Back in the day when I was a single girl I was often quite direct in saying no. Especially if a guy was obnoxious. But maybe that was not the best way to do it: men’s feelings and pride get hurt.
Yes, of course, but men can still see the difference between being hurt by the situation and being hurt by you as a person.
Few things hurt as bad as the feeling of being played. A ‘no’ which is not scornful, humiliating or making fun of you is not even really a rejection.
At least from my POV, if a woman said something like: ‘sorry, but I don’t really find you appealing
that way,’ or: ‘you just aren’t my type,’ but without a tinge of something like contempt or seeing me as a creepy person who’d best disappear ASAP, then I would probably laugh back and say something like, ‘tough luck!’ and drop it. In theory, at least. In practice, it’s quite difficult to avoid the tinge of ‘creep!’ in one’s voice and to take a respectful ‘no’ for good coin.
Women are told that telling a man she is not interested in him is hurtful and rude.
Depends on the
way it is told, the attitude. If the woman isn’t saying it in a rude way, then she isn’t being rude. But if the way in which she says it is rude, then the content of the message is not where the problem lies. Scorn, ridicule, humiliation, that’s what’s hard to take. Or a u-turn, being cut out without explanation. Things of that sort.
‘Sorry, not interested,’ for that matter, is an answer that’s lacking in courtesy if the asker is not being discourteous. It’s a sort of curt answer. Being courteous takes a little more than being in one’s right.
In an ideal world, men would approach women and women would approach men in designated situations where both parties knew that the other was inerested in considering relationships.
Not sure. Designated breeding grounds produce a forced atmosphere. Look at dating websites, singles’ evenings and such like.
The person asking would very clearly ask “would you like to go on a date to assess whether we are both interested in a relationship together?”, the person asked would respond with either “yes” or “no”, and that would be an end of it.
You’re thinking with your left brain right now. Once the romance kicks in, the wording you’ve just cited would feel too business-like for the situation.
A lot would depend on the delivery (tone of voice etc.), but there’s only so much you can do with the exact words.
unless you’ve bought into the romcom idea that a man just has to keep pursuing and harrassing a woman for long enough, ignoring her discomfort, until she changes her answer.
In an ideal world women wouldn’t be using rejections and refusals as a way to get a man to take the hint and try harder. But real life is a bit more complicated than that, and so individual mileages may vary. (Happened to one of my closest relatives.)
Unfortunately man are socially conditioned to chase and endlessly pursue a girl until she gives a she says the word “no”. Look at every romantic comedy or Nicholas Sparks book; the guy gets a bunch of circuitous responses that could have been taken as a “soft no” but they eventually get together.
The problem with soft answers is that the softer they are, the less certain they are. If you really are interested, then you won’t be taking chances that you might be wrong.
So okay, if it’s one of the many girls who catch your eye along the way, then yeah, you’ll go on your own way. But if she’s really captured your interest, then you won’t be taking chances. It may even occur to you that you owe
her better since you’re a man and a man is supposed to take charge and be the strong person, the rock. This includes providing reassurance, assuaging doubts, being adamant when others are faltering, going forward when others are slacking.
I remember my female friends telling each other that they had to make the guy chase them and if didn’t keep trying after they rejected him the first time he wasn’t worth it. That mentality didn’t end in high school either.
Humans play games. This is because humans have the ability to think analytically and synthetically, which means they can dissect systems, reconstruct patterns and so on and use the system to their advantage. Social contacts aren’t that much different from a
board game. Games are attractive because they amuse people, on the other hand some play to win. Either way, people do something non-obvious in order to achieve a desired purpose. They will use redefined words and gestures for that (i.e. meaning different from face value). In fact, even the law works this way.
The facebook could not be up-to-date or maybe it’s more of an inside joke. 
Don’t kid yourself, we can not pick up on the clue. Believe it or not, us women will often assume at first that you are just being nice or want to have a conversation. We don’t assume that talking to you is like some sort of weird pre-date “scout” out. It also doesn’t always cross our mind that we immediately need to mention our boyfriend. We’re just talking, right?
The problem, though is that your example presupposes a couple of conditions that probably no longer go without saying in the younger generations. Or not. I was just about to say that the girl needs to have had some manners drilled into her, or some presence of mind or some… incentive. But the lack of any particular incentive to immediately make a counteroffer is probably the very thing we’re talking about here — i.e. the fact of just simply not being interested. So probably you’re more right than I’d first thought.