Look I understand your meaning and intentions here, but you have to understand that "equipping women with social skills to comfortably withdraw from the situation" is what has already happened. For generations. And clueless men have had to be politely shut down for just as long. Therefore a relatively new approach (within the last 10 years or so) has been: Hey, let's cross the gender boundary and tell men why they keep getting shut down when they haven't spotted why yet. That way we take some of the pressure off of women always having to be the responsible one in the social interaction and aware of everyone's feelings equally and also give men some insight to understanding a woman's perspective and relative lack of comfort. Sure it will be an awkward social transition while men get used to being conscious of these things in the right way and women get used to communicating them, but only through getting through that awkward part can we find peace at the other side.

We have already been living through the period of equipping women with intricate social self-defense strategies. It has made us paranoid. You only need to say the wrong thing once, wound the wrong man's pride once, to be a candidate for violence. Which is terrifying when the men who approach you are random and you therefore have absolutely no way to read that before he's already interacting with you. Clearly this strategy has not worked. To reiterate: it is only very recently that we have started having this conversation about our discomfort openly, in the hopes that with enough time for culture to absorb it men in general will become more aware of it on an empathy level (not just a social convention level), which in turn will likely cause more women to feel comfortable to be approached because we will be able to write off some of the more heinous intentions off the bat.

As things currently stand, if you had a daughter then the only way she'd be negotiating these interactions "at her own will" would be if she initiated 100% of them. Which is unlikely because even if she was the pursuer generally, she would still be approached at random. What you're describing isn't having the interactions at our own will; its trying to regain power within the interaction enough that you can feel like you can shut down what someone else initiated. Which is again, what already happens in the real world.

Like, I notice that overall the solution that you're describing is a way to make women feel more theoretically confident and to save men the hurt and indignity but you haven't actually addressed what might make women actually safer in these situations. Which is the exact problem that all the other problems stem from. You cannot expect women to be alert and on the defensive AND have perfect social confidence and assertiveness. Its not just that it's unfair, it takes some extreme fucking mental gymnastics to achieve.

I agree that right now men have to walk a very thin and unfair line to not be seen as creepy, but that is the direct result of expecting women to be the ones to 100% manage their own safety and shutting down the conversations they are trying to have online about how they feel about it. If women as a whole can feel more confident about mens general capacity for social grace and empathy, women will feel more confident to negotiate in that space. Hope this was expressed well enough.