The other day, my parents asked me (22M) if there were any women that I find attractive (I guess because they're paranoid about me being gay lol) and I told them yes, there's a fair number of women that I've seen in public that I've found attractive.
They asked me, "Do you talk to any of them?" and I said "No??? It's inappropriate to approach women in public unless you have business with them."
I told them that it is only appropriate for a man to talk to a woman he doesn't know when the social situation is explicitly designed for meeting strangers—dating apps, hobby groups, meeting friends of friends, etc. In my view, cold approaching women you don't know just because you're attracted to them is harassment.
My parents told me that I'm being ridiculous and making excuses because I'm nervous. They are adamant that I need to learn to approach women or else I will never find a partner. I told them that times have changed and this is disrespectful and potentially predatory behavior along the lines of unsolicited flirting and catcalling. Approaching women is a violation of their personal space and could make them feel very uncomfortable, especially if they feel like they don't have an easy way out.
My parents are almost 60 and they are very conservative, so they don't exactly follow progressive discourse, and I feel like they're super out of touch on this as a result. Particularly, my mom tends to strike up conversations with other women in public, and she's skeptical when I tell her that I can't do the same thing because I'm a man and would be viewed as a potential predator.
But I also don't get out much, which makes me second-guess how distorted my understanding of the social world is from reality. My parents are like a broken clock, and sometimes they DO have a point about something despite 90% of their opinions being insane. Maybe there is a more nuanced reality that I'm not picking up on.
So I wanted to ask here. Are my parents out of touch? Am I out of touch? Are we both wrong? I want to know your opinion.
I think the bigger issue here is that you are obviously uncomfortable with the idea of approaching people in public and your parents are treating this as irrelevant and something you are supposed to just force yourself to do it anyway despite feeling like the situation is wrong and threatening. You shouldn't need to justify not wanting to do that by appealing to some kind of cultural authority about what is acceptable to society.
Personally even as a man it normally freaks me out when strangers approach me in public. It just feels like a very unusual, unexpected and potentially unsafe kind of circumstance, almost never something positive, there's no way I would trust such a person, so I'm not going to do that to others because it's like I would be inflicting that on both of us simultaneously, and that would of course come through in any interaction I attempted. How could I expect them to be receptive to that when I would never be myself? People may argue, that's the wrong way to feel and so it doesn't matter, replace that attitude with a better one, as if they themselves could easily substitute a totally different way of being for how they are.
If you need an invitation in order to feel safe in a social situation, I would say it is ok to demand that people respect that and not mock you for it.
Unfortunately, this is normal behavior for them. They exhibit virtually no empathy and constantly talk trash about what expectations I don't meet. They would rather laugh at me and insult me for having issues than actually help me. I'm on my own. They will spew the most vile filth imaginable, and when I insult them back, they suddenly get all pearl-clutchy and tell me that the Bible says I have to respect them no matter how awful they treat me. I tell them "Respect is a two-way street. You don't have to be nice to people who make your life hell" and they go "B-but the BIBLE!!" They are cry-bullies. And their parenting was so psychotic that it radicalized me into becoming progressive. My brother, devout follower of their teachings, grew up to become a literal cat killer. And they treat him as a perfect child and ask why I can't be like him. Yeah, uh, no thanks.
As a defense mechanism, I eventually learned to be contrarian. Whatever my parents said, I would take away the opposite lesson. Where they were rude, I was kind. Where they were discriminatory, I was inclusive. Where they promoted certain kinds of people as superior, I believed that no kind was inherently better than any other. Instead of ignoring suffering, I believed in helping those in need. The person I am resulted from my survival of this environment, not an embrace of it.
But this contrarianism prevents me from taking away nuanced lessons, and that means I need to intentionally seek that nuance. By asking about this issue, I hope to gain an understanding of some of that nuance, at least enough to help me continue to grow instead of falling into defeatism.
If you're not dependent on your parents, think about cutting them out of your life or at least strongly reducing contact. Trust me, mich less stress this way, choose people who are good to you to keep around.