We have a tendency to escalate—if wearing a halter top could mean “it’s hot out”, some people will take it to mean “I want strangers to hit on me.” If you wear a bracelet whose official meaning is “I want strangers to hit on me,” some people will assume the wearer wants a step farther than that.
When Emma Goldman published essays in favor of “free love” (sex outside marriage) in 1910, she began to have trouble with men banging on her hotel door in the middle of the night, thinking that this meant she was sexually available to anyone at any time.
So my guess is that people wearing such bracelets would get more wanted attention but also more unwanted attention.
I would also expect some women complaining that men don’t distinguish between women who wear red bracelets because they are open to being hit on, and women who just want to wear red bracelets without getting that kind of attention. And then we would have campaigns telling men that it’s creepy to treat women with red bracelets differently.
More generally—sometimes signals are confusing because some people want them to be confusing. They want to eat their cake and have a plausible deniability about eating their cake, too. These people could be in a minority, but they will ruin the signals for the rest of the population.
We have a tendency to escalate—if wearing a halter top could mean “it’s hot out”, some people will take it to mean “I want strangers to hit on me.” If you wear a bracelet whose official meaning is “I want strangers to hit on me,” some people will assume the wearer wants a step farther than that.
When Emma Goldman published essays in favor of “free love” (sex outside marriage) in 1910, she began to have trouble with men banging on her hotel door in the middle of the night, thinking that this meant she was sexually available to anyone at any time.
So my guess is that people wearing such bracelets would get more wanted attention but also more unwanted attention.
I would also expect some women complaining that men don’t distinguish between women who wear red bracelets because they are open to being hit on, and women who just want to wear red bracelets without getting that kind of attention. And then we would have campaigns telling men that it’s creepy to treat women with red bracelets differently.
More generally—sometimes signals are confusing because some people want them to be confusing. They want to eat their cake and have a plausible deniability about eating their cake, too. These people could be in a minority, but they will ruin the signals for the rest of the population.
EDIT: Oops, this was already said here.