Terracotta
3d ago
(And I should add, by the way, @doglatine , that I deeply appreciate how open-minded, thoughtful and respectful this whole exchange was; it's been a real pleasure to get into these questions in such an honest way. Thank you!)
Terracotta
3d ago
It can be a fun and an interesting exercise, but I'm less convinced that it helps us access truths in any meaningful way, at least most of the time. It's a kind of "social psychoanalysis" that just like regular psychoanalysis, is largely immune to falsification (Freudianism was one of the ur-examples that motivated Popper).
I had a long thing about my concerns with Popper (although I'm certainly no fan of Freud, either)-- but rather than getting too deeply into it, I'd just strongly question that claim that it's always a basically speculative and time-wasting project to try to model someone's motivations from a combination of their words and actions. Developing and refining theories of mind seems to me like a kind of metis that humans are inherently excellent at based on our nature as a social species-- certainly better at, on average, than we are at understanding the laws of physics, for instance. The processes of observation and analysis aren't always very legible, so they might not stand strict Popperian scrutiny-- but it's also not accurate to say that there's no opportunity to gather more data, discard false hypotheses and refine models accordingly.
In this instance, for example, I suggested that perhaps men like mom-rape jokes but hate daughter-rape jokes because, on some level, they like the idea of moms being taken down a peg. You countered that au contraire, perhaps men's love for their moms is so deeply embedded that it's more easily outraged versus fatherly love of a daughter, hence those jokes are funnier. Human minds are enough of a black box that we may never fully resolve it, but is it really true that we can literally never get any closer to the truth, and thus that we should never ask the question at all? It seems to me that we could try to get a bit closer by asking whether we know of any men who didn't grow up with their moms, or men who hate their daughters, and explore how they react to humor. Or by asking whether men are on the whole more respectful, deferential and attentive to their moms in other contexts, versus their daughters. Or by asking whether your or my interpretation better models how aggressive humor works in other contexts: for instance, do men more greatly enjoy rape jokes about their political outgroup, or their political ingroup? About a disliked boss, or a beloved boss?
It's certainly possible for this kind of inquiry to be done poorly, and it definitely gets dramatically worse the more you fund university professorships to do it at industrial scale (as does empirical science itself, for that matter). But just refusing to countenance it at all seems just oddly incurious, unless it's part of some strategic boundary that women shouldn't be allowed to think about male sexuality. As a man, are you not interested in why some jokes are hilarious while others are painful? Do you not feel that on some level, you respond differently to some classes of people versus others, and are the causal mechanisms underlying those feelings not intriguing to try to model?
Terracotta
3d ago
I'm late responding, but just wanted to say that it's been a while since I read anything so solidly info-dense and enlightening. Wish I could find more deep dives into the entirely foreign and fascinating culture of gay porn. Thank you for this!
Terracotta
9d ago
I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.
Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes. Ironically, the threat of over-reading is probably what provokes some of the compensatory under-reading here, but there must be some level of valid interpretation between "jokes are a straightforward statement of intention" and "jokes mean literally nothing about anything."
(For instance, on why mama jokes are funny but daughter jokes aren't-- is it possible that most men have a little bit of underlying resentment/ contempt for older women, including their moms, that makes it a teeeeny bit viscerally enjoyable to imagine them being put in their place or subjected to male dominance, whereas having a beloved daughter demeaned is just straightforwardly painful?)
I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics.
That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring, but that's just from mixed-company observations. Are successful jocks really witty and transgressive with other men? I'm trying to imagine what that would even sound like.
Terracotta
10d ago
The only hill I'm dying on here is that I think that the actual communicative intention behind this kind of humour is typically misconstrued by women as more sincere or literal or psychopathic than it is, whereas men can more readily see that it's taking a kind of entirely performative humour/banter/mock aggression that's common in all-male contexts and employing it outside of them
Thanks for your candor and critical thinking about this! I think the only hill I'd die on is that female proscription of rape humor is similarly rational and grounded in practical safety considerations for female-bodied people in a sexually dimorphic species, not just some outpouring of blue-haired librarian priggishness as various bros would have it elsewhere on this site.
