Good point. That's why expected value is important. The problem is that with typical straight women, bland approaches and pursuit often doesn't work very well.

As a result, the practice of men making non-bland approaches may be good for women on average in the big picture. How can that be?

Let's assume that typical women require a behavior of type X to be attracted to a guy (or X, if not completely required, is very effective relative to other behaviors in attracting women). Yet women are creeped out when they are approached by men who display behavior X if those men also exhibit unattractive quality Y, or lack overall attractiveness from non-X sources.

If so, we might have a very strange looking situation where most of the time, a man displaying X towards a woman will creep her out, yet simultaneously, a surprisingly high percentage of women are actually dating guys with behavior X!

For someone to find a relationship, they need a reasonable pool of potential partners to select from. If the practice of men approaching and pursuing women in non-bland ways helps women get this pool of potential boyfriends, then that could be a good thing for women, even if results in creeping women out a lot of the time.

What are the ethics of guys displaying behavior X when P( creepy | guy displays X ) = 90% but also P( guy displays X | guy is a boyfriend ) = 90%? I think it can be ethical, but it depends. If there is a similar behavior Z such that P( creepy | guy displays Z ) = 70% but also P( guy displays Z | guy is a boyfriend ) = 90%, then I think X becomes unethical because there is now a viable less-creepy alternative.

And this is only talking women's interests, not men's. There is an optimal level of creepiness-risk in male approaches that gives women the pool of potential suitors they need to find boyfriends. Yet depending on how the numbers work out, that level of creepiness risk might be enough that women, especially of increasing attractiveness, are going to get creeped out a lot of the time by men employing high-risk, high-reward strategies to get them above the bland, just-another-guy threshold.

Disclaimer 1: There are many, many ways of approaching women that are both potentially creepy and which don't even have a chance of working, such as catcalls. The expected value of these approaches is negative, and as a result they should be expunged from the male behavioral repertoire. Males exhibiting these behaviors need to be shown viable alternatives. While their behavior is oppressive to women, in a way they are also victims of oppression because their culture or subculture has inflicted maladaptive mating behaviors on them.

Disclaimer 2: Some women don't want roguish boyfriends who sweep them off their feet, yet must endure such approaches from men who are simply doing the kind of thing that works with the majority of women. I feel sorry for these women, but I think their main beef is with other women and the incentives they provide men: women with atypical preferences in men are victims of a tyranny of the majority in the female election of male behavior.

It is reasonable for men to approach women in ways that (they have good reason to believe) will have positive expected value with the majority of women (as long as they are willing to back off or tone things down if they are making a woman uncomfortable). A possible solution for atypical women is to find some way of signaling their preferences in men prior to being approached, by style of dress or subcultural affiliation, and I think plenty of women already do this, e.g. dressing like a hipster) girl signals that she wants to be approached by hipster guys who adhere to hipster norms of behavior.

For most people, male or female, it is probably better to receive too much sexual attention than too little (assuming that we are talking just about attention, not about sexual violence). If you do not receive sexual attention, you do not have sex, and you do not have relationships. For people who want these things (the vast majority of people), going without tends to hurt their mental health and warp their self-image.

Also, many people do buy from telemarketers, and many people would never want unsolicited sexual attention. I'm not convinced you're talking about the ordinary cases here.

I don't think that's the problem. If advancing induces hatred in the woman, she was not likely to want you if you approached her in a different way (though if someone's on the fence, having some finess can help). I think the decision of whether or not a woman wants the advance at all is made relatively quickly. The real problem is to find a unified theory of how women want men to be, a much harder sell for men in the self-help section.

Salespeople are wanted if you have explicitly gone into a store expecting to buy a certain kind of product. Then they are helpful sources of localised information. You want what they have and went looking for it.

Salepeople are not wanted if they are intruding and trying to push a product on you when you were not looking for it. If the methods or product are particularly offensive - that just adds insult to an already unwanted situation.