Im a guy (ignore pfp) my friends r very afraid of being creepy and making women uncomfortable, I trained myselg against that instinct and smile at women I don't know and sometimes talk to them, I feel this undercurrent in american culture that if ur a man you have to view your own desires as shameful, which is not something tht I like . gen z
All of this seems very obvious to me. There's a certain hypocritical disconnect between what women say they want and what they actually want. Of course you can't say that. There's also a myth as you've illustrated about the 'male gaze' being abhorant. I've found it surprising the degree of compromise women will allow if the man is either particularly good looking or prosperous. I reject the idea that women judge men comprehensively. They don't. At least not at first. In this way, there's far less difference between the sexes than has been promoted today. I also don't know what's wrong with sexual steriotypes . They exist for a reason
I feel like while I agree with this statement based on the perception of my experiences, I have trouble believing the argument. Are you saying to blame the system at a time when people I don’t like use that as a justification for actions and behaviors I would literally fight back against?
The wildest thing though, I have started efforts that are risky, economically and personally that if I can make it through would make me a higher status male. And the self-awareness that I feel compelled for this and the why doesn’t prevent me from making the effort. But it wouldn’t matter cause I still feel like I cannot advertise the effort, because that would be strutting, a precursor to gazing.
In short, this article seems to validate my feelings, so I Don’t trust it, but I’ll keep reading for more evidence.
You've hit on an topic that needs greater explanation to facility broader awareness and understanding. How many women understand their own desires, the desire to be desired by a high status man which is observed by other females? How many men understand that women still want the male gaze, but only if they see you as "good enough" status, especially in a social setting with other females observing?
I'm an old man that came of age in the analog time. It was so much easier to learn these lessons when everyone was face to face. But, I realize the challenge that my son will face as he tries to navigate the current field of landmines.
When I was younger, I only liked the male gaze from males I wanted gazing at me, not those I didn't. It felt good to have that attention as an insecure, awkward young person. So many women underestimate how being noticed by males you want to notice you can be helpful to boost confidence during those horrible, lonely, insecure, angsty, awkward, teen and early adult years (without turning it into a game) only to use that confidence to affirm that you don't need a man for anything.
I remember arguing about the male gaze when I was doing my postdoc at Princeton. I told my fellow feminists in a faculty seminar that I wanted men to look at me, and that I was proud of being attractive. They were absolutely horrified (let’s just say that the men in the classroom were not). I quoted Keats about truth and beauty. I referred to Lacan and the gaze of the Other as constitutive of subjectivity. They were not convinced. In fact, they started ostracizing me, which I did not mind as I hung out with the guys. Interestingly, the only other female postdoc who remained friendly with me was a very beautiful woman. Was it as simple as the fact that she was not afraid of competition?
There's a congruence with everything beautiful in the natural world that also renders it true and intelligent. Maybe this isn't a popular view today, but I think this also applies to human beings. It's also no mistake that industrial beauty standards work to distort what is clearly there by design to disclose many things not just physical
Please continue doing what you do. What you do is important to public discourse. There are so few brave women saying this. The few who do have been viciously harassed and vilified. (just ask Cassie Jaye) that makes what you say even more important though I do realize the challenges you will have to face. You are brave and write very well too.
I would posit, Ms. Pandey, that your reluctance to abandon the subject may be owing to a dawning realization that your own, unique perspective, represents a meaningful contribution to a deeper understanding of the issue.
You may (or may not) be thinking "others have already published similar observations." That may be so, but follow your muse; you're already adding thought-provoking perspectives to the public discourse.
I hope that you delve a little more deeply into two factors; that male visual assessment isn't exclusively a copulative speculation, and that female appraisal of "totalities" is not an inevitable condemnation to veniality within the eternal transactionality of relationship.
Perhaps I'm projecting in saying this, but it appears that your direction is leaning toward a more concise understanding of the symbolism and signalling associated with gendered visual assessments of fitness for fulfillment of various social roles and functions.
In any event, your prose is excellent and quite enjoyable to read. I make that assertion, even allowing for the confirmation bias potential within your audience.
