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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.)
You can bargain with whatever you have. Party X wants something from party Y, and to get it tries to... 'convince' the other party by 'showing' them that he has something they want. How that is not bargaining I don't know and I don't care.
Raising the bar for definitions like this is, to me, an irrelevant game of words at best. If we don't disagree on the factual matter at hand then I have to ask again, what are you insinuating my argument is when I use the term 'bargain'?
This seems similar to objections to general manosphere terminology regarding the 'sexual market place'. Where the accuracy or utility of the terminology is disregarded due to it being too vulgar.
I mean, this is about love and companionship and all those nice, beautiful things, right? A relationship just can't be so ugly. True love is beautiful.
Well, from the perspective of a woman, maybe that's the case. They don't see their requirement for money as something vulgar and emotionally negative. They just see it as the way of the world at worst and a necessary stepping stone towards true love at best. But for a man, at least speaking for myself, it does seem rather crass and vulgar to gatekeep something as talked up as affection or 'love' behind a financial requirement. Really betrays and diminishes the entire concept. I mean, that's not something men are supposed to let get between their affection or 'love', right?
Not too vulgar, but as potentially misleading. For example, simply changing the denotation of a word doesn't automatically change its connotations. Hence, one's reasoning can be affected by associations with a word's old reference.
Well, you said:
"You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals."
Well, if "bargaining" specifically means something like handing over money for sex, then certainly masculine traits are irrelevant to the sexual encounter. A femboy, a coward, a dishonest man etc. could do that.
But it seems that you also want to say that anything a guy does to make himself (more?) attractice is also bargaining:
"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."
However, the connection between masculine traits and attraction becomes more integral here. For example, most women find the ability to obtain resources as more attractive than the mere possession. A trust-fund baby is less attractive than a self-made man, because the latter (if the wealth was acquired honestly, not purely by chance etc.) can provide under a wider range of circumstances, e.g. the loss of his wealth. And if you think of your own (platonic) difference in regard for the two men's characters, it's at least because of the masculine traits required to obtain wealth are admirable, whereas the luck required to be born into wealth deserves no admiration at all.
Similarly, you want to say that a woman who buys and uses make-up to attract men is bargaining. However, in that case, feminine traits (delicacy, attention to the comfort of others etc.) are also usually relevant to the success of the woman, in a way that isn't the case in archetypal bargaining, e.g. a woman who gets a hot husband by her family offering a big dowry.
The extension of "these behaviours aren't really masculine/feminine" seems to depend on the claim that there are bargaining for sex, which is true if you stretch the scope of 'bargaining' far enough. However, it doesn't follow from that subsumption of these behaviours into the category "bargaining" that we can infer that they have the properties of archetypal cases of bargaining for sex (or companionship or whatever). The problem is that such non-sequitur inferences are very tempting due to the connotations of "bargaining", even given an explicit change in its reference.
You're right to make the analogy with "sexual marketplace", which is misleading for similar reasons. I have been in brothels and I have dated, and while there are similarities, it's a reciple for loose thinking to refer to both as "sexual marketplaces". Devoted as I am to capitalism and economic analysis, I'm more devoted to rationality and clear thinking, which are harmed by expecting that the associations (descriptive and normative) of words will change simply as a matter of broadening their definitions.
I have no idea what you are doing anymore. I've told you that I don't care what you call it, so long as we are talking about the same thing. At this point you seem to be fixating on words and definitions to get away from the meat of the matter. It just looks like you want to reject a framing of the conversation without saying it.
When someone is talking about the 'sexual market place' in the context of dating in the western world they are obviously not talking about brothels and prostitution. You are not being rational or precise with language when you play these word games. It is at best obtuse and obfuscatory.
The point I'm making is extremely simple. Man A gets approached by women, gets replies on dating apps and in general finds casual sex and relationships very easy to come by. Man B gets none of those things. In fact women don't even look at him for longer than 2 seconds to decide that he is not attractive.
Man A doesn't need to think about his life goals in terms of what he needs to garner attention from women. Man B does. Man B recognizes that if he does not come by some form of 'thing' or 'currency' or 'bargaining chip' or 'whatever word you want' to balance out his apparent unattractiveness to women, he will likely end up alone or unhappy. Both of these guys might be similar otherwise, but their struggle is not the same. Both want sex and affection. One needs the 'thing' to even be able to play the game, the other does not.
