William Costello

in proximity to people kind of with similar interests.

They're going to see you hopefully shine in an industry that you belong in and should be thriving in.

Of course, romance is going to blossom there.

So that seems a bit of a misguided cultural idea to just completely shut down workplace romances.

Yeah, I think it would be a shame if that was a complete... I mean, I believe even like Facebook or Netflix have a...

For sure.

I think the idea of flipping it, flipping the sexes there, would have more legs than perhaps we might think, because although it is still making a move, men would perceive a move being made on them as much less harmful.

Even sexual harassment, men perceive it as way less harmful when it's towards a man.

Men perceive sexual harassment as less harmful generally towards men or women, but specifically towards men.

So flipping it would be, I think, would have some legs.

I think the worst, most men would probably be flattered and say, so why don't we flip it?

I think that the desire is not there for women.

I think most women want to be pursued rather than pursue men themselves.

It's just that they want to be pursued by men they deem eligible or competent themselves.

And they've got this kind of avenue to repel or to kind of punitively punish men they don't deem eligible who are giving them the ick for coming on to them, which is a shame.

You know, there's a funny phenomenon because men have this sexual over perception bias whereby we perceive men.

a smile from a woman as giving us sexual interest and this is there's good evolutionary reasons for this is because our ancestors weren't the ones who missed a cue of sexual interest it's actually like the smoke detector principle it's better to be overly sensitive to these cues than to miss them so we've got this over perception bias but meanwhile women have got uh

for a whole host of reasons, they've got a strategy to kind of give soft rejection or to misrepresent romantic interests for a whole variety of interests, one of which could be wanting to feel safe, not feeling safe enough to forthrightly reject someone.

So you've got these two mechanisms running into each other where women are giving this kind of ambiguous no or token resistance to romantic pursuit.

And, yeah,