Pray continue in your most interesting series of narratives and observations regarding this topic.
Seems potentially relevant. Men aren't (as a group, on average) oversexualizing women at a glance, we're just broadly worse than women at perceiving and interpreting subtle cues across a wide range of nonverbal signals, with similar error rates in both directions (whether she's interested or she's not), and the finding that men often overestimate women's sexual interest is therefore a matter of differences in base rates (far more women are uninterested than interested).
QUOTE: The present evaluation of gender differences in perception of sexual intent replicated the long-standing finding that men are more likely than women to misperceive sexual intent in women's displays of friendliness and showed that gender differences in perceptual sensitivity accounted for this result. Men found platonic-interest cues to be less discriminable from sexual-interest cues than women did. Just as in previous research, they made some mistakes in perceiving sexual intent in friendly displays, but they also misperceived friendliness in sexual-interest displays. That is, they oversexualized some women, but were quite likely to undersexualize other women. Although the methodology varied from that used in early research (we employed an identification paradigm and a series of photographs), the effect sizes (d = 0.38–0.40) were consistent in magnitude with the average effect sizes reported in previous investigations (Farris et al., 2008). Employing a model-based approach capable of parsing decisional bias from perceptual insensitivity, we found no evidence that men's performance differed from women's because of a gender difference in decisional thresholds for positive-affect targets. Relative to women, men did not oversexualize the image set, and their decisional criteria for detecting sexual intent were no more or less lenient than women's. For this image set, the underlying etiology differentiating men's performance from women's performance was perceptual sensitivity. END QUOTE
It was also kind of interesting that women lowered their threshold for assuming sexual interest was intended when the women pictured were dressed more provocatively and the decisional threshold was raised when the pictured women were dressed more conservatively. Given how often feminists insist that the way a woman dresses cannot be taken as an indicator of wanting male sexual attention, it's a point against that claim that they themselves treated clothing as a relevant signal for assessing whether other women were expressing sexual interest or not.
This is intriguing, and I wasn't familiar with this research. This also explains why interest I've registered in men when I was younger may not have been returned despite their overall behavior. That last paragraph though proves the point well.
It’s a complete Shit Show out there. Almost to the point where I might just stick to hookers and tiddy bars and give up actually trying to have a real relationship with a woman.
That is the smartest move for men these days and least risky. Hookers are now the safest sex a man can have. Approaching a woman can be life destroying and is not worth the risk.
I have heard many men IRL say the same. And you know what...when I say some of this stuff exclusively in male company, invariably there's a sigh of relief.
“The [fill in the blank] acted on me because I allowed it” thing is the entire missing piece for understanding the decline in human relationships. People have grown entitled to not having their feelings hurt. Attention from a low status person feels bad because it conveys that they believe you are at their level. And as women have advanced in socioeconomic status, they bristle more when getting unwanted attention. Women that get all dolled up with ‘come and get me’ makeup and clothing are really just trolling for the highest status man they can attract. But they will attract the gaze of other men too. But many women cannot compartmentalize their feelings getting approached by a man they feel is below their station. Their unregulated emotional reaction, frankly, is to be a bitch.
Apparently I was a considered a catch… relatively high status. I was married at 22 and focused on my career and family, so I was never really in the market. I played guitar in a cover band while working swing shift for several months as a director of computer operations for a bank. I had a 2-3 hour break while programs would run on the mainframe, and would head to local area venues that hosted live music so I could check out other bands. I would get a meal at the bar. Over time I got to know some regulars. I noted the girls all dolled up, and a lot of lonely single guys clearly not high on “the catch” hierarchy. Over time I grew a bit miffed over how rude these girls were to the boys. Instead of kindly rejecting the ask to dance or talk, they would say things like “not if you were the last guy on earth”. When those girls approached me, I did the same to them and maybe add ‘bitch’ to it. The look on their face… confusion and then rage because they probably had never been treated that way in the places they trolled, was my reward.
And THAT is the missing piece here. Females disliking male attention really never get to experience what rude rejection feels like. Because most men are chivalrous, and constantly horny, they walk on eggshells. I have a view of 100% gender equality, and wish more men would stop walking on eggshells and would treat rude females equally as rude males.
