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Why do you dismiss this so readily? In my view, this topic is the crucial point of life for many men.
Why such a callous dismissal?
I don't find my 'dismissal' callous. I explain it in the rest of my post.
You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals. They give it away for free to those they actually like. And how much you work has nothing to do with it. That fact doesn't just leave the authors 'constructive masculinity' dead in the water, it leaves practically every 'socially positive' definition of masculinity dead in the water.
As other people have said, you don't necessarily have to bargain. Just attain high status and signal interest, and the rest takes care of itself.
I am optimistic we can find a way to encourage prosocial behavior without literally making women property.
I.e. bargain.
What type of mating situation would not be bargaining?
None. It's not that you are bargaining that's the point. It's what you are bargaining and what for.
You can't consider yourself 'masculine' after working away to become 'high status' to attain the thing some other guy has been getting without having to 'work'. It just doesn't add up. Which leaves all of these prosocial 'constructive masculinity' prescriptions dead in the water.
In short, consciously attempting to do something to attract women reduces your attractiveness to women, correct? So prosocial masculinity is a contradiction in terms because 'being prosocial to attract women' and 'attracting women' are incompatible, or at least orthogonal.
If so, I think it's somewhat true but also somewhat overstating the case. Unless you possess animal magnetism, trying to look a bit better is probably worth it. And increasing your status is also probably worth it. But it will never make you one of those men who just scores effortlessly.
(I'm going to agree with what you said with more words)
Kind of. You can increase your bargaining power. Like, owning a house or a decent sized apartment is enough to bag yourself a single mother. But in a Venn diagram of three items, 'prosocial', 'attractive' and 'realistically feasible for a young man', you have a very small intersection between all three. Small enough to justify saying, in my view, that these are not realistically achievable. Or at least I would not prescribe the prosocial constructive masculinity framework to anyone I actually care about.
There's a distinction we can make between personal life advice and social commentary. Yes, bettering your life is very possible and for most, easy. Study hard, get a good job, work hard. You get rewarded for this by the time you are 30 compared to if you don't.
But from a social commentary standpoint, what does the life of an 'unattractive' man who does this look like between 16-27 compared to someone who doesn't need to? To echo Elliot Rodgers: "It's not fair!".
You piously work your way through your youngest and most exciting years starved of attention from the opposite sex to do what? Get settled for by the time you hit 30 by some woman who expects you to pay down all the loans she took to fuel her party days of college? Where she had sex with guys she actually wanted to have sex with? Meanwhile you, for all intents and purposes, are in a platonic monetary relationship with this person. You know she doesn't like you the same way she liked those other guys.
I think every man knows in their heart that such a state of affairs is tragic and humiliating. Potentially more tragic and humiliating than just folding. After all, is such a life really worth working hard for?
I think that, regardless of everything else, the 'prosocial' crowd has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Though I agree with @TheDag to an extent. You need meaning, a greater purpose, a true faith to overcome this. There's no way you can tell a non-insignificant percentage of young men that they will simply have to ignore their own emotions and bootstrap themselves through the loneliness whilst there's an ongoing propaganda war on social media where everyone is trying to out-advertise and out-sexualize everyone else to show off just how much fun they are having.
But short of resurrecting Jesus Christ or Adolf Hitler, I don't know the intended way to do that.
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No, a bargain is a quid-pro-quo. "Oooh, that tall guy from Goldman Sachs is so hot, and he's looking at me" is not a bargain.
You are bargaining with the hypothetical woman when you decide to become a tall guy working at Goldman Sachs to garner her interest. You bring being tall and having money, she brings whatever.
Making oneself attractive to women is not the same as bargaining with a woman. And the hypothetical tall Goldman Sachs guy didn't choose to be tall anyway. As you yourself said, she'll give it away for free to him.
If you know a woman would not consider you attractive if you don't work at Goldman Sachs, so you seek to work at Goldman Sachs, what word would you use to describe you working at Goldman Sachs in relation to that woman and their attraction to you? I like the term 'bargaining chip'.
It might not be verbal, but that woman weighed you as 'attractive' on her scale because of that job. You needed that 'bargaining chip'.
I like the term "panty dropper".
It's still not a bargain. There was no negotiation (nor even offer) and she gets nothing from it. There's no "Hey, schlub, you get a job at Goldman-Sachs and I'll be hot for you". She just IS that way.
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This is starting to sound like the noncentral fallacy, and perhaps a particularly bad version of it. "I can stretch the meaning of X to include Y, therefore I can extend judgements about central cases of X to Y" is not a good argument.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
Is a woman wearing makeup to attract men "bargaining" too?
I think you are employing the 'I don't like the connotations of this so I'm going to call it a fallacy' fallacy. I'm not stretching the meaning of 'bargaining' here at all. Beyond that I don't know what you are insinuating that I am arguing for. I am giving a description of reality. If you want to use different words to describe it, go ahead. It doesn't change the fact that most men have to learn that just being themselves isn't good enough. They need something more. Which is where the entire self improvement become masculine and worthy crap comes from.
Kind of. She's leveraging what she already has.
To help elucidate a bit, a part of the frustration monetarily successful women have described in media is that they want to be able to bargain for a better man than their looks could command but can't since a lot of men don't care about their money. I.e. their money has no bargaining power over the men they want. So they write articles about how men are intimidated by successful middle aged women or whatever.
You don't think it's stretching "at all" to extend it to interactions with no agreement on sufficient conditions for the exchange, articulated negotiations, or legal enforcement? And from a political or commercial context to a romantic one?
But I totally agree with your first two sentences and I don't know what the third one means. My complaint is that thinking of "You have to work hard to gain the romantic approval of others" as "bargaining" is trying to generate a specific emotional response by including the former in the latter category (which, sure, you can do with the right defintions) where the archetypal form of similar bargaining would be e.g. prostitution or arranged marriages.
She's amplifying it, granted. But that doesn't make it bargaining.
Why put it in terms of "bargaining power", rather than "men are largely indifferent to money in a partner, at least for deciding whether to have sex with them"?
(Maybe it also extends to whether they consider women to be marriage-material, but the evidence I have seen is about women's sexual success. And some of that has been dubious e.g. relative frequency of simultaneous partners, but that presupposes that a sexually attractive woman is more likely to have multiple simultaneous partners, something I don't know to be true. Sleeping around seems to require attractiveness on the part of men, but desperation is a sufficient condition for even unattractive women.)
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