Hmm, while it’s true that many women can still attract a mate/have plenty of sex if they don’t put effort into their looks, it definitely seems to me (anecdotally, through both my own lived experience and what others talk about) that women get more male attention when they do put in effort
Oxytocin
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Maybe true, but I think it’s even more likely that the world would be better if everyone were asexual, or at least did not have such a high sex drive that it causes them to do things they don’t endorse
> dating is an inherently risky business, especially for men
I don’t want to start an oppression olympics, but it feels important to note that the risk to women of men getting violent or stalkerish at some point in the dating process is much higher than the risk to men of another man attacking them for being interested in the same woman. (and I think this has always been true, including in the ancestral environment)
at best, separating the sexes into distinct classes would result in a situation that sucks for any kitchen-gender people that would rather be serving staff, and vice-versa. And we should expect there to be a lot of such people, because in general the variance within the sexes is greater than the variance between the sexes.
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
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
FYI I have had a very similar experience to what you’re describing. You’re not alone. I too found that being kind to notme instead of shouting at them is helpful. And, I’ve found one of the things that helps most is feeling really seen/heard by others, so hopefully this helps!
I’ve seen and considered this advice before, but when I am doing perhaps too much apologizing, the reason is usually that I actually am trying to get signal on whether/how much I’ve upset the other person.
Even if they only say “it’s okay” out of obligation, I can usually tell from tone and word choice and so on whether that’s what’s going on. There’s a big difference between a terse “it’s fine” and a warm “what? No, it’s totally fine, you have nothing to apologize for”. It’s not perfect, of course, since people are sometimes intentionally deceptive here, but it’s at least a decent chance of decent signal.
Thanking the person does not generally achieve this. In a sufficiently close relationship with sufficiently direct communication norms, I can sometimes just ask directly, but it would still be pretty weird to ask for every minor thing.