Nervousness about expressing romantic interest is of course quite common, especially for nerdy/low-status people. But Scott seems to have had highly exaggerated fears (arrest, expelled from school, etc.) His reaction was so extreme that he even sought chemical castration. That was an extreme, abnormal response.

I agree that it's out on the tail of the distribution, but I don't think it's a very wide distribution. Fear of those specific consequences is rare; general fear and anxiety severe enough to seriously impact quality of life, up to and including risk of suicide, is not nearly as rare. Social anxiety is, after all, a relatively common problem. I mean, here we are in a subthread on another website with a pretty small user base, and you have three "me too" responses within 12 hours.

The kind of feminist ideas Scott talks about are really important in the general case. But they are also predictably harmful to people predisposed to a certain kind of anxiety. To steal an analogy I've seen elsewhere: telling a hypochondriac that they should pay more attention to their health is probably harmful, even though that's a good message for the general population. A little more nuance can help - like emphasizing the target ("interact with women as full human beings", "maintain your health"), not just the direction required to reach the target ("worry more about making women uncomfortable", "worry more about possible symptoms"). Because some people have overshot the target, and need to come back the other direction.

This isn't to say "nerdy men should get a free pass on being creeps" or something dumb like that. But it would be great to have more activists/therapists/bloggers/etc that aren't actively, viciously anti-helpful about it.