But I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless. Sure, there are plenty of nuts overreacting to mildly edgy jokes these days, but it also doesn't match my experience to say that men's humor suggests nothing about their underlying views and values because they apply that humor equally to every possible target. I think there are types of harm and violence that men don't joke about, either because it would provoke a threatening response or because they just don't find it funny, and I suspect those gaps probably signal underlying vulnerabilities and anxieties the same way that jokes about raping aged moms aren't as funny to people in the process of becoming weak old ladies (and conversely, a surprising number of Twitter feminists turned out to enjoy jokes about assaulting Republican women and TERFS over the past few years). So it does seem worth exploring the contours a little. I also think that transgressiveness and dominance/aggression are two separate things - I know humorists who are wildly transgressive but still don't make any jokes of the dick-swinging, put-down sort - so just pointing out that men love breaking rules doesn't fully account for what makes women uneasy about YOUR BODY MY CHOICE.
Two follow-up questions: do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms? I feel like the former isn't as common. Why? How about each other's sons?
Second, there are plenty of humorless men out there (I've met some of them!). When a guy has no sense of humor, how does his participation in locker-room banter usually fall flat? Does he go too far? Not far enough? Not in the right direction?
Terracotta
11d ago
Uh... at least for 'fucked your mom' level jokes, absolutely positively yes.
Those are pretty funny, and also it's interesting that they are so very, very delicate about it: the language is "I want to flirt with your dad" and "I did your dad," both of which are like 5th-grade starter-pack level in the scale of "fucked your mom" jokes. So maybe it will evolve all the way to where a dude can joke about how another guy's dad moaned as he double-fisted him last night, who knows?
While we're in this media sphere, another thing I've been genuinely curious about: what's the standard level of sexual violence theming in gay porn (of the sort actually made for gay men)? Like, does popular gay porn do "dumb twink rammed until he CAN'T WALK STRAIGHT" or "Ten portly bears PUNISH this bratty man's BLEEDING ASSHOLE while he begs" style videos at the same rate as straight porn, and are there similar levels of theming about men getting choked and hit, getting stuck in tight places and begging for help, having guys cum on their face and chest, etc., as you see in videos about male sex with women?
But for the original claim to be true, that rape jokes are just fun male bonding and guys don't take it too seriously, then there should be no gay taboo at all, correct? Because the idea of being physically forced to be penetrated in ways you don't want, by a stronger person whom you don't desire, is not threatening or traumatizing to men, so why would it be less funny for a straight guy than for a gay guy?
It's telling that your bottom link is not actually a friendly moment of male banter, but a dominance chest-thump from a Gen X right-leaning guy toward his Gen-Z leftist outgroup, and even so he attempts only an extremely gentle and euphemistic joke about male-male quasi-seduction ("you'd be my concubines") happening in an explicitly counterfactual world. Is the expectation that the Gen Z boys will respond "LOL good one you magnificent bastard," because boy talk is just like that? Would O'Neill respond that way if somebody joked about his entering concubinage in turn?
What about if they did so in more explicitly rapey language like "your body is my choice," or by describing the "depraved" things they would do to him, and how much he'd like it once they got started?
What about if they did so while also casually showing that they were armed, so that while they're joking about raping him right now, it could definitely real-life happen at any future point if they encounter him? What if it were not an ex-Navy SEAL joking about doing this to high-school kids, but an established MMA champion joking about doing "depraved" things to one of the programmers on TheMotte? Would any given male Mottizen still reliably find this hilarious?
Terracotta
11d ago
Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression.
This is such a weirdly off-base comparison, though. The proper analog would be men joking about raping each other "in various depraved ways," not each other's moms (as the saying goes, tragedy is me getting a paper cut, comedy is anyone else besides me getting raped). Do locker-room lads generally respond with twinkling eyes and good-humored grins when their bros graphically describe how they will bend them over, force them to the ground and ravage their assholes as they scream, because their bodies are somebody else's choice? Maybe so, I don't hang out in men's locker rooms. Sounds fun!
A sincere question: if sexual-assault jokes are an essential and universal part of male bonding, do gay dudes joke about raping each other's dads?
