Women signal interest or a lack thereof in a thousand ways. Picking up on that is a basic social skill and like all skills some persons are more capable than others.
Women have different personalities and indicate their attraction or lack of attraction in very different ways. Flirting for some women is the exact same behavior presented to everyone for other women.
If you want to know if a woman is attracted to you, ask her out and see what she says
how does one ask a woman out if the default is supposed to be "don't hit on me right now ever"?
Sometimes she'll say no to test to see if you're serious or not and probably to test your social acumen too. Picking up whether it's a "no, I'm not interested" or a "no, but I want to see more" is exactly the kind of social cue reading I'm talking about.
And yeah learning that can be rough for people who aren't naturals and especially rough for spectrumy folks. Some of whom will probably even say there is no such thing at all because they can't see it. But them's the breaks. The reality of the sexual marketplace is what it is.
Taking no for no, and moving on with a smile to other women can show confidence, and maybe she will reconsider and take steps to get back into your social life.
In general, asking over and over again hoping for a different answer can signal desperation.
So it turns out in this situation, the spectrumy response of just taking a response at face value, can also be the best strategy for the "sexual marketplace".
That is in addition to it just being the right and decent thing to do, of course.
you're asking socially awkward + nervous + scared guys to 1. go out of their comfort zone and smoothly create inorganically an opportunity to strike up a conversation with someone, and 2. sprinkle in something that is considered flirtatious but not too strong that it falls under the category of "hitting on"
Now why these social cues are so often subtle or ambiguous is itself an interesting question. It's not one I have any good answers to though. In this area, as in most, I'm a phenomenologist and not a theorist. Needless to say the phenomenology I've developed precludes telling a woman I'm interested in about the phenomenology I've developed. Except of course when I think she might find it attractive. Human social interactions are marvelously complex. Frankly my inclination to start navel gazing has set me back once or twice.
BTW, I’m not talking about PUA stuff here. Rather, I would think of it as practising the art of conversation, and cultivating a curiousness about other people.
A skill that you need to practice with dedication and that "takes time" to learn still doesn't sound basic.
As someone that has participated in lots of flirting, conversation, and curiousness about other people, I can say confidently that being curious and being good at conversation are not sufficient to navigate flirtatious behavior successfully, unless you're using "art of conversation" as a huge umbrella term which includes charisma / etc. If you are doing that, then I'll note that probably the majority of people on Earth have not mastered the art of conversation (or even cultivated it much) by such a broad definition.