It takes two to tango, or not – 1. Intro.

I’ve been writing about creeps a lot lately, so people have been sending me lots of creep-related goodies. One of the main type of goodies I’ve been getting are articles aiming to teach women how to turn men down. Please note that the gendering is from the articles themselves, not from me: that’s how the articles I’m getting are written.

Although they all purport to be teaching women how to say “no”, in reality the articles vary so much in their intent that it’s hard to compare them. Some aim to teach women how to turn someone down without ruffling any feathers whatsoever. These articles suggest methods so subtle, so gentle, that the men in question might not even realise that they have been turned down. Others aim to teach women how to punish men for daring to approach them, regardless of the context or manner of this approach. These articles concern me because they might cause unnecessary escalations. There are plenty of articles sitting between these two extremes. Some even oscillate from one extreme to the other. All the articles, however, have something in common: they all look at the women’s boundary setting as if it were the only significant element in the rejection process. They completely ignore what comes before and after. In doing so, they entirely overlook two key factors:

1. Women do not say “no” in a vacuum; their rejection is part of a longer process.
2. It’s not always the “no” that is the problem: the process can fail at any point.

It seems to me that in order to teach how a rejection should work, we need to look out at the entire rejection process, and from both sides. We need to look at the whole social request dance, not at a single step in it. For the dance to be completed successfully, with no bruised toes or egos, all the steps need to be completed adequately by both partners. A failure on either person’s part at any point will result in someone’s toes getting stepped on.

The Social Request And Rejection is a dance with four main parts:

1. Person A makes a social request;
2. Person B accepts or rejects the request;
3. Person A responds to the acceptance or rejection;
4. Person B responds to the way Person A responded.

What we are doing now is teaching a quarter of a dance – one-eight part of a dance, in fact, because this is a dance with two partners.

Furthermore, we ignore that the rest of the process affects how women set boundaries, or fail to. Women are often reluctant to state a clear, calm “no” because, in their experience, it’s common enough for men to either brush by it, or flip out in response. We could play a chicken-or-egg game with this: what comes first, women’s reluctance to reject, or men’s reluctance to take rejection on the chin? By focusing solely on women’s ability to reject, we’re overlooking the other half of the equation.

When my male acquaintances bemoan that some women are too unclear or too hostile in expressing their rejections, I encourage them to create a fake female profile on a free dating site – a very naughty thing to do, but a great educational experience. In no time at all, they discover how often a woman can turn down a man in a considerate, clear fashion only to be met with a stream of weasel tactics, emotional blackmail, insults, and even threats. Maybe, just maybe, women’s apparently inexplicable, aberrant behaviours would be less common if perfectly good “nos” didn’t blow up in their faces quite as often.