Without some sort of artificial bar keeping women out (which there does not appear to be), there's something very strongly masculine about the job itself.
The problem is the odd presumption that the only possible reasons for not performing an activity must be (a) artificial bar, or (b) innate incapacity. But again, a glance at virtually any other big group difference highlights how silly that is.
For instance, you haven't responded to the point about >3:1 F:M ratios in pediatrics or SLP; can I take it that you agree men are inherently incapable of delivering language therapy?
The US produces only 1/10 the steel that China does; presumably that's because metallurgy is a strongly Asian pursuit, and without their help we would have to build most of our skyscrapers out of mud?
Only 15% of bartenders are people with a college degree. So it seems, given that no law prohibits B.A.s from taking bartending positions, that something about college must erode one's ability to create mixed drinks? Populate a luxury space station with a bunch of Ivy League grads, and they'll all be flailing around smashing the vodka bottles and trying to drink from the soda sprayer.
Re: engineers, like I said, I know some lovely older engineers, so I don't want to rag on the profession too much. I can speculate that low-EQ professions would be canaries in the coalmine for for any kind of emerging populationwide issues with male socialization, though, much more than e.g. medicine or law, where men go through more of a filter for social competence; and some of the truly hair-raising comments by self-professed engineers on themotte and elsewhere make me worry that this is happening. But the gender disparity could equally well be explainable by engineering being a profession with only middling salary and declining prestige, limited flexibility and autonomy, and low levels of evident connection to the values that women are currently socialized to care about (like "contributing to the community" and "helping the less fortunate").
Terracotta
2mo ago
I think I specified male engineers. (And in all fairness, many of the older ones I interact with IRL are great people; it's mostly the remarks one sees from nerd-id'd young and middle-aged men on sites like this that have recently made me feel very sorry for the young women trying to work in those spaces.)
However, we weren't discussing whether current male engineers should feel bad about their character, their social skills or their workplace culture. I was questioning your reasoning above that because somewhat fewer women than men currently choose to enter engineering as a profession (an observation consistent with a wide variety of underlying causes, including that talented women have more options or that the current cohort of men in the field is unpleasant to interact with), therefore we can conclude (a) engineering is inherently, as you term it, a "men's role", (b) that biological females can't do engineering, and an all-female society would have inadequate personnel to complete its necessary engineering tasks. (That's setting aside the broader claim you were trying to support, which was, if I read it correctly, that since engineers are also so incredibly valuable, the current gender balance of engineering partly justifies the existence of patriarchal social norms.) Could you say more about the reasoning that you feel justifies (a) and (b), if I'm getting those correct?
Terracotta
2mo ago
If "Amazons" is just ordinary women who don't need no man, it seems very unlikely they could do these roles... because if they could they would in greater quantities than they are.
This is very weird logic. To take a parallel case: 75% of pediatricians and 90% of speech-language pathologists are female, give or take. Therefore on a male-only island children would die in droves, and stammerers wither into mutism, because obviously men can't perform these roles, or else they would do so in greater numbers?
I'd predict far greater numbers of women entering engineering in an Amazon society, because you're removing the substantial downside that is having to work with male engineers.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I think people are pretty good at giving credit for real, visible contributions, where the reality is clear and concrete (as opposed to a statistical construct, a historical artifact, or an abstract case that somebody could maybe make if they wanted to).
In the subsistence-agriculture conditions that birthed The Patriarchy, and in a world where physical strength is a valuable resource overall, it seems extremely clear why an able-bodied adult man wrangling a yoke of oxen, carrying stones for a wall or fighting with hand weapons is both taking on extra personal risk and rendering irreplaceable value for his family, and why the usefulness of having him in that role might justify investing it with extra privilege versus the females and immature males of his household.
