I think one of the reasons dating has become so fraught and so many more innocuous behaviors are viewed as harassment is there are many, many fewer high-quality guys on the market lately and, largely, women control dating in most practical ways.

So it’s now tailored to suppress\weed out low-quality potential mates with minimum possible effort.

This makes total sense! I am not even criticizing women for it. The pool of men they want to date (which is very different than the pool of available men) is bad (from their perspective) and shrinking all the time.

Of course they want to use whatever leverage they can find to make sure hobo Kid Rock doesn’t get up in their face. When you understand the incentives, the choices made seem more sensible.