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Notes -
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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