* Women are annoyed by compliments from men because they get a ton of them (and mostly they do end up being attempts to manipulate), and men are overjoyed by compliments from women because they get very few of them. (This does leave open, why do men compliment women so much more than the other way around?)
* In general, gender norms are mostly enforced within-gender—it’s mostly men telling their sons to “man up” and men telling other men what’s effeminate, and mostly women telling their daughters to “act like a lady” and policing fashion faux pas
* Several points here may be at least as well explained if you drop the genderedness—losing friends due to a primary relationship is bad regardless of the genders involved, being well-liked and high-status is attractive regardless of your gender and the genders of the people liking you,
* The bonobos apparently use sex to strengthen bonds, but your argument is about strengthening bonds through non-sex with your non-sexually-compatible friends, so idk how those are related
* The “postmodern feminist push for equality of the sexes” has been damaging to the status quo, but I don’t think that should necessarily be thought of as “damaging to the social fabric”—like, yeah it was in the short term but maybe that was necessary to get out of a local maximum
* If the kitchen staff were one sex, the serving staff were another, and this were explicit, we should expect this to result in many kitchen-gender folks who would strongly prefer to be serving staff and vice versa, because there is almost always more variance within the sexes than between them
Also, just as a data point, some parts of the OP that were presented as obvious but don’t resonate with my experience at all (I am AFAB and identify as non-binary but am generally perceived as a woman)
* “it’s still kind of suss and not a good sign if nearly all of someone’s friends are of the opposite sex”—I’ve never had many female friends and men seem to find me attractive anyway (less so since I cut my hair short, though) * “in order to be respectful it is absolutely necessary that I address the attraction question”—I’m not even capable of determining whether I’m attracted to someone I don’t know well yet (but I think this is atypical for any gender, which is why it’s called demisexual) * I do not experience an obvious difference/shift when imagining a bakery staffed by one gender vs co-ed
Sorry if this comes across as super nit-picky! To counterbalance, here are some points I (genuinely!) liked and agreed with:
* “modern dating sucks because people are directly looking for mates”, general support for community-building—people are way more isolated in contemporary Western cities than in pretty much any other time and place, and this seems pretty bad, we’re highly social animals
* “the ideal form of physical training for a guy to attract a woman might be things like mobility training plus some kind of skill practice like dance or woodworking”—yeah actually I’m pretty sure guys that go that route get hella p*ssy. Also yeah I think the deal is less that women want someone to protect them and more that they want someone to do just general physical tasks—needing to be protected almost never comes up in day-to-day life but needing to move a heavy object or do grimy repair work comes up all the time
* the idea that people should respect the general social fabric more than their ability to get laid
Also yeah I think the deal is less that women want someone to protect them and more that they want someone to do just general physical tasks—needing to be protected almost never comes up in day-to-day life but needing to move a heavy object or do grimy repair work comes up all the time
Speculation: This is interesting. Suppose in a tribe it’s the strongest men most likely to be called on to defend others in the rare times it’s needed. In that view , the buff gym bro’s existence could be valuable primarily to less-buff men: he’s making himself less (or at least no more) attractive to women, while (being perceived as) reducing physical risk to other men in his tribe from outside threats. In contrast, it wouldn’t exactly be helpful for a woman to tie herself to the man in her tribe most likely to die violently.
The frequency explanation doesn’t really work, because men do sometimes get excess compliments and it doesn’t actually become annoying; it’s just background. Also, when women give men the kind of compliments that men tend to give women, it can be quite unwanted even when infrequent.
The common thing, which you both gesture at, is whether it’s genuinely a compliment or simply a bid for sexual attention, borne out of neediness. The validation given by a compliment is of questionable legitimacy when paired with some sort of tug for reciprocation, and it’s simply much easier to have this kind of social interaction when sexual desire is off the table the way it is between same sex groups of presumably straight individuals.
