Read a tweet today about why Gen Z men are not "manning up" and cold approaching women. It's obviously the fear of getting your life ruined, not the fear of rejection.
This is established fact for virtually anyone who's ever thought about the subject (besides NPCs).
But my thought is even if you somehow took away the risk of ruining your life, there are a lot of problems with expecting men to find relationships by walking into the buzzsaw of cold approaches over and over. First of all, it kind of hurts to get turned down based on your physical appearance, and the appearance of 80% of men is inadequate on its own. You can make up for that with banter and flirting. But is it realistic to expect every man, or even most men, to develop the level of game needed to pick up girls off the street?
Second, most attractive women you see on the street already have a boyfriend. Not a meme boyfriend, an actual dude. Now it is true that if you're Timothee Chalamet you can probably turn half of those women into cheating hoes, but why would you want to given that you're going for a serious relationship? In the end it's just very awkward for both parties to go through the script again and again. "Sorry, I have a boyfriend." [forced smile] "Oh, my bad sorry"
In the past women were somewhat more likely to take cold approaches as a compliment. Disclaimer: somewhat more likely. Today the infinite choice of online dating has more than filled women's thirst to be admired, so getting approached in public mostly makes them annoyed for the same reason that most people prefer to be emailed rather than called.
There is a way for guys who aren't male models to be attractive to women: get to know them in a mutual community so their appreciation of your positive features overcomes the "ick" and "he's not a kpop boy band member" factors that they initially notice. People can also figure out who's in a relationship and who's looking without embarrassing themselves. This form of courtship, coincidentally, has been attacked by each successive sexual revolution.
I'm generalizing in several places, but I doubt that most relationships are going to happen through cold approach in a healthy society, whether that's in person or on a Jewish dating app.
In typical twitter fashion everyone's talking about a term and nobody defines it.
I'd say cold approaching, to most people, means going up to a girl you barely know and trying to get a date. Asking out a girl that you do know in person is much healthier. There's a lot less risk for both parties because you can tell if someone's at least somewhat warm to you. Doesn't mean she'll say yes, but there's a higher chance of it working out.
If that's the case, that's incredibly rare to begin with, 10-15 years ago there was very few genuine pua's. I remember being younger and joining my local city lair and it was basically a dozen guys trying to work up the courage for a few hours each weekend with a couple of guys that just did it seamlessly. Cold approach is actually really hard. I think that's overlooked.
It is a lot rarer than people's perception, to the point where "just be a man and ask the cute girl out" is more of a Hollywood boomerism trope than not.
Having said that, I've talked to a few old couples - and I mean 70s and up - who have storybook tales of the guy asking out the girl behind the jewelry counter at the department store. I've gleaned that it was more common in the past, but at the same time that world was also completely alien from the entire PUA scene because it was premised on monogamy, not teaching Indians how to bang drunk girls at the bar.
Come to think of it, the bar is probably the last holdout where cold approaches were/are normal. There's a decent number of people who have dated from random chatups at the bar, although I would not call that a healthy culture by any means either.
The missing part of this puzzle is in the past towns were smaller and more insular, meaning that random girl behind the counter probably has X degrees of connection to you anyway, even if you've never directly interacted.
Like, in my tiny hometown today if I talked to a girl with intent, she would absolutely know someone who knows me in some way to preselect from that. And I would likely know something about her family in general. There was a pre-built foundation for us to interact on that the cold approach wasn't nearly as frosty as it is today.
Same with the eligible pool back then being far smaller because of the (again) more small, insulated communities people lived in. Its a lot easier to be fine with talking to a random guy/girl if they are one of the 8-20 in your age range to begin with. You weren't competing as a guy with every single dude in the town because women were still shamed for picking something wildly inappropriate (like a much older man).
That, yes, but even city culture was also healthier. One common denominator in all these stories is that both men and women were more resilient, but also more amicable. Girls would be more open to trying out guys on a first date, would be more polite about rejecting them, and guys weren't too concerned about rejection and were less hung up on oneitis.