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Maybe it should be. Right now, I feel like a lot women are under the impression that most of their male friends do not want to have sex with them. I don't know the exact numbers, and I can't think of a way to find out the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure a lot of men would be happy to fuck their female friends if given a no-strings-attached opportunity. Especially the single males but even a decent amount of guys in a relationship. But I constantly see stories like this, where a woman finds out a man wants to have sex with her, and she's disgusted. But why is she surprised? I understand that she doesn't want the sexual attention, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and women should be aware of just how common it is. Just because being aware of true facts is good. Lots of woman are friends with lots of men who sexually desire them, but the men just keep it a secret- would it be that much of a disaster if it wasn't a secret, if women were aware their friends desired them?
Maybe our current equilibrium is better. Maybe putting immense pressure on men not to let women know that they're sexually desired is good and prevents women from being pressured into sex they don't want. Maybe this equilibrium has to exist otherwise women would only make friends with the portion of men who genuinely don't want to have sex with them, so other men need to fake not having desire to make female friends. But it still just leaves me scratching my head when I see the degree to which women are shocked and disgusted when they learn that they're desired, since it shows that their mental model of the world was pretty damn off.
Because the idea that a low status male thinks he has a chance with her implies she is low status.
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Society is built on certain salutary myths. In Plato's Republic, commoners are taught that citizens are brothers, and that everyone is born with the tools that indicate their role in society. These noble lies are foundational to the polis. In the organizational meme we call society, members must be brainwashed into believing (a) morality is for all citizens, not just your blood relatives, (b) some people must do unpleasant, dangerous, and degrading work for the benefit of the superstructure.
Of course, some societies require many more and more rigorously-indoctrinated lies than others. But for sure societies where women have a public and gender-integrated role require the polite fiction that males aren't lusting after them around the clock.
The problem is, when you enforce a social fiction for long enough, people start to believe it. This is okay and society functions as long as the noble lies pay their keep for the cost of people doing insane things because they believe lies. Children's crusades, flagellants, etc were the price medieval christendom paid for Catholic doctrine. Lysenkoism, collective farms, etc were the price the USSR paid for Leninism. Social friction and loneliness are part of the price we pay for modern gender ideology and a bigger workforce.
One noble lie paid its keep for a thousand years, the second for a few decades, the third, we'll see.
I would agree that (a) is a foundational lie of larger societies. (b), though, is not quite right. It’s not self-sacrifice, but self-interest, that shores up the superstructure.
Not that self-sacrifice isn’t valuable! It adds slack to the society by incentivizing the least fortunate (or competent) to hold firm instead of snapping. It’s just not sufficient. Christian ideals never eliminated theft and sloth among the worst-off. And when a society tries to rely on people to choose their own sacrifices, it works great until the first defection. Soviet communism was a series of increasingly desperate attempts to patch this prisoner’s dilemma. No, sacrificial collectivism loses out to personal incentives.
Women weren’t martyring themselves for God and country by having children. They were performing the most socially valuable role. When the bottleneck was individual brute strength, men had a dominant competitive advantage in farming and mining and war. Technological advances made women’s labor more valuable just as the cotton gin added value to slave labor. This is enough to explain the development of women’s rights without relying on attitudes about male lust.
The game has changed.
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The women already know they're desired. They are shocked and disgusted by the social faux pas of men confronting them with that desire when they aren't themselves interested.
Maybe. Whenever I hear stories from friends or online, it definitely seems a lot more that they didn't imagine that so many male friends wanted to fuck them. Pretty much every woman I know in real life or seen stories from have been shocked when they go on dating apps for the first time and realize they have hundreds or thousands of likes from men who want to fuck them.
I think this is the critical part. You are under a selection effect of "Anecdotes that women think it will be socially advantageous to publicize", so those are the ones you hear about. Other adjacent anecdotes, you don't.
One therefore ends up only hearing the scenarios that women want to humblebrag about. And she can humblebrag about "I'm so hot that X wanted to fuck me but I'm too good for him so I said "Eww, no, nerd" lol", but she can't humblebrag about "I'm so hot that X wanted to fuck me and so we fucked", because that would make her a slut.
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