Women Are Giving Up on Men and Retreating from Public Spaces

They’re tired of the aggression.

Jessica Wildfire
5 min readJul 7, 2023
Richard Miller

A woman goes to a coffee shop to do some work.

Out of nowhere, a random dude shows up. He starts moving her stuff and putting his things on the table. When she asks what he’s doing, he says he’s just “testing how nice you are.”

It’s a thing.

Apparently, pickup artists have been advising men to go out and do this to women they don’t even know. The goal is to figure out how submissive they are, and how easy to manipulate.

So that explains why dudes would walk up to me and touch my stuff, sometimes even putting creamer in my coffee or straws in my tea. They weren’t just being pushy.

It was a test.

(I failed.)

For years now, sad angry men have been filling the internet with complaints and distress calls. Many of them claim they just can’t find a woman. They blame liberals. They blame feminism. They blame everything but each other.

The entire time, millions of women have tried with increasing desperation to explain why they’re opting to live alone, foregoing relationships, and even spending less time in public.

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