"Honey, there is this random blogger who thinks I should befriend a girl in my company. It's supposedly not creepy or anything. What do you think?"
If I didn't care what my wife thinks, I'd still have to think twice and consider the gender-political climate of the modern age.
The mere perception of having some intention of wrongdoing can harm you.
In all corporate ethics training courses, you're always hammered with the message of avoiding even the perception of a conflict of interests and such.
Usually, those "avoid perception" messages are with regard to corruption. The rhetoric isn't used in sexual misconduct training, but the concept naturally carries over. If I'm to avoid creating so much as the perception that some official is being bribed into signing a deal, of course it must also be good to avoid so much as the perception that I have some sort of designs of a female coworker. I want simpler rules that are more general.