For example, say you’re a man who has gotten into working out and you’re visiting your friend whom you haven’t seen in a while. If your friend goes wide eyed, saying “Wow, you look good. Have you been working out?” and starts feeling your muscles, that’s a compliment because it’s not too hard for your friend to pull off “no homo”. He’s not trying to get in your pants. If that friend’s new girlfriend were to do the exact same thing, she’d have to pull off “no hetero” for it to not get awkward, and while that’s doable it’s definitely significantly harder. If she’s been wanting an open relationship and he hasn’t, it gets that much harder to take it as “just a compliment” and this doesn’t have to be a recurring issue in order for it to be quite uncomfortable to receive that compliment. As a result, unless their relationship is unusually secure she’s less likely to compliment you than he is—and when she does she’s going to be a lot more restrained than he can be.
The question, to me, is to what extent people are trying to “be sexy for their homies” because society has a semi-intentional way of doing division of labor to allow formation of social hierarchies without having to go directly through the mess of sexual desires, and to what extent people are simply using their homies as a proxy for what the opposite sex is into and getting things wrong because they’re projecting a bit. The latter seems sufficient and a priori expected, but maybe it leads into the former.
The bonobos apparently use sex to strengthen bonds, but your argument is about strengthening bonds through non-sex with your non-sexually-compatible friends, so idk how those are related
Ah yeah, oops, I noticed that possible confusion and forgot to say something about it.
The fact that the bonobos use sex to reassure each other is purely incidental to why it came to mind for me. The structure of interest was more “Our tribe just encountered a potentially rare resource, so let’s focus on reaffirming our tribal bonds before we even orient to the resource.”
Like for men, they could focus on just maximizing appeal to women… but that’d heat up competition between them. So maybe instead there’s a draw to affirming male bonds. Being useful to other men. Working on being a more functional member of the male cluster.
Likewise for women. The main factor in picking a mate isn’t getting a guy to want to have sex with her. It’s in making sure she’s well-supported while having children. If there’s competition between the women for attracting a specific man, that can create rancor in their ranks, and that can weaken all their children’s support. So there’s maybe a natural draw to focus on bonding with other women first precisely because they’re the competition. Slightly different dynamic as with the men, but roughly the same overall effect.
Alternate hypotheses:
* Women are annoyed by compliments from men because they get a ton of them (and mostly they do end up being attempts to manipulate), and men are overjoyed by compliments from women because they get very few of them. (This does leave open, why do men compliment women so much more than the other way around?)
* In general, gender norms are mostly enforced within-gender—it’s mostly men telling their sons to “man up” and men telling other men what’s effeminate, and mostly women telling their daughters to “act like a lady” and policing fashion faux pas
* Several points here may be at least as well explained if you drop the genderedness—losing friends due to a primary relationship is bad regardless of the genders involved, being well-liked and high-status is attractive regardless of your gender and the genders of the people liking you,
* The bonobos apparently use sex to strengthen bonds, but your argument is about strengthening bonds through non-sex with your non-sexually-compatible friends, so idk how those are related
* The “postmodern feminist push for equality of the sexes” has been damaging to the status quo, but I don’t think that should necessarily be thought of as “damaging to the social fabric”—like, yeah it was in the short term but maybe that was necessary to get out of a local maximum
* If the kitchen staff were one sex, the serving staff were another, and this were explicit, we should expect this to result in many kitchen-gender folks who would strongly prefer to be serving staff and vice versa, because there is almost always more variance within the sexes than between them
Also, just as a data point, some parts of the OP that were presented as obvious but don’t resonate with my experience at all (I am AFAB and identify as non-binary but am generally perceived as a woman)
* “it’s still kind of suss and not a good sign if nearly all of someone’s friends are of the opposite sex”—I’ve never had many female friends and men seem to find me attractive anyway (less so since I cut my hair short, though)
* “in order to be respectful it is absolutely necessary that I address the attraction question”—I’m not even capable of determining whether I’m attracted to someone I don’t know well yet (but I think this is atypical for any gender, which is why it’s called demisexual)