If someone uses "Nazi" to mean "conservative", then they obviously don't refer to conservatives, but would their usage really not affect their inferences or the inferences of others?
True, different men, like different women, have to work more or less hard to get romantic success. (This is more unforgiving for women than men: almost any woman can get sex, but what people usually want is a loving long term relationship, and men tend to be the gatekeepers for that. A man can work to balance out his unattractive physical traits, whereas a woman's degree or money is unlikely to help her much with the opposite sex.) This is because people care about physical appearances. Physical attractiveness is certainly helpful for initial attraction, though things like conscientiousness and agreeableness seem to be more important for maintaining love long term, since the latter requires a lot of empathy and (rewarding) hard work.
Now, why is working harder to get what you want through labour, exercise, study etc., rather than largely getting it due to inborn attractiveness, not "masculine"? Stereotypically, I would have thought the opposite: a man who is admired by women through displaying virtues and competence is more "manly" than one who is admired by women purely on innate physical grounds. Consider a reversal: is there something unusually masculine about the story of a woman who DID win the affection of her beloved through her abilities and character, despite her plain looks and innately awkward personality?
I appreciate the appeal of gaining easy approval due to one's looks, but I see it as a more classically female way to gain romantic success. Even in nature, among animals that do mating rituals, it's the male that needs to prove himself through dances, chasing the female around etc. in order to mate. Usually, the female just has to look fertile and healthy, and perhaps not even that, even if the result of mating is the male being eaten.
Think Cinderella (be beautiful and agreeable, then someone will eventually be nice to you) vs. Indiana Jones (handsome man, but still only gets the girl by proving himself, proves himself by solving problems and by saving her from danger - sometimes repeatedly in the same movie). Obviously, the latter is more of a classically masculine archetype: the questing knight in European folklore.
This is also seems to be why "saving the man from danger" has more of a maternal rather than romantic feel when it's a woman doing the saving, whereas "saving the woman from danger" has more of a heroic and sexy quality when it's a man doing the saving, unless it's literally saving his daughter as in the Taken movies. And if a man can save the village/kingdom/world/universe, then he's that much more of a classically masculine figure, since he must display great virtue/competence to do so.
To play your own game, if someone uses the term 'conservative' to refer to conservatives, I don't really know what they mean either. A conservative in rural Kentucky is not the same as a conservative in Washington party politics. A conservative today is not the same as a conservative from 60 years ago. What people are talking about and referring to is derived from context. Who they are, who they are referring to specifically and to what end.
I can, for instance, recognize that some person on twitter calling some 'conservative' a nazi is probably a lib/left/progressive voicing their emotional distaste more than they are making a relevant 1:1 comparison between 'conservatism' and the National Socialist German Workers Party of Adolf Hitler from the 1930's. By the same token I can disagree with their terminology I can recognize their actual contention.
As for the rest of the points you make, I feel like you are going a bit beyond the relevant subjects.
On this we agree. The rest of the paragraph, however, is irrelevant to the matter at hand. This is not a dissection of the sex wars from a point of view of who has it better or worse. Even if men in their current state are on aggregate more happy than women the problems they are having still exist and they can still be miserable. On top of that, men who can't even get a reply on Tinder are not gatekeepers for relationships. Looking at the situation from this angle loses sight on the topic of: attention from women, prosocial behavior and masculinity.
Because, as I maintained in my reply to OP, getting women is a competition. If you lose the competition it doesn't matter what you've done or how hard you have worked. And ultimately every man understands that if you are not successfully getting women, you are in a sense a loser compared to those who are successful. You can't be masculine and a loser.
How we see things in the abstract, infused with all our idyllic romanticism, is completely irrelevant. Like the Japanese veteran turned beggar shows. The heroic soldier doesn't return to the women of the country he fought for, where they await him with open arms in recognition of his struggle and feats of bravery. He returns to see them fornicating with the guys who nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he is forced to beg them for scraps.
We don't need a hypothetical analogue from the animal kingdom to dispel our fantasy notions of how things ought to be. Some men need to own a house, at the very least, to get any attention from women. Other men don't.
You might really like the notions of masculinity and chivalry you express, or notions similar to 'constructive masculinity' as expressed by the author of OP's article, but that's just that. I'm not going to repeat what I've said on the problem prosocial masculinity faces, as I've already written a comment on it here
But I think it's safe to say that, again, it's dead in the water and a lot of men realize this.
Ok, now I'm sure I don't know what you are talking about. Why not?
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