I'm not confused about that! My post says very clearly that women shouldn't ask men out if they're very into 1950's-style gender roles. I strongly advise that people reject those unless they have a specific kink for them, but I agree that men & women should play those roles if that's what they want. Now I'll have to write a whole post on why you probably don't want that
i don't particularly think that "wanting to be feminine" is something i can't admit to myself, but thank you for bringing it to my attention just in case. i don't disagree with your description of the dance between the roles, i just don't think it's arbitrary (or "designed"--figure of speech?) it seems like it just arises from incentives
Yeah, "are we having a good dance" IS the criteria that makes someone "suitable" - not whether or not they have asked you out. Walking up to someone and asking them out with no further context isn't useful information, but having a good dance with someone *is*. Asking someone out is asking if they want to continue dancing with you - it won't be very effective if you haven't had a good dance yet. Women aren't going to explicitly ask to continue the dance if they're not having a good dance. But they can and SHOULD be putting in effort to make the dance enjoyable.
It's not "wanting to be feminine." Both men and women want to have a good dance. If you see that your partner isn't putting in effort, you're not going to be interested. It very literally takes two to tango. A man might be the one to choose a woman just to get the dance started, but if they aren't both actively choosing each other in the middle of the dance, neither party is going to want to continue the dance.
> they’ll sleep with you and then move on, and you’ll still be single.
I believe the fear is that they won't move on, and you'll end up in a multi-year situationship.
Relatedly, I view SO as agreeing with you that the point of dating is to figure out if you're compatible, and that breaking up does not mean the dating was a failure. The failure is spending months or years in a relationship after you could have figured out it was never going where you wanted.
There are degrees of “asking someone out”. “I want a provisional commuted romantic relationship” is different to “my friends are going to the markets on Saturday; you should come along”. Depending on your cultural vibes, the first might be a sexual invitation; the latter is making space for more interaction.
This is great food for thought! I think it’s possible to be more agentic and provide more signal/encouragement from the feminine role than the average woman goes for. It’s strange to me that a lot of this back and forth makes “asking someone out” so binary. In my experience, it can often be a collaborative process. Like maybe I serve up an easy opening if I’d like a guy to ask me out. Threading this needle is something I touch on in my latest post. But there’s probably much more to be said on that issue.
An honest debate about sex and gender would admit that finding (or choosing not to find) a mate is both the most-important and the hardest task in life, and that gender roles play important, well, /roles/ in making that both simpler and more-satisfying, /even if they're entirely socially constructed/. There are big pluses and big minuses to eliminating gender roles. I'd like people to be able to opt out, but it's more important that people still be able to opt in.
I don't think that wanting to gain information about the other party necessarily means the sexes are "at war". As you say, gaining information IS the point of "being interested" in someone. The hinge point seems to be whether you should gain information before going on a date, or set up the date first to gain information.
If you see the date as the primary way to gain information, then not asking someone out seems like throwing a valuable opportunity away. But there is plenty of information that you can get from someone before going on a date - and, crucially, the data point isn't simply "he asked me out so he has some interest in marrying me."
Fixating on "who asked out whom" is precisely what obscures where the information actually lies. As Cyn wrote, the way flirting naturally progresses is not a single moment of asking out, but instead a series of small escalations where both people take turns being brave. That's the collaborative dance that everybody wants! If the dance is going well, then officially asking someone out comes naturally - but it's actually completely unnecessary, because the information has already been gained. (by BOTH parties!)
So when a woman says "he hasn't asked me out so he's not suitable", it's not "he hasn't uttered words to invite me to a date", it's "we haven't had enough of a dance yet." Both men and women can be limp dance partners who do nothing to drive the dance forward. What makes a dance good is when *both* partners can see that the other is putting in *effort* - that the other is *invested*.
A man officially inviting a woman on a date isn't the One Defining Moment that proves he's the Masculine Pursuer. It's just the natural result when he's been continuously putting in effort. Women SHOULD be putting in effort as well - but asking a man out is not the only way to do so. Asking someone out is the output of effort, not the input.
Extremely well said! The question then turns to why some women have such an aversion to executing a particular step. "That step is a turn off" is a reasonable reason. All the other arguments are excuses.
Though it's also possible they haven't learned the right time to do that step, and so they keep failing at it and ending up with bad results. "I don't want to take the time to learn that step when I think men should have already learned it" is a reasonable answer, but uh.... lots of men also haven't learned it due to the social climate I hint at, so it's gonna remove good options. But if you're that bad at the step, it might let you avoid more bad mistakes than missed good options.