I kinda love that trolling because it is equivalent treatment. "Women that get all dolled up with ‘come and get me’ makeup and clothing are really just trolling for the highest status man they can attract. But they will attract the gaze of other men too. But many women cannot compartmentalize their feelings getting approached by a man they feel is below their station. Their unregulated emotional reaction, frankly, is to be a bitch." Yeah, I have had to learn how to reject men without being an asshole, but I definitely did this same thing when I was younger. Even more often, women would mock ME if low status men gave me attention, even if I wasn't attracted to them. These were ostensible friends.
I like how you point out that the concept of "male gaze" is usually reckoned with in the abstract, something that exists everywhere all at once in the world, not something that an individual man does to an individual woman at a point in time.
Someone pointed out that men have two options: go to work or go to jail. Women have more options, both in terms of society's approval and as a practical matter, and they have even more if they have someone to support them. Want to pursue that high-status, low-pay job? Door opened. Want to be a SAHM? Door opened. Want to be a (semi-)pro activist? Door opened. Want to have a social life like on TV? Door opened.
The cope some use is that we're living in "late stage capitalism", and if we had some kind of socialism these social arrangements could be deprecated if not done away with altogether because "everyone" would have "all" the resources they need, but in the meantime this is how we "have" to live. That's nonsense, of course. TANSTAAFL.
Not trying to be all blackpill here, but it is what it is. The risk--for both people--is that things can become very conditional if not merely, ahem, transactional at that point.
What they say about feminism, they say about socialism, which is that "if only we tried real feminism/socialism". And over time I have come to see that women's collective orientation born of evolutionary pressures has lent itself well to collectivist ideologies; no authoritarian regime can survive without female support. What you say about women having infinite choices is absolutely unrecognized, because in our supposedly advanced society women want the choice to stay home, so partriarchal benefit, while also having their fully working spouse do half the housework (I had a friend in a situation like this who was divorced by his wife in the end). One of the problems is the expansion of the definition of 'emotional labor' out of which came this idea that women do 'unpaid labor' at home. As though domestic work making the home is the same as paid labor. It actually just devalues the domestic sphere to talk about it in such capitalistic terms.
"The gaze describes the professional class female fantasy of male attention, by which they are simultaneously disgusted and which they crave." This self-loathing reminds me of Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, The True Believer, where he describes a "despised self". This self he describes as craving a "freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product." A blame where any precieved expectation is a threat which may uncover the blemishes. So then offense becomes a defense.
"A woman doesn’t just consider the man’s physicality but trains her gaze on his entire life." This superficial assumption is no more accurate than the male's gaze for a sexual mate. There is no way someone can know a man's life based on his professional appearance any more than a man can determine a women's fitness as a mother and mate based on her curvaceous fitness. They are both crude stereotypic preludes to deeper knowing that dating should provide. What these oversimplified perspectives sacrifice is the profound benefits of a male/female team. How much is lost when we foolishly try to place one sex as morally superior to another in an effort to exclude or minimize one sex from our relationships? Feminism's attack on the husband/wife team is now destroying all other male/female teams. Mother/son; Grandmother/grandson; Father/daughter; brother/sister; aunt/nephew or uncle/niece. If one believes that morally the male gaze is perversely sexualized and the female gaze is parasitic, how does this errode the intentions in all these relationships?
"If one believes that morally the male gaze is perversely sexualized and the female gaze is parasitic, how does this errode the intentions in all these relationships?"
It erodes the intentions to the degree that people desire a life of comforting illusion.
That illusion is fostered as the result of yet another perversion of moral imperative; that reciprocal benefit is not foundational to persistent interaction.
More concisely, that "transactionality" is "evil."
The organism, whether amoeba or hominid, that fails to pursue self-interest, perishes.
Understanding and acknowledging this factor, does not profane the higher sentiments of humanity. It is merely an acceptance of fallibility and the limitations associated with biological imperative.
I would quibble with your post in only one particular, T Kai Roc; the modifier "perverse." Otherwise, I think your observations poignant and insightful.
