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Are women who are surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males straighter than the average? That would be a point in favor of that hypothesis, and if we assume women who return to physically abusive relationships for the stated reason of "because I still love him" are telling the truth (along with, uh, every dime-store romance novel out there that's literally just this), maybe it's a data point suggesting it's correct.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is because very few people today have any experience in the exercise of power (along with the standard reactions to people misusing it- which I believe is far less prevalent than people say it is specifically because "saw it on TV/read it on the Internet"). Old people will complain about "kids these days not knowing how to do anything" but their failure to make ranks available and fucking delegate for once means men and women don't understand what it means to be in the middle of the dominance hierarchy. My father failed to do that, my bosses all failed to do that, my friends fail to do that (and it has a very obvious negative effect on their kids). Nobody over the age of 40 gets it.
Oh yeah, and then you have the general room temperature of "beta good alpha bad", which is
because women-as-statistical-distribution are betas and vice versa for men. Which combined with the above makes the problem even worse. You can tell people how to exercise power that way if they don't know it, but you can't talk about it if you don't know they don't know it. And when the people in power really don't want anyone to discuss it (i.e. they're all alpha-hating betas) that obviously gets harder.
I read a story once about how in (either WW1 or WW2, can't remember) one of the questions a potential officer had to answer to be considered for the position was how he answered how he'd dig a trench. The ones that failed would start talking about dimensions, how deep, tactical implications, etc. [as if they were going to do the work themselves]. The correct answer was, is, and always will be "Sergeant, build me a trench!".
And while one can argue "well you know it or you don't" that's a cope answer, and we'd be better off population-wise if everyone knew at least a little bit of how to do that. If you shun selfishness qua selfishness you won't know how to use it correctly, rationally, productively.
I think betas call that Nice Guy Syndrome.
Yeah, straight relationships work like that too. People who pretend they don't are usually betas who actively resent being assigned beta at birth.
I find it extremely odd that most of the more "alpha" women I meet (as in, they might as well be gay men in thought/action/general attitude towards life) have higher than average facial neoteny. By contrast, most of the "forever a beta, and very angry about that" women have very masculine faces (the 'model' look). I've come to find that I care about that more than if it's a woman or a man (and I suspect is where the "traps are/n't gay" meme comes from people who have also noticed this about themselves).
I find this to be true in employer-employee and friend-friend relationships too. I find it difficult to deal with a lot of the time; while I eventually figured out my proper role in these relationships it took me way longer than it should have.
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