exactly attractive either :) Honestly, putting myself in the type of women I’m most intrigued by i wouldn’t put up with myself. The closest I got was when I chatted up a girl on a train, but just couldn’t tell if she was just being super polite. Although I did end up getting her LinkedIn... I guess I’m not smooth either.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    If you’re not attractive become attractive. If you’re not the kind of person you’d put up with change, become better. If you’re not smooth or confident work on them, they’re learnable skills. Don’t be yourself, that’s a crock of shit those born on third base say, work on becoming better, on becoming someone you respect and who you think is worth dating.

mellow-lake-day 8y ago

Tinder and other hook up apps are the solution. No more approaching strangers in a bar who are either there to hang out with friends or just want to be left alone.

feministincel 8y ago
They are the solution because the intentions are clearer but then... you don’t get matches, because in straight pairings more women get orders of magnitude more attention than most men. Source - I don’t get matches. And if I do, I’m boring.
CuriouslyC 8y ago
Tinder is garbage. They have intentionally created a horribly imbalanced market to hook women with unrealistic prospects while extracting as much money as possible from the bottom 80% of men. Singles meetups organized around a shared hobby or activity are a million times better.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

autokad 8y ago

I dont think it has anything to do with puritan, as its not related to religion at all. well for one, sex in college is extremely dangerous. the Obama administration basically threatened Universities to treat male students as guilty (not even guilty until proven innocent). https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-campus-rape-policy/538974/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-un...

tdb7893 8y ago
I've never met any male college student where that was why they aren't having sex. I highly doubt this is a major factor for any but a very small number of people (and those people are unlikely to have sex for other reasons anyway).
barry-cotter 8y ago
American culture has deep roots, just like everywhere else. Just because the ideology of human rights or progressivism doesn’t identify itself as a post-Christian movement that doesn’t really make sense except on light of Christianity doesn’t make it untrue. The line from the Quakers with God’s inner light in each person to the inherent dignity of man is not exactly subtle. Likewise sex worker hostile feminism in Sweden or Norway uses similar rhetoric of concern for sex workers while doing everything in their power to make their lives hell. Just because the feminists in question don’t talk about Christ that doesn’t mean they’re not the same kind of judgmental bourgeois Lutherans their grandmothers were.

Pfhreak 8y ago

This is a wild exaggeration. Men used to be able to basically hit on women in all contexts with zero consequence (e.g. hitting on women at work was ok, let alone butting into a group at a bar). More recently, people have been pushing back on men who are inappropriate. This leads to some men who don't understand the new boundaries having a very large overreaction and essentially saying that it's impossible or scary to 'chat someone up'. See also the men who won't work/game in mixed gender groups because it's "too difficult". The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'. They aren't complicated rules.

amvalo 8y ago
Actually the rules are even simpler than that: 1. don't.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  They really aren't? You can flirt, you can come on to people. Some people want that, and it's ok in some contexts.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    And there is no way to tell which people are okay with this and which aren't without taking risks that can have severe consequences. Some men are just going to say "no thanks" to this, and on the scale of society that some men is a large number.
    - golergka 8y ago
      > And there is no way to tell which people are okay with this and which aren't without taking risks that can have severe consequences. Ask?
      - Mirioron 8y ago
        Just asking can be considered creepy or harassment.

duxup 8y ago

There is a sort of sexual paranoia in the US, but it isn't religious and puritan....it shows up in corporations and academic institutions. Laura Kipnis had a wonderful essay about it, and as if to drive the point home it resulted in a series of absurd investigations by the University she works at. http://5d5.3dd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes-Academe.pdf http://5d5.3dd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Se...

mirimir 8y ago

Sure. But the lead in to that makes it pretty clear: > But that still does not seem to explain the persistence of America’s sex recession, or its most extreme feature: how concentrated it is among men. Since 2008 there has been almost a threefold rise in the share of men under the age of 30 who claim to be having no sex. At the same time, the portion of sexless women increased by only 8%. A range of possible explanations for the disparity has been suggested, and the students seemed to corroborate several of them. Many felt men’s social skills had been especially eroded by over-reliance on technology. Overindulgence in porn meanwhile offered them an escape route from reality. Yet the most compelling answer, because it contains elements of all that and more, may be signalled by young people’s increasing reluctance to date. > This is often blamed on the “hook-up culture” of college campuses. Yet casual sex and dating coexisted in the 1990s. It is also easy to exaggerate—now as then—how many people are hooking up. Half the Northwestern students said they rarely or never did. Yet they also rattled off reasons not to date which, among the men, who would traditionally take the lead in such encounters, included uncertainty about how they were even managed. Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone is sexual? That’s hairy,” shuddered one man. I didn't get comfortable "chatting someone up in a bar" until my mid 30s. After a few ~long-term relationships, and a failed marriage. And this was during the 60s-80s. I can't imagine what it's like now.

cybersnowflake 8y ago
Its not rocket science. All but the ugliest women can get sex/relationships more easily than all but perhaps the most attractive men. You have the top 90% of women competing for the top 10% (guessimate but its around there) of men while the other men are left completely in the dust.
- mirimir 8y ago
  That doesn't seem plausible. How can the "top 10%" of men be having sex with anywhere near the " top 90% of women"? That'd be a lot of sex for those men. And wouldn't they be kept busy enough by the top 20%-40% of women? I do suspect that social media is a huge part of it. With such a focus on superficial attractiveness. And the potential for mobbing. There was lots more slack, back in the day.

jetrink 8y ago

When 50% of the population smoked, smoking in bars was accepted. Non-smokers who didn't want to spend an evening wreathed in smoke didn't go to bars. Those who did knew what they were in for. I think approaching people to try to get them into bed is a lot like smoking. At one time, 50% of people in a bar were engaged in that activity. If you went to a bar in the evening, you knew that would be a part of the environment. That doesn't mean it wasn't annoying or awkward for the people being hit on who just wanted to enjoy an evening with friends. It's understandable too that as it becomes rarer, it also is more likely to be seen as creepy, just as smoking has become more offensive as it becomes more rare.

kthejoker2 8y ago
Counterpoint: showing up at a bar that encourages smoking is a much stronger signal when there are less people that do it. A human voluntarily showing up at a bar in the age of Tinder is a strong signal, too. So in theory the "creepiness" of assuming their intention to meet others as potential dating material should reduce as well. And just like it would be gauche to go as a nonsmoker to a smoking bar and complain about the smoke in your face, it would be the same to go to a singles bar and complain about the unwanted attention of other patrons.