Fast-forward to modern industrial/financial democracy, and sure, construction workers and other male-dominated industrial roles are great and necessary, but:
(a) superior brute strength is no longer the money-maker, thus no longer the source of high status, that it once was;
(b) availability of mechanical aids and automated tools means there's at most a small disparity between male and female capacity to perform those roles (realistically, a country of Amazons could do all their plumbing and engineering just fine)
(c) ergonomics and safety tech improvements mean that these roles are much less dramatically taxing/ uncomfortable, and that men performing them no longer take on substantial daily risk of bodily injury and death, vs. in a preindustrial context
(d) society is much less casually violent, so the utility of physical strength is restricted to a very limited number of workplaces, not experienced daily in street life; and finally
(e) even women married to physical laborers experience concrete benefit from the labor only in the form of a paycheck, which could just as easily be derived from white-collar work; hence there's no particular reason to regard the man as rendering irreplaceable value to the family through his biological form.
Ultimately, I think humans reason about respect in extremely concrete, embodied ways, and with open self-interest. Making some abstract argument that engineers are broadly good to have around, and that like 80% of engineers are men therefore all men deserve some credit for the existence of engineers (?!), is simply not the viscerally compelling case for male privilege that "need this tree chopped down and carried over there? great, I'll get on it" seems to have been.
Terracotta
2mo ago
I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.
Industrial processes work best with other industrial processes, so I guess it's a race to industrialize that biology as we have various other forms of organic production. I'm not saying I'm a fan, but it's weird for a community as virtualized, urban and seemingly techno-optimist as the Motte to come down so hard in favor of artisanal methods in this single area.
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did. Watch some living-history documentaries about preindustrial farm life, or read about crime in early cities and roads, and it becomes extremely obvious why it would be helpful to have someone around who's taller with a lot of upper-body strength and greater potential for physical aggression, and why a smaller-bodied person might willingly relinquish a certain amount of autonomy to retain that alliance. Once men deliberately technologize themselves out of the hard-labor-and-physical-defense game, to which their biology is naturally suited, it becomes much easier for women to look at their desk-jockey vidya-playing husbands and brothers and ask why they get to demand so much and give so little in return.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Ironically it turned out that it was far less fallacious than the genderist argument. For all the attempts at "gender neutral upbringing" girls still tend to zero-in on girlie princess stuff, and boys on trucks and whatnot. Despite "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob" being cancellable and outright illegal, women still earn less money than men, etc.
I mean, I'm aware of many of the checkmate-libtard! style memes on these topics, but a couple weirdos failing at their halfhearted attempts to raise ungendered children in a very gendered social world, or some women continuing to lose out in pay negotiations despite their bosses' professions of fair treatment, says virtually nothing one way or another about the optimum extent to which a well-run society should embrace, enforce or renounce differential treatment of individuals by sex. I don't really know what the "genderist argument" is, since that's not how anybody seems to label themselves in these conversation.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Simply having the sex-vs-gender distinction implies nothing about the relationship between the two, just that they're different things worth analyzing separately, like genotype vs phenotype or wealth vs. income.
I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman. Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses). Similarly, there's an extremely good case for a presumption of blank-slatism as the best working approach to prevent grave injustice on an individual level.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens; and runaway gender-performance competition (like the kind the US saw in the 50s, or arguably is seeing today) is a costly Moloch-style trap that is hard to escape without externally-enforced change. So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy, which runs: sexual dimorphism is natural, therefore (a) all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change; and (b) a society's sex-specific stereotypes are "natural" and nature is good, so women should try to perform their society's conventional stereotypes of womanhood (and men: manhood), and those who less closely match those stereotypes are unnatural and bad.
Basically, trying to circumvent the fallacies in "But you have to dress your XX baby in pink because pink is naturally for girls!"/ "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob because he supports a family, that's just the nature of things."
Unfortunately, I think this usage ran afoul of the trans folks' desire to deliberately re-conflate the natural and the social in order to argue that their social performance of gender stereotypes was, indeed, "natural," therefore biological, unchangeable and good. So whether there's a definition distinct from "sex" on that side of the aisle, I couldn't say.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1.
This seems like an oddly idealistic narrative of the origins of female franchise. I'd understood that early votes-for-women initiatives in the US were aimed at preserving the political power of the (gender-balanced) elite classes in the face of growing (mostly male) immigrant populations? I'm less familiar with the history of the vote in the UK, but given that many landholding women had local suffrage long before, which was removed with the expansion of male suffrage at the start of the 19th century, I presume most of those developments were similarly driven by cynical power-consolidation politics rather than by honest persuasion changing hearts.