* I do not experience an obvious difference/shift when imagining a bakery staffed by one gender vs co-ed
Sorry if this comes across as super nit-picky! To counterbalance, here are some points I (genuinely!) liked and agreed with:
* “modern dating sucks because people are directly looking for mates”, general support for community-building—people are way more isolated in contemporary Western cities than in pretty much any other time and place, and this seems pretty bad, we’re highly social animals
* “the ideal form of physical training for a guy to attract a woman might be things like mobility training plus some kind of skill practice like dance or woodworking”—yeah actually I’m pretty sure guys that go that route get hella p*ssy. Also yeah I think the deal is less that women want someone to protect them and more that they want someone to do just general physical tasks—needing to be protected almost never comes up in day-to-day life but needing to move a heavy object or do grimy repair work comes up all the time
* the idea that people should respect the general social fabric more than their ability to get laid
Speculation: This is interesting. Suppose in a tribe it’s the strongest men most likely to be called on to defend others in the rare times it’s needed. In that view , the buff gym bro’s existence could be valuable primarily to less-buff men: he’s making himself less (or at least no more) attractive to women, while (being perceived as) reducing physical risk to other men in his tribe from outside threats. In contrast, it wouldn’t exactly be helpful for a woman to tie herself to the man in her tribe most likely to die violently.
The frequency explanation doesn’t really work, because men do sometimes get excess compliments and it doesn’t actually become annoying; it’s just background. Also, when women give men the kind of compliments that men tend to give women, it can be quite unwanted even when infrequent.
The common thing, which you both gesture at, is whether it’s genuinely a compliment or simply a bid for sexual attention, borne out of neediness. The validation given by a compliment is of questionable legitimacy when paired with some sort of tug for reciprocation, and it’s simply much easier to have this kind of social interaction when sexual desire is off the table the way it is between same sex groups of presumably straight individuals.
For example, say you’re a man who has gotten into working out and you’re visiting your friend whom you haven’t seen in a while. If your friend goes wide eyed, saying “Wow, you look good. Have you been working out?” and starts feeling your muscles, that’s a compliment because it’s not too hard for your friend to pull off “no homo”. He’s not trying to get in your pants. If that friend’s new girlfriend were to do the exact same thing, she’d have to pull off “no hetero” for it to not get awkward, and while that’s doable it’s definitely significantly harder. If she’s been wanting an open relationship and he hasn’t, it gets that much harder to take it as “just a compliment” and this doesn’t have to be a recurring issue in order for it to be quite uncomfortable to receive that compliment. As a result, unless their relationship is unusually secure she’s less likely to compliment you than he is—and when she does she’s going to be a lot more restrained than he can be.
The question, to me, is to what extent people are trying to “be sexy for their homies” because society has a semi-intentional way of doing division of labor to allow formation of social hierarchies without having to go directly through the mess of sexual desires, and to what extent people are simply using their homies as a proxy for what the opposite sex is into and getting things wrong because they’re projecting a bit. The latter seems sufficient and a priori expected, but maybe it leads into the former.
Ah yeah, oops, I noticed that possible confusion and forgot to say something about it.
The fact that the bonobos use sex to reassure each other is purely incidental to why it came to mind for me. The structure of interest was more “Our tribe just encountered a potentially rare resource, so let’s focus on reaffirming our tribal bonds before we even orient to the resource.”
Like for men, they could focus on just maximizing appeal to women… but that’d heat up competition between them. So maybe instead there’s a draw to affirming male bonds. Being useful to other men. Working on being a more functional member of the male cluster.
Likewise for women. The main factor in picking a mate isn’t getting a guy to want to have sex with her. It’s in making sure she’s well-supported while having children. If there’s competition between the women for attracting a specific man, that can create rancor in their ranks, and that can weaken all their children’s support. So there’s maybe a natural draw to focus on bonding with other women first precisely because they’re the competition. Slightly different dynamic as with the men, but roughly the same overall effect.
Ideally you’d try to have a separate bakery with reversed gender-roles.