As much as I agree that your “theory of the mechanism” is certainly valid and self consistent, I suspect you’d also agree that we’re mainly talking about effects and trends that are happening somewhere between on the marginal level and the level of full blown trends.
It’s trivially easy to point out that for some large majority, they’re mostly going on as they always have. People out in the boonies and burbs and the SEC are going on mating as they always have and mostly ignoring the NYC PMC’s psychodramas, while the shutins in their mamas’ basements and holed up in their SoHo closet apartments with their cats are mostly just going on as generations of loser shutins have done before them.
It sucks that the elite PMC psychodrama dominates so much of how we talk about this stuff. Because on the one hand, it’s absolutely real and they have done real damage in their own spaces, which has absolutely also had its splash damage on the rest of society. But on the other, the splash damage is thankfully somewhat contained from making a full breakout.
I remember on the Chappelle show years ago Dave Chappelle brought up the movie "What Women Want" (about a man who can suddenly hear womens thoughts) and then did a funny bit about "What Men Want", with a woman hearing men's thoughts and their evaluations of her physical traits and being totally disgusted. Men and women think differently as you are right to point out. As men we often can't help the thoughts that jump into our brain if we see an attractive woman. But like so much about morality it's what we do moreso than what we think. Seeing an attractive woman and having lustful thoughts come to mind is one thing, but acting on it so that a woman feels uncomfortable is another. Of course on the flip side of that is unless a man approaches and makes the first move he'll never have a chance, but for women it often seems they think a man should know beforehand if they should make a move. Newsflash: we're not mind readers.
Excellent. Great to see that there are women speaking the truth.
Im a guy (ignore pfp) my friends r very afraid of being creepy and making women uncomfortable, I trained myselg against that instinct and smile at women I don't know and sometimes talk to them, I feel this undercurrent in american culture that if ur a man you have to view your own desires as shameful, which is not something tht I like . gen z
All of this seems very obvious to me. There's a certain hypocritical disconnect between what women say they want and what they actually want. Of course you can't say that. There's also a myth as you've illustrated about the 'male gaze' being abhorant. I've found it surprising the degree of compromise women will allow if the man is either particularly good looking or prosperous. I reject the idea that women judge men comprehensively. They don't. At least not at first. In this way, there's far less difference between the sexes than has been promoted today. I also don't know what's wrong with sexual steriotypes . They exist for a reason
I feel like while I agree with this statement based on the perception of my experiences, I have trouble believing the argument. Are you saying to blame the system at a time when people I don’t like use that as a justification for actions and behaviors I would literally fight back against?
The wildest thing though, I have started efforts that are risky, economically and personally that if I can make it through would make me a higher status male. And the self-awareness that I feel compelled for this and the why doesn’t prevent me from making the effort. But it wouldn’t matter cause I still feel like I cannot advertise the effort, because that would be strutting, a precursor to gazing.
In short, this article seems to validate my feelings, so I Don’t trust it, but I’ll keep reading for more evidence.
You've hit on an topic that needs greater explanation to facility broader awareness and understanding. How many women understand their own desires, the desire to be desired by a high status man which is observed by other females? How many men understand that women still want the male gaze, but only if they see you as "good enough" status, especially in a social setting with other females observing?
I'm an old man that came of age in the analog time. It was so much easier to learn these lessons when everyone was face to face. But, I realize the challenge that my son will face as he tries to navigate the current field of landmines.
When I was younger, I only liked the male gaze from males I wanted gazing at me, not those I didn't. It felt good to have that attention as an insecure, awkward young person. So many women underestimate how being noticed by males you want to notice you can be helpful to boost confidence during those horrible, lonely, insecure, angsty, awkward, teen and early adult years (without turning it into a game) only to use that confidence to affirm that you don't need a man for anything.
I remember arguing about the male gaze when I was doing my postdoc at Princeton. I told my fellow feminists in a faculty seminar that I wanted men to look at me, and that I was proud of being attractive. They were absolutely horrified (let’s just say that the men in the classroom were not). I quoted Keats about truth and beauty. I referred to Lacan and the gaze of the Other as constitutive of subjectivity. They were not convinced. In fact, they started ostracizing me, which I did not mind as I hung out with the guys. Interestingly, the only other female postdoc who remained friendly with me was a very beautiful woman. Was it as simple as the fact that she was not afraid of competition?
