SarahC:

It does seem that men have more of a problem with amorous disappointment than women do.

I disagree. I've been in situations where girls were determined to seduce me, and I kept rejecting their increasingly overt and desperate advances. They'd typically end up getting visibly annoyed, and there were also some ugly scenes of frustrated anger on their part. Similar things also happened sometimes when I would (mostly unintentionally) give a false hope to girls who were below my standards, though admittedly with much less overt drama compared to the former sort of situations.

Of course, such situations are less common than the inverse, and even more importantly, since women are typically physically weaker, men won't feel intimidated and threatened by their flipping out. These were just amusing youthful adventures for me, but I can easily imagine inverse scenarios being awfully scary for women. However, the idea that women somehow handle it more calmly and rationally when they're faced with the terrible feeling of being put down by a disappointing rejection is completely false.

That said, there are some significant differences in practice. Men are expected to take a more proactive role in approaching and initiating things, so by sheer necessity, they more often end up plunging into defeats based on unjustified expectations. Moreover, men and women tend to react very differently towards various kinds of signals of aloofness and disinterestedness in the early phases of meeting and dating. However, discussing these issues fully would mean getting too deep into technicalities -- the important point is that it's unjustified to present men as somehow worse overall in this regard.