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So why is the constant social/cultural/media message, across virtually every mainstream channel, that men need to step aside, elevate women, defer to female input, and basically give women every single advantage so they can 'level the playing field' that was made unequal due to years of patriarchal control?
You're basically suggesting that women want some form of patriarchy, despite it being a literal governmental policy to attempt to dismantle said patriarchy.
Square the circle for me. Why are women, especially the college educated ones, voting for policies that make women less dependent on men and further remove authority for men if they prefer a man who takes charge?
Why wasn't Donald Trump re-elected on a wave of female approval?
Presumably because what people want, what they say they want, and what they vote for are all different things. Why do feminists sleep with Chads and not the sensitive nice guys?
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Being dependent on men in general is very different from being dependent on one particular man the woman has vetted.
I can grant that.
But the net result of making it harder for men to act as authority figures in general is to make it simultaneously harder for them to act as authority figures for a specific person.
So basically, if women want to make themselves independent of "males" so they're free to choose which male they want to depend on, it is fair to ask how that's working out for them.
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I mean, dating preferences and politics aren't things you would necessarily expect to have a one-to-one correlation in. And both of these fields are basically filled with self deception to the point that that's the norm rather than the exception, so when you've got lies stacked up on top of lies, a square circle is entirely expected.
But to humor the question for a bit, I've heard an explanation that the type of anti-patriarchy politics you see are a sort of society-wide "shit test." The idea being that, if you fully immerse society in the anti-patriarchy message, then the only men who will be dominant are the ones who are so dominant that they refuse to submit to those messages. Thus it becomes easier for women to discriminate between dominant and non-dominant men, with the latter type of men having to face higher barriers if they want to fake being the former. It's a win-win for women, because besides the emancipation/extra power gained from reducing the patriarchy, they also only get hit on by men who are more likely to be actually attractive.
The possible obvious pitfall is that there are only so many Truly Dominant men around, so most women end up unable to pair with one of them, instead being another notch on their bed stands during their younger years before having to settle for a substantially less dominant and thus less attractive man or just singlehood. And if the anti-patriarchy messaging was strong enough, that substantially less could be substantially less.
Like most such simple theories, there's probably a grain of truth and a lot of convincing-sounding just-so stories to it. At the least, none of this seems at all intentional or coordinated, and it's mostly an emergent phenomenon from the aforementioned stacking of lies upon lies that leaves everyone confused, is my guess.
I can agree with much of this.
As you stated, there may be a grain of truth to this. But it's one of those things that might be workable in a small tribe or otherwise tight-knit community where the whole society willingly recognizes the dominant males and affords them authority.
Probably something that, when scaled up to a sizeable nation state, ends up leading he massive population of 'less dominant' males to defect in hopes of improving their own social position, and the relatively small, and vastly outnumbered, dominant males are now beset by a group with outsized political power which they cannot defeat without near-perfect coordination amongst themselves. And of course the issue where the women are all competing for this pool of dominant males and thus are happy to enlist the less-dominant males to their side as needed. Consider the rise of Onlyfans as a means of separating less-dominant men from resources en masse in exchange for no actual physical interaction, which then allows a woman to be self-sufficient while she seeks the ideal mate.
Other factors like the shifting of social status from males who are good at fighting, killing, and leading male-centric warbands to guys who are good at manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet, building technology, and navigating feminine social environments (I'm being pretty obtuse here, admitted) are also making it harder for dominant males to assert the sort of social control that might counter the feminine influence.
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