Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I concur that it's a bad post, but it mostly just seems bad by virtue of the poster clearly taking his own preferences and doing mental gymnastics to argue that the whole world would be better off if it catered to them. It does meet the baseline definition of mansplaining, because his fundamental claim to authority rests on him being a man - but unlike with the typical callout targets, there is actually nothing particularly fallacious about the idea that ceteris paribus a man would be more likely to be well-equipped to explain what men find attractive. He just happens to give a bad explanation anyway, against the odds.
The statement that women in general don't know what men find attractive rings true to me, just based on everything I have heard from female friends and romantic partners over the years. You should not make the mistake of confusing this statement for something like "women have a hard time attracting men", because both the former and the negation of the latter can be (and, I'd argue, are) true simultaneously. Men, as a group, have low standards. Some individual men have very low standards, and moreover the low-standards ones are scattered surprisingly widely across the distribution of men by quality of women. Also, increasingly, the preferences of men are such that the quality of the partner they get matters far less to them than the guaranteed and the potential costs of engaging in partner selection. That is, these men prefer a woman who barely passes their standards and throws herself at them for free over one who is far more attractive to them but would have to be wooed/won over (with the attendant cost in time, "emotional labour", money and preference falsification in other domains, risk of heartbreak and threat of social consequences) every time.
As a result, the easiest success strategy for women starts looking something like 1. pick a man; 2. make sure you pass some minimum attractiveness threshold (which can be done by optimising for a very wrong model of male attraction as long as it's not completely insane); 3. hit on him as obviously as your intra-gender social constraints will allow; 4. guard him from any competition. If you follow this strategy, it may seem to you that your optimisation at step 2 did a lot of work, step 3 was just necessary because men are dense, and step 4 is insurance because men are so fickle that they would cheat on a 10 with a 6 for novelty, and that your success therefore means you had a good grasp of men's preferences. In reality, at step 2 you probably optimised in some direction that barely managed to have positive dot product, made it to 6/10, and steps 3 and 4 were the decisive ones because a 6/10 in the hand is worth more than a 10/10 in the (Australian) bush, gympies and all.
(You can benchmark actual ability to judge men's preferences by trying to predict their ranking of the attractiveness of classmates (if they feel safe to share with you), actresses, or fictional characters. I have been in fairly unfiltered mixed company sharing those, and men's rankings never fail to surprise even women who know them well.)
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