There's a congruence with everything beautiful in the natural world that also renders it true and intelligent. Maybe this isn't a popular view today, but I think this also applies to human beings. It's also no mistake that industrial beauty standards work to distort what is clearly there by design to disclose many things not just physical
Most females simultaneously cherish and loathe being The Second Sex. Must be exhausting. Certainly is for The Other Sex.
So much food for thought here on the shit show that is modern day Intergender dynamics.
I keep meaning to move off this subject but I just can’t.
Please continue doing what you do. What you do is important to public discourse. There are so few brave women saying this. The few who do have been viciously harassed and vilified. (just ask Cassie Jaye) that makes what you say even more important though I do realize the challenges you will have to face. You are brave and write very well too.
I would posit, Ms. Pandey, that your reluctance to abandon the subject may be owing to a dawning realization that your own, unique perspective, represents a meaningful contribution to a deeper understanding of the issue.
You may (or may not) be thinking "others have already published similar observations." That may be so, but follow your muse; you're already adding thought-provoking perspectives to the public discourse.
I hope that you delve a little more deeply into two factors; that male visual assessment isn't exclusively a copulative speculation, and that female appraisal of "totalities" is not an inevitable condemnation to veniality within the eternal transactionality of relationship.
Perhaps I'm projecting in saying this, but it appears that your direction is leaning toward a more concise understanding of the symbolism and signalling associated with gendered visual assessments of fitness for fulfillment of various social roles and functions.
In any event, your prose is excellent and quite enjoyable to read. I make that assertion, even allowing for the confirmation bias potential within your audience.
Pray continue in your most interesting series of narratives and observations regarding this topic.
Please don’t! 🤣 you are doing a Fantastic job!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2890253/#:~:text=Abstract,intent%20early%20in%20an%20interaction.
Seems potentially relevant. Men aren't (as a group, on average) oversexualizing women at a glance, we're just broadly worse than women at perceiving and interpreting subtle cues across a wide range of nonverbal signals, with similar error rates in both directions (whether she's interested or she's not), and the finding that men often overestimate women's sexual interest is therefore a matter of differences in base rates (far more women are uninterested than interested).
QUOTE: The present evaluation of gender differences in perception of sexual intent replicated the long-standing finding that men are more likely than women to misperceive sexual intent in women's displays of friendliness and showed that gender differences in perceptual sensitivity accounted for this result. Men found platonic-interest cues to be less discriminable from sexual-interest cues than women did. Just as in previous research, they made some mistakes in perceiving sexual intent in friendly displays, but they also misperceived friendliness in sexual-interest displays. That is, they oversexualized some women, but were quite likely to undersexualize other women. Although the methodology varied from that used in early research (we employed an identification paradigm and a series of photographs), the effect sizes (d = 0.38–0.40) were consistent in magnitude with the average effect sizes reported in previous investigations (Farris et al., 2008). Employing a model-based approach capable of parsing decisional bias from perceptual insensitivity, we found no evidence that men's performance differed from women's because of a gender difference in decisional thresholds for positive-affect targets. Relative to women, men did not oversexualize the image set, and their decisional criteria for detecting sexual intent were no more or less lenient than women's. For this image set, the underlying etiology differentiating men's performance from women's performance was perceptual sensitivity. END QUOTE
It was also kind of interesting that women lowered their threshold for assuming sexual interest was intended when the women pictured were dressed more provocatively and the decisional threshold was raised when the pictured women were dressed more conservatively. Given how often feminists insist that the way a woman dresses cannot be taken as an indicator of wanting male sexual attention, it's a point against that claim that they themselves treated clothing as a relevant signal for assessing whether other women were expressing sexual interest or not.
This is intriguing, and I wasn't familiar with this research. This also explains why interest I've registered in men when I was younger may not have been returned despite their overall behavior. That last paragraph though proves the point well.