Power is power. There is no interesting scenario "oooh what if Group A was more violent but Group B had more members, and they realized their interests were opposed, who would win" because both numbers and capacity for effective violence are just forms of power, and by definition the most powerful group has already won-- is, in fact, the group orchestrating the conflict, defining the teams and making it permissible to think about the opposition of interests in the first place.
As regards the gender gap in political affiliation, the actual power-holders are clearly not the anxious Millennial women who dutifully parrot the ACAB memes that turn up on their Instagram feeds; they're the mixed-gender, likely majority-male Instagram board and leadership, plus all the others of their class, who decided for obscure reasons of their own that those memes were fine and dandy to boost in feeds in the first place, then to bake into the rest of our tech-driven reality. Those are the folks to watch, and if 4chan ever does go to real-life war against the Emilies, it'll be when those people decide it would be a convenient development, not a moment before. But I tend to agree with the person upthread who said that this line of thinking is mostly an excuse to fantasize impotently about punishing the people who won't sleep with them.
Terracotta
2mo ago
In a state of nature, sure. But in a society, everybody is expected to muster the self-control to behave sociably to others in public spaces like the workplace, as long as others are behaving conventionally in return (and all the clothing mentioned in this thread has been extremely middle-class conventional; nobody's asking people to roll with assless chaps or nudism).
I think the problem is in assuming that because certain fear and arousal instincts have a biological basis, they're therefore radically "unavoidable," indeed unalterable, and justify making outsize demands for accommodation from others. It didn't make sense back when anxious students were demanding full veto power over triggering college syllabus material, and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context, either.
Terracotta
2mo ago
Affirmative! Sorry, was writing in haste above.
Terracotta
3mo ago
I believe OP mentioned braless women on the commute, not at work; the work attire I've seen criticized here was tight AKA "skinny" pants and tops with cleavage. But if you're asking if all these garments can be worn strictly with a view to looking presentable according to current fashion standards, then the answer is emphatically yes. Check out reddit femalefashionadvice and various women's clothing blogs, and you'll hear women trying to use clothes to communicate things like effortless, comfy cool (the braless or bralette tank, loose crocheted cardigan, 90s jeans look) and tailored polish (the skinny office pants look, which you'll be pleased to note has been replaced with swingy trousers). Sometimes women think about sexual display for date-night outfits, but in my decades of fashion discussions I have literally never heard or read a natal female remarking excitedly that an everyday outfit displays her nipples or shows how her breasts move, and will thus doubtless inspire random men to imagine emotionlessly fucking her as they pass by on the train.
On the bra thing specifically, visible bra straps (unavoidable under some tops) have at various points been considered un-presentable, and I've heard women express relief that the braless option solves that fashion problem.
Terracotta
3mo ago
I think I was responding to this bit:
But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. [...] It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly,
I'm not seeing the concern in the passage above that one's strictly chaste, "accidental" and "innocuous" glances toward women might be misinterpreted as sexual; it seems more about someone who is annoyed that they get a constant arousal response, to an "uncomfortable" extent, from any visuals that show the shape of a woman's body? Thus, the opening of this conversation was about whether it's fair to complain about constantly getting aroused around boobs, while also deliberately entraining that exact response pattern, and keeping oneself in a state of artificial sexual hyper-sensitivity, through regular masturbation to porn.
If it's pivoting instead to a conversation about how women overestimate the perviness of the male gaze, then I don't see how clothing is relevant one way or the other. Men can look at women lustfully no matter what they're wearing, so presumably a woman could also level a wrongful accusation of ogling regardless of her dress.
Terracotta
3mo ago
Again, I'm not saying that there isn't a hardwired component to sexual arousal. But organisms are very good at using environmental information to upregulate and downregulate behavioral programs depending on what's most reward-rich at the moment. The dynamics of this are pretty consistent; remove a reward and there's an extinction burst of increased drive to regain it, then after a while that program gets turned down as temporarily no longer profitable.
So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them, BUT also a primary leisure activity is protracted rubbing of their genitals while they look at a bunch of images of random women in postures that suggest sexual opportunity, then I feel like they clearly aren't doing all they could to persuade their bodies to turn down the constant sex-seeking.
