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Notes -
It makes me suspect that the weird "Women don't want commitment and children, men do" assumption that I see in a lot of discussions about birth rates are men trying to shift the sexual marketplace in their favour. It would be like women saying "Men don't really want sex, otherwise they'd become HVM and be begging us for marriage." (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if some women on Female Dating Strategy think something like that.)
Human relationships don't always work Lion King style (male wants to play, needs to sort himself out for female to play with him, female plays with him to get commitment from HVM) but that's one of our better reproduction methods. It's certainly a lot more spiritually rich than arranged marriages, sex workers, IVF, or the hare-brained schemes I have come across online.
Is it manipulative? Only if people don't understand how the game works at some level, and pretty much every non-retarded neurotypical human does, if only subconsciously. And it incentivises not only reproduction, but character development by both partners - the male to develop an attractive personality, the female to develop a spine so that she isn't exploited by the process and to take the risk of having her heart broken.
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