I think I understand the point that you are making and I agree that gendered expectations on how romance is done is bullshit and annoying for people of any gender, and I agree that due to those cultural expectations women can make it harder for men especially less confident men (and vice versa). However it's possible you may have misunderstood the point of my post, I wasn't meaning to say that anyone who feels this way is sexist and an idiot, I was more trying to say that this is a really normal human emotion and that social skills are hard. (Also these sorts of things happen in non romantic circumstances too)

My issue with a lot of posts like these is that while they can be true when you make something that is about normal human feelings and then make them about gender you put the other gender more out of reach and make it even harder to connect with those people. A lot of the time the reason someone might just do this rather than asking or being upfront about this stuff is because they're worried about how the other person might react. It would be a shit ton easier if everyone was upfront about how they felt but none of us are willing to do that, it's frigging scary.

Additionally I think women are working towards being more open about that sort of stuff, there's plenty of threads on ask reddit where women do talk about that stuff. And if women (or anyone really) are in a comfortable environment and you ask they will talk, if you want to figure out how to understand women romantically talk to your female friends ask them for advice (pro tip a lot of people like being asked for advice now and again it shows you trust them and care about their thoughts).

I'm not the most eloquent person so I hope this doesn't come across as an attack on you but more as a request for understanding from a person who also doesn't know what the fuck they're doing and once accidently stared at a girl at a party for so long that she asked if I was feeling sick. She was really pretty but the idea of talking to anyone but the idea of talking about romantic stuff to anyone is really effing scary (gender doesn't make a difference in telling if someone is into you).