If you’re so bad at socializing that you might accidentally harass someone, fix that! Don’t just retreat from the world because you can’t handle a basic skill.
Edit: Interesting downvotes. Is it the suggestion that women are people, or the suggestion for self-improvement if you’re incapable of treating them accordingly?
Consider the same exchange with different subject matter: "A: I don't race my car because it's dangerous" "B: Dude, if you're so bad at driving how do you even get to work? Learn to drive and get onto the track! It's awesome and I had been racing with no injures so why can't you?"
Please, let us not get into bad faith argument even deeper. Nobody here is arguing against talking to people. The question is about the safe and dangerous modes of talking to people.
The original comment I replied to is basically saying that men just avoid women as an "one of the unfortunate unintended consequences of the #MeToo movement." My point is that this is not due to #MeToo, it's due to people with bad social skills who think avoiding women is better than improving them.
Yes, improving your social skills can be damned hard. But that’s irrelevant if you don’t even want to do it. First we need to convince people that self improvement is the solution, not isolation. Then we can talk about how.
Er... your theory is that "too shy/awkward to carry on a casual conversation with a woman" is something that some men prefer? That they could overcome it, but don't want to? That seems more likely to you than "they would like to overcome it, but haven't been able to"?
I’m not saying they’re happy with it, but prefer it over self improvement? You bet. People usually hate trying to change themselves.
You can want something yet fail to achieve it, that's fairly obvious, no? Compare: fat people who want to be not-fat.
Of course, the blatant counter-argument would be that those just don't want it enough; this entire train of thought seems rather damning to me.
I'm saying, if your social skills are so bad that you're risking your job by being social with women at work, you should make fixing that a top priority.
Also, in response to your first sentence, it's about relative risk.