With guys who are in prestigious/powerful corporate positions, I wonder if there is a fundamental issue where everybody tends to brown nose them, but female brown nosing sometimes gets misinterpreted as flirtation and interest.

And because guys in these sorts of positions actually do get an overpowered amount of real interest from women, they may have a harder time detecting inauthentic interest-alias than say a random janitor guy who a woman is being artificially nice to for some reason.

And then if the guy mistakenly thinks the woman is interested and makes a move, the woman may then in the moment feel unsure about what to do, because an abrupt rejection that contradicts their earlier outward behavior may make them feel not good, they might feel like they caused it, etc (which I think lines up with accounts I’ve read, except they don’t mention the brown nosing part of the theorized pattern).

This doesn’t excuse anything, necessarily, I just wonder if there are some complex dynamics at play. This setup we have where sexual relations are at will, subject only to consent, is not that old, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the system as-is still produces very bad outcomes at times even if the parties involved are all behaving in a non-psychopathic way.