It’s a complete Shit Show out there. Almost to the point where I might just stick to hookers and tiddy bars and give up actually trying to have a real relationship with a woman.
That is the smartest move for men these days and least risky. Hookers are now the safest sex a man can have. Approaching a woman can be life destroying and is not worth the risk.
How do you have these conversations with your friends?
You have it honestly. Just straight up about the absurdity of it all.
I have heard many men IRL say the same. And you know what...when I say some of this stuff exclusively in male company, invariably there's a sigh of relief.
“The [fill in the blank] acted on me because I allowed it” thing is the entire missing piece for understanding the decline in human relationships. People have grown entitled to not having their feelings hurt. Attention from a low status person feels bad because it conveys that they believe you are at their level. And as women have advanced in socioeconomic status, they bristle more when getting unwanted attention. Women that get all dolled up with ‘come and get me’ makeup and clothing are really just trolling for the highest status man they can attract. But they will attract the gaze of other men too. But many women cannot compartmentalize their feelings getting approached by a man they feel is below their station. Their unregulated emotional reaction, frankly, is to be a bitch.
Apparently I was a considered a catch… relatively high status. I was married at 22 and focused on my career and family, so I was never really in the market. I played guitar in a cover band while working swing shift for several months as a director of computer operations for a bank. I had a 2-3 hour break while programs would run on the mainframe, and would head to local area venues that hosted live music so I could check out other bands. I would get a meal at the bar. Over time I got to know some regulars. I noted the girls all dolled up, and a lot of lonely single guys clearly not high on “the catch” hierarchy. Over time I grew a bit miffed over how rude these girls were to the boys. Instead of kindly rejecting the ask to dance or talk, they would say things like “not if you were the last guy on earth”. When those girls approached me, I did the same to them and maybe add ‘bitch’ to it. The look on their face… confusion and then rage because they probably had never been treated that way in the places they trolled, was my reward.
And THAT is the missing piece here. Females disliking male attention really never get to experience what rude rejection feels like. Because most men are chivalrous, and constantly horny, they walk on eggshells. I have a view of 100% gender equality, and wish more men would stop walking on eggshells and would treat rude females equally as rude males.
I kinda love that trolling because it is equivalent treatment. "Women that get all dolled up with ‘come and get me’ makeup and clothing are really just trolling for the highest status man they can attract. But they will attract the gaze of other men too. But many women cannot compartmentalize their feelings getting approached by a man they feel is below their station. Their unregulated emotional reaction, frankly, is to be a bitch." Yeah, I have had to learn how to reject men without being an asshole, but I definitely did this same thing when I was younger. Even more often, women would mock ME if low status men gave me attention, even if I wasn't attracted to them. These were ostensible friends.
I like how you point out that the concept of "male gaze" is usually reckoned with in the abstract, something that exists everywhere all at once in the world, not something that an individual man does to an individual woman at a point in time.
Someone pointed out that men have two options: go to work or go to jail. Women have more options, both in terms of society's approval and as a practical matter, and they have even more if they have someone to support them. Want to pursue that high-status, low-pay job? Door opened. Want to be a SAHM? Door opened. Want to be a (semi-)pro activist? Door opened. Want to have a social life like on TV? Door opened.
The cope some use is that we're living in "late stage capitalism", and if we had some kind of socialism these social arrangements could be deprecated if not done away with altogether because "everyone" would have "all" the resources they need, but in the meantime this is how we "have" to live. That's nonsense, of course. TANSTAAFL.
Not trying to be all blackpill here, but it is what it is. The risk--for both people--is that things can become very conditional if not merely, ahem, transactional at that point.
And, of course, like you said things can become very conditional in practice when it comes to the status of individual men. This cartoon sums it up nicely: https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/double-standards-comic-illustrations-110-59843e354a84d__700.jpg
What they say about feminism, they say about socialism, which is that "if only we tried real feminism/socialism". And over time I have come to see that women's collective orientation born of evolutionary pressures has lent itself well to collectivist ideologies; no authoritarian regime can survive without female support. What you say about women having infinite choices is absolutely unrecognized, because in our supposedly advanced society women want the choice to stay home, so partriarchal benefit, while also having their fully working spouse do half the housework (I had a friend in a situation like this who was divorced by his wife in the end). One of the problems is the expansion of the definition of 'emotional labor' out of which came this idea that women do 'unpaid labor' at home. As though domestic work making the home is the same as paid labor. It actually just devalues the domestic sphere to talk about it in such capitalistic terms.
