>Of course when you go to more meta rules like "give people personal space" and "read people's cues", which are contextual and subjective, then the whole problem with spelling out rules disappears. Those rules are good rules. But those aren't rules. They don't spell anything out. That was the whole "complaint" in the first place. > an excuse to go on creeping: "everything not forbidden is allowed". The actual situation is that everything is forbidden and yet you have to do it anyway. So you *have* to be a creep, and the difference is whether it's appreciated or not, so you have to predict it. (What I described, and you called "gently breaking barriers," is almost literally "creeping," as in "creeping up," crawling gradually forward, sneaking in.) For some types of people it's very stressful to break the rules and be a creep and yet you have to always do this. You (almost) never get permission except after the fact. > then people like the Tumblr user linked in the OP would complain "but those rules are so subjective and confusing and how can poor autistic/nerdy/shy/etc. guys ever understand" Yeah and they are completely right. It's not just "subjective and confusing." Nobody will ever give them permission (before the fact), and they can't deal with it. There is never any accepted way to go about anything. You are telling them to get permission, and to follow the rules, but that isn't how it works at all. Even if someone is fully willing to work with this reality, the process of learning how to read the signals is going to involve failure (i.e., being a creep). Worse: failure at later ages than would be normal, if you are a social failure, and/or bad at learning it. Finally, remember that some men are just unattractive and are going to strike out all the time everywhere so that they will never get that after-the-fact permission no matter what they do. Any possible thing they do is always going to be either creepy, or just a self-desexualization. Like the real rule if you're unattractive is actually "desexualize yourself." It's "don't even try." You are just not allowed to express attraction, even (or especially) in the totally normal way that everyone else does it. The main reason people don't acknowledge this is just that it's very convenient not to acknowledge another person's suffering. People are socially expected to hide that kind of suffering (along with many others). They are required to pretend to be normal in that regard when they aren't; and thereby they gain the acceptance of, and faux equality with, those who really are normal. (Erving Goffman wrote a great little book that talks about this called *Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity*.) So I think that what people are doing here is at least in part making excuses for this social reality, which of course is quite cruel to experience. > I... don't think we disagree on anything? Well you're claiming there is "rules lawyering" but I'm saying that that isn't the case because there are no permissions granted and thus nothing to "rules lawyer." The fact that you can't say what is allowed is just a result of the fact that nothing is allowed. Some people are very/overly sexually aggressive, don't really care about the effect that their behavior has on women, don't have self-control, try to push or pressure women into giving them what they want, and so on. These people never ever rely on "rules lawyering" because it doesn't exist in this context since no rules ever *grant* permission to do anything sexual. Some people have great difficulty going ahead to violate boundaries in order to establish new boundaries, either because this is too stressful for them, or else they have such a low success rate or bad judgment of existing boundaries that they are going to get some very bad reactions. I think we disagree also about this: in theory it would be possible to have very spelled out, very rigid and explicit courtship procedures. It has happened in real historical human societies (and surely still exists in some places). Of course it's not possible to make that happen in the USA, and I'm not saying it would be desirable. But rules lawyering isn't a problem here either, because the whole premise of the rules is that men need to be prevented from taking advantage of women. Consider rules like always having a chaperone present, every woman has to accept every dance invitation, the dance partners must touch only in the ways prescribed by the dance (distance between pelvises), etc.. Probably this kind of system is relying a lot on the final rule that after marriage the woman has to provide sex more or less on demand (the marriage is finally the called-for rule that grants sexual permission), and it doesn't permit any premarital sex, so we modern people probably wouldn't want to (and couldn't) establish something like it anymore. Regardless, I think that at times society actually has been set up to let men get all the way to a marriage proposal without ever having to do anything like the animalistic creeping that I described earlier. Men would only have to do that kind of thing in premarital and extramarital affairs (and I guess optionally on their wedding night).