> It bothers me that I basically have to pretend to be a dude on most of the internet because of assholes.
At least on the Internet, you can pretend, in the meatspace, you simply can't.
I also wouldn't call these people assholes, it might be convenient but imho it's needlessly vilifying people for simply behaving like they are expected to and how they've behaved for the longest time.
Because for the longest time, and in most places to this day, males are expected to initiate contact, if they are interested in a relationship with a female.
Now, one could argue that's outdated and "sexist", but that doesn't change the fact that large parts of our societies (and our behavior) are still shaped by these expectations. It's not that people want to be assholes, people simply don't want to be alone and for the longest time, the most common and accepted solution for that was for males to initiate contact and woo the females.
Sadly this is an angle on all this that too often gets ignored in favor of some simplified narrative where all these guys are just a bunch of misogynists who consider women their property or something like that. While these types do exist too, it just feels dishonest to frame this whole issue like that.
Because as a male the reality of the situation pretty much boils down to this: You are either proactive and approach people or... you stay alone. I'm not trying to dramatize here, I'm just trying to point something out that seems to be largely ignored in these kinds of discussions.
Not everybody is a socialite who constantly meets new people without any effort, heck for the longest time we've been told that female brains are explicitly better at socializing that than male brains (or is that considered sexist now too?). So what are males supposed to do in this situation? Just sit tight until a female approaches them? That's pretty much a "forever alone" sentence for the vast majority of males.
That's why at some point for many males this becomes a simple issue of game theory: You can't meet new females without approaching new females, the more new females you approach the higher the likelihood that you will end up with one of them.
As sad and sterile as it might sound, in the end, it often just boils down to "trying often enough" and it's been that way for the longest time and I'm pretty certain this is engrained in our nature to a certain degree. Millions of years of behavioral evolution don't just vanish in a matter of years.