And when you start talking about it in capitalistic terms, well, transactions are what a capitalistic free market is all about.
And if one is keeping score, a la a Cosmo quiz, well, now we're applying double-entry bookkeeping to relationships. Yuck.
I think there's a lot more to unpack here!
"The gaze describes the professional class female fantasy of male attention, by which they are simultaneously disgusted and which they crave." This self-loathing reminds me of Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, The True Believer, where he describes a "despised self". This self he describes as craving a "freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product." A blame where any precieved expectation is a threat which may uncover the blemishes. So then offense becomes a defense.
"A woman doesn’t just consider the man’s physicality but trains her gaze on his entire life." This superficial assumption is no more accurate than the male's gaze for a sexual mate. There is no way someone can know a man's life based on his professional appearance any more than a man can determine a women's fitness as a mother and mate based on her curvaceous fitness. They are both crude stereotypic preludes to deeper knowing that dating should provide. What these oversimplified perspectives sacrifice is the profound benefits of a male/female team. How much is lost when we foolishly try to place one sex as morally superior to another in an effort to exclude or minimize one sex from our relationships? Feminism's attack on the husband/wife team is now destroying all other male/female teams. Mother/son; Grandmother/grandson; Father/daughter; brother/sister; aunt/nephew or uncle/niece. If one believes that morally the male gaze is perversely sexualized and the female gaze is parasitic, how does this errode the intentions in all these relationships?
"If one believes that morally the male gaze is perversely sexualized and the female gaze is parasitic, how does this errode the intentions in all these relationships?"
It erodes the intentions to the degree that people desire a life of comforting illusion.
That illusion is fostered as the result of yet another perversion of moral imperative; that reciprocal benefit is not foundational to persistent interaction.
More concisely, that "transactionality" is "evil."
The organism, whether amoeba or hominid, that fails to pursue self-interest, perishes.
Understanding and acknowledging this factor, does not profane the higher sentiments of humanity. It is merely an acceptance of fallibility and the limitations associated with biological imperative.
I would quibble with your post in only one particular, T Kai Roc; the modifier "perverse." Otherwise, I think your observations poignant and insightful.
As much as I agree that your “theory of the mechanism” is certainly valid and self consistent, I suspect you’d also agree that we’re mainly talking about effects and trends that are happening somewhere between on the marginal level and the level of full blown trends.
It’s trivially easy to point out that for some large majority, they’re mostly going on as they always have. People out in the boonies and burbs and the SEC are going on mating as they always have and mostly ignoring the NYC PMC’s psychodramas, while the shutins in their mamas’ basements and holed up in their SoHo closet apartments with their cats are mostly just going on as generations of loser shutins have done before them.
It sucks that the elite PMC psychodrama dominates so much of how we talk about this stuff. Because on the one hand, it’s absolutely real and they have done real damage in their own spaces, which has absolutely also had its splash damage on the rest of society. But on the other, the splash damage is thankfully somewhat contained from making a full breakout.
I remember on the Chappelle show years ago Dave Chappelle brought up the movie "What Women Want" (about a man who can suddenly hear womens thoughts) and then did a funny bit about "What Men Want", with a woman hearing men's thoughts and their evaluations of her physical traits and being totally disgusted. Men and women think differently as you are right to point out. As men we often can't help the thoughts that jump into our brain if we see an attractive woman. But like so much about morality it's what we do moreso than what we think. Seeing an attractive woman and having lustful thoughts come to mind is one thing, but acting on it so that a woman feels uncomfortable is another. Of course on the flip side of that is unless a man approaches and makes the first move he'll never have a chance, but for women it often seems they think a man should know beforehand if they should make a move. Newsflash: we're not mind readers.