Terracotta
3mo ago
I'm just saying that women's bodies have greater and more pronounced visibly sexual qualities than men's,
I agree with fribble that this is a statement about the viewer's sexuality, not about women's bodies. Women are not pleasing, others are pleased to imagine the things they could do to them. Women are not sexual, they are sexualized. (We also need more gay dudes in the conversation, I guess.)
Re: social consequences, here's a weak parallel case. One reasonably common hardwired female response to a man's body is fear. Men are on some level intimidating to be around, with their height, thick muscles and wide shoulders. To a much smaller person, male bodies telegraph, accurately, the potential to inflict violent physical harm and domination, regardless of how nice the guy actually is. This is why many little kids are instinctively afraid of strange men, before they're socialized to suppress that feeling. Some women find it attractive, particularly in a context where it could be aligned with their own interests. But the physicality of an unaligned male is generally at least a little viscerally scary.
Male fashion is also designed to emphasize and aestheticize those same traits of physical dominance. It accentuates shoulders, chest and neck, making the body look squarer and more muscular. Much male fashion even mimics the working clothes of violent occupations, like military uniforms and gangster clothing! If you're a guy and have an outfit that you think looks really sharp, odds are good that some part of the design, deliberately or not, is making you look more intimidating.
Now, suppose you're wearing your favorite perfectly normal mall-purchased outfit to work, and a woman in the office objects. It's anxiety-causing for her, your big scary body in these strength-emphasizing clothing makes her feel on edge all the time and limits her ability to act freely around you. Why should you be allowed to dress to frighten other people? If you were really considerate, you'd wear something softer, frillier, maybe with a cute animal print or something to signal your harmlessness.
That woman's biological fear response to your body is just as real and unpleasant as your biological arousal response to a sexy coworker. But you didn't dress to be "scary" to her! Probably you didn't think of her reaction at all. You just wanted to look presentable within the normal idiom that gendered fashion currently provides for you.
Does it seem more reasonable that you should go home and put on something frillier? Or that she should get therapy to gain more control over these maladaptive biological responses?
Are you under the impression that historical modesty and sexiness exists on a simple linear scale from burqas to tank tops? Probably there's a universal thrill with full view of certain parts of the anatomy, but past that, modesty norms and male perceptions of "sexiness" are very much in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of extremely "conservative, old-fashioned societies" in equatorial regions have far less covered-up norms of dress than we do. Public breastfeeding used to be far more common in the West, while there's a huge amount of historical hand-wringing about the immodesty of women showing their sexy, sexy free-flowing hair, which today men view in their co-workers without experiencing unmanageable erections.
My point is that there is underlying instinct, but then there's a huge amount of situational conditioning on top of that. If a man complains that he feels uncontrollably, painfully aroused and frustrated by the tops of a woman's breasts at work, then goes home every night and deliberately stimulates himself while looking at images of the tops of women's breasts, then all I'm saying is that he's clearly the dog AND Pavlov in that situation.
I think you're right that there's some important impact from the decline of embodied competence (material, social, physical) as a personal quality that people aspire to. In a society where people need to do more to survive on a daily basis, there's more value from the kind of deep, optimized knowledge you accrue through pure repeated experience; and that feels like a natural factor in making people respect their parents enough to want to become them, in a household/family setting that's similar to the one where they excelled. I definitely consult my mother regularly on workplace relations, etiquette, domestic stuff, child/husband/friend psychology, and various adulting skills, in addition to her professional areas of expertise, and I similarly pay attention to other women and men of her generation as models for social technologies and ways of being that I feel like we're in danger of losing. I expect it will be unpleasant to become a crone when it's my turn, but I don't think I'd trade the abilities and understanding I will have gained along the way.
If that kind of respect for experience is on the wane, I wonder how much of it is (a) the devaluation/ demystification of knowledge in general with the rise of the Internet; and (b) the massive Dunning-Krugerization and loss of intellectual humility that the culture has undergone as a result. But also, the high-status life narratives these days seem much more consumption-oriented than production-oriented, so maybe people don't particularly know or care whether they're good at anything.
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