Making fun of society, is fun. Gender dynamics in dating are timeless and always interesting.
Here's an ironic take on the world's oldest profession, and how it manifests symmetrically between the two majority genders.
In general, people regard prostitution as the sale of women's embodied services to men, in exchange for money. Some will assert that this demeaning or dehumanising, but I don't really want to get into that because that would require us to discuss what it means to be human, and we might disagree on that - or on what rights are accorded to humans, after we define what a human is. Anyway ...
So the common take is, men want women's bodies, and in the absence of freely available bodies, men will offer to pay money for womens' bodies. And it would seem, that women's bodies are often sold, either by themselves, or by people who take advantage of women ... to tap into the excess supply of men's money, which is available for barter against womens' bodies.
All of this of course, lies upon the structural economics of scarcity around the quantity of womens' bodies made consensually available to men, and the quantity of men's money made consensually available to women. However there are externalities abstracted away from this dualism, which we can reintroduce in discussion, to get a more complete picture of the economic landscape.
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Let's then focus on the scarcity of womens' bodies made consensually available to men. There is a common understanding that men pitch, and women judge. This is classically exemplified in electronic dating markets ( "apps" ) where a metric tossed around the industry is that, men who initially accept ( "swipe" ) a woman have a 0.3% chance of being symmetrically initially accepted, whereas women who initially accept a man have a 30% chance of being symmetrically accepted.
And we all know the reason for this : men are shit! The average woman's experience of men is less satisfactory than the average man's experience of women. Whereas the discussion usually revolves around what men want from women, there exists of course a symmetrical discussion about what women want from men. Therein lie the memes about what women want. Assuming the memes are accurately representative of reality, let's dive into that instead.
Women want men who don't hurt women. Hurt extends across various dimensions/categories of course :
- ruffians ( people who hurt people, regardless of intent )
- bullies ( people who hurt people, with intent )
- liars ( people who promise A, and deliver not-A )
- swindlers ( people who talk about A, and deliver not-A, whereas there was no promise of A )
- leeches ( people who consume more tangible resources from a commons, than they contribute to a commons )
- thieves ( people who consume tangible resources without consent from those whom those resources belong to )
- bums ( people who are aesthetically unkempt )
- ( other? )
Yet other labels, criminal or otherwise, can be associated with one or more of the labels above. Rapists are, for example, either ruffians or bullies, who are also both leeches and thieves. Rude people are generally either ruffians or bullies. ( I myself am most certainly a ruffian of some sort - it's just part of the brand. )
But these seem like generally horrible things, right? Why do we talk about it as if these are things women want to avoid from men ... don't men want to avoid women who are like this? There are two curves to consider, once again ... supply and demand. Firstly, there's the highly supported hypothesis that for cultural/biological reasons, men are definitely more prone to the behaviours above, than women are prone to the behaviours above - this leads us to a sexist, albeit potentially justifiable consideration, if we can find enough peer-reviewed empirical evidence to support it. ( But we're not here to do do peer-review, so let me get on with the essay. ) Secondly, could it possibly be the case ... that given the same amount of misbehaviour by a counterparty, men are simply more tolerant of these categories of misbehaviour?
The quick and dirty answer is that both hypotheses may be evidenced, both may be true, and both are non-contradictory - two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It's entirely brainable that men are more structurally prone to such misbehaviour because men are more tolerant of such misbehaviour - this may be embellished by a distinct feminist hypothesis : that men are predisposed to be more tolerant of misbehaviour from other men, than men are predisposed to be tolerant of misbehaviour from women ...while women are predisposed to be more tolerant of misbehaviour from anyone regardless of their gender. This final hypothesis captures to some degree, why it is said that there exists systematic violence by men against women.
Women also want men who make them feel valued / loved / cherished / spoilt / babied / respected / worthy of long-term commitment / worthy of short-term expenditure / socially engaged / in-grouped / paired / etc. Maybe, more on that, another time.
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Anyway, this started out as an ironic take on prostitution, but it got kinda serious. Let's quickly circle back to the main point. The scarcity of consensually available womens' bodies to men is due to the fact that men are simply not predisposed to be nice to women. This has certain implications, of course. It follows logically that it takes men more effort to be nice to women, then it takes women to be nice to men. And that is what brings about the sense of entitlement that naive men have, when they find that their efforts to court women are spurned.
While prostitution of women is about jacking up the monetary price of consent to dispense bodily services ... the prostitution of men is all about jacking up the price of consent to dispense niceness. Just as men are johns, when they pay money for sex ... women are janes, when they pay with sex, for niceness.
That leaves us with the familiar thought, that often people are not nice to each other because they actually like each other. Sometimes men are just offering niceness for short-term consent from women and often enough, women are happy to cough up it. Just as the world has an excess of cold, hard, male, cash available for trade with women's bodies, the world has an excess of warm, wet, female, pussy available for trade with men's tender loving care. It's just business - none of this necessitates that the counterparties want more than their desires fulfilled, and are willing to pay for it with what they have in spare - but often enough there is contract dissatisfaction. Anecdotally, we have prostitutes raging after failing to get paid after giving consent to their bodies, and we have prostitutes raging after failing to get bodies after giving away their attention.
What to do about it? All I can hazard, is the guess that contracts should be clearly stated up-front. GLGF ... If that's what you want, and if anyone wants otherwise, I hope they get it too.
