I don't think it's reactionary. I think it comes from a common experience that single guys have. If it were easier to find a woman you connect with, who just wants to hang out and get to know you for your personality, then I suppose it would be that simple. As it stands though, women like that might exist, but they're like unicorns.

As a single guy, if you go out to third spaces (few and far between as they are, especially ones that don't center around alcohol), with the intention of finding someone to date, people will call you a creep. If you go to a hobby group to try to meet like-minded people, and you find someone you're interested in romantically, if you even so much as hint at it, people will call you a creep. If you're in public, the general consensus is "Don't bother women; they can only assume you're a predator and they'd rather be mauled by a bear than talk to you."

So meeting women in person is out of the question. But if you go to the dating apps, the vast majority of women there are either bots, or they're just advertising their instagram or their snapchat or their tiktok or their onlyfans and they don't actually check their profile for matches. And the few who actually match with you end up just wanting to sell you cryptocurrency and aren't actually interested in meeting you for a date; maybe they aren't really the person pictured in the profile.

And the relatively few real women who are actually on the apps are either filtering for height and/or income level, or fast-swiping based on looks (sucks to suck if you don't take good selfies), or if they actually read your profile then you still have to somehow manage to be unique without being cringe, seem "normal" without being cliché, show some personality without sounding self-centered, express confidence but don't be self-aggrandizing.

So that's already an impossible balance to strike on just a silly profile on a platform that's already inherently kinda cringe. So ultimately it comes down to looks, height, and income level. And even if there are women on the apps who look past that stuff, they're only really being shown the profiles of guys who pay the top-tier subscription and pay for extra boosts on top of that. And the guys who get the most likes (meaning attractive, tall, and high-earning).

And if you somehow luck out and get matched with a real woman, but you don't immediately sound enthusiastic (but not too enthusiastic, mind!), or if you some how even slightly indicate that you want to know if she's real before getting emotionally invested in the conversation, then she gets offended and calls you sexist for even implying that a scam account could be catphishing as a woman.

And if you somehow make it through all of that unscathed, and have a real conversation with a woman, even if it seems to be going well, she might ghost you at any moment without any indication as to why. It could be something you said, maybe taken a different way from how you meant it, or maybe it sounds cringe or cliché or didn't land or whatever. Or maybe you took too long to respond. Or maybe you responded too fast. Or maybe she found a "better" guy and moved on. Or maybe she went on a date with some douchebag and now she thinks all guys are like that. You'll just never know. But you have to make it through at least a week or two of navigating all of this perfectly, and then if you're lucky, you might get a first date, after which she might ghost you for any reason or no reason at all. And you probably need to go on at least four or five dates before discussing any sort of commitment or expectations after which you might finally feel somewhat secure in the budding relationship.

So dating apps are out of the question too. And other online spaces are too, for that matter, because if you bother women there then they call you a creep.

So you can't meet women in person. You can't meet women online. What's left?

But a guy can't exactly get away with saying he's searching for a diamond in the rough, because apparently that's misogynist since it implies there are women out there who don't meet his standards (such as "treat me as a person and not as a wallet." Even the implication that some women might just be looking for a free meal is seen as sexist!).

Describing the process of dating as an interview process is viewed as sexist (if you're a guy of course, because apparently that objectifies women; but if a woman describes it the same way then she's "liberated" and "empowered").

So all-in-all if a guy lucks out enough to actually land a date, and the woman suggests somewhere expensive, if he suggests somewhere cheap or free then she might ghost him and then it might be another year or two before he's offered another date. Is that really an offer he can turn down?

If you're wandering in the desert, and you're starving, and someone offers you a grilled cheese for $30, do you really have a choice to say "That's too expensive! I'll go somewhere else."? Airlines know this.

And yet society still hasn't caught up to recognize how lopsided the dating scene is. Yes, women face problems and that sucks. Most people don't deny that. But the slightest discussion of the problems men face gets viewed as an attack on womankind writ large, and immediately flamed.