so I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
And that is perhaps a key point. Were I to read “men will still be alluring” I would get a sense that the author is a woman. I’d be briefly distracted by some cognitive dissonance and cringe slightly at some imagery that doesn’t mesh well with my own desires. But I wouldn’t get a sense that I was being exculded from an intended female audience.
I’ve both read and observed that women tend to be more interested in meta-communication and in particular to implications of ‘belonging’. Perhaps because when women use exclusion to bitch at each other while the male equivalent is one-upmanship. In any case, communicating across that cultural divide creates enough confusion that we can expect self help authors to remain employed more or less indefinitely.
There’s also a much greater history of women being excluded from male groups than the other way around, so it’s unfortunately not unreasonable for women to subconsciously draw stronger conclusions from such phrasing.
And that is perhaps a key point. Were I to read “men will still be alluring” I would get a sense that the author is a woman. I’d be briefly distracted by some cognitive dissonance and cringe slightly at some imagery that doesn’t mesh well with my own desires. But I wouldn’t get a sense that I was being exculded from an intended female audience.
I’ve both read and observed that women tend to be more interested in meta-communication and in particular to implications of ‘belonging’. Perhaps because when women use exclusion to bitch at each other while the male equivalent is one-upmanship. In any case, communicating across that cultural divide creates enough confusion that we can expect self help authors to remain employed more or less indefinitely.
There’s also a much greater history of women being excluded from male groups than the other way around, so it’s unfortunately not unreasonable for women to subconsciously draw stronger conclusions from such phrasing.