Well, if the point of the dance is to find someone who's a good dance partner for you, there's no particular reason that you have to do your partner's step for them. This goes in both directions: if the man isn't actively putting in effort, the woman has no obligation to push things further. If the woman isn't actively putting in effort, the man has no obligation to push things further either. BOTH sides need to be active. Is it really removing a good option, if the criteria for "good" is being able to do the thing that hasn't been done? Not "is this person a good option", but "are WE a good option?"
Yes, someone needs to be the first to put in effort to get the ball rolling. But it doesn't really matter who as long as the response is active. As both Wes and Cyn have said, "being active" doesn't have to be literally asking someone on a date. For women, it might be asking to go to a quieter room to talk. It might be Sasha Chapin's "responsiveness". What matters is that you're both actively engaged, actively taking risks and responding to each other. That's the filter - not "did they literally ask me out" but "are we, figuratively, asking each other out and responding, in an escalating cycle?" That's the same evaluation you'd get from a good date anyway. Why not start the process now?
“Women have an aversion to that step because that step is a turnoff for women” is not a reasonable reason, it’s a circular statement. Women don’t like thing because women don’t like thing. It’s like saying people like eating sweet things because sweet things taste sweet and we like sweet tastes.
If you want a reason you might ask questions like “what is it about the composition of things that taste sweet, that might make them good for human organisms to consume them, such that human taste buds give us rewarding signals when we consume those things?” You might get an answer like “things that taste sweet are things that have readily available simple carbohydrates, and don’t have toxic components that we perceive as bitter or foul, so that in the ancestral environment—where easily digestible energy was rare and good for survival—organisms wired to seek such foods out tended to survive.”
You could ask analogous questions about why it doesn’t feel good for women to pursue men—why pursuing men gives women unpleasant signals, like eating a bitter substance. If you were interested.
This piece brilliantly cuts through the surface-level "information theory" framing to reveal what's really at stake in dating dynamics. The insight that many women can't openly articulate their desire to embody the feminine aesthetic—even to themselves—is particularly astute.
The contrast between "Dating For Marriage" and "Dating For Discovery" resonates deeply. Your personal story about the JW marriage mindset illustrates how destructive it can be when dating is viewed solely as a commitment pipeline rather than a collaborative exploration of compatibility.
What strikes me most is your reframing away from the adversarial model. The war-between-the-sexes framing breeds exactly the kind of resentment and strategic thinking that makes genuine connection impossible. When one party is calculating information advantages rather than genuinely connecting, everyone loses.
The complementary dance metaphor is apt—masculine and feminine aesthetics exist not in opposition but in collaborative harmony. The tragedy is that modern discourse has made it nearly impossible to discuss this openly without being accused of regressive thinking, forcing people into these elaborate justifications about "information asymmetries."
Though I'd add: the jugaad social tech observation is fascinating but perhaps incomplete. Sometimes these elaborate justifications aren't just covers for taboo desires—they're how people actually experience their preferences. The felt sense of "this doesn't work because of information asymmetry" might be the genuine psychological reality, even if the underlying cause is aesthetic preference.
It feels good for women to be pursued rather than pursuing because being pursued is a better evolutionary strategy for women than pursuing, so human nature rewards being pursued with good feelings and pursuing with bad feeling to encourage women to pursue the more successful strategy. I.e. being pursued feels good for the same reason that fire hurts or we prefer looking at a landscape of a green field with some trees, water running through it, and mountains in the background than an inhospitable waste or why dead or diseased things provoke disgust. These feelings encourage us to do the evolutionarily smart thing: move our hands out of flames, settle in places with good survival prospects, avoid sources of disease.
Why is being pursued a better strategy for women? Because men have a category of women we desire enough to be willing to pursue, and much larger category of women we aren’t willing to pursue but are willing to sleep with if it drops in our lap. It isn’t a matter of gaining fine-grained information about compatibility like you’d gain on a date. It’s about learning which of two categories you fit in for him: highly desirable (and therefore potential partner), or meh but worth a throwaway fuck? Throughout human history women who pursued tended to be used as throwaway fucks by lots of guys. This is not a successful strategy for women, as it tends to leave them with vulnerable babies needing care and no man around to help. So the selfish genes that survived were those that made women feel bad about being used as throwaway fucks and about pursuing, and made them feel nice and feminine and good about being pursued.
What part seems like fanfic to you? Do you think the Venn diagram of “women I would spend effort to pursue” and “women I would fuck if it cost me no effort” is a single circle for most guys?
Do you dispute that our biological natures, shaped by evolution, cause things that were evolutionarily successful to feel good and rewarding, and things that were not successful to feel aversive? Like, people whose impulse when confronted with a dangerous cliff was to go run along the edge of it tended not to reproduce, so most of us have a wariness around heights; people whose impulse when confronted with a strange bug or snake was to go pick up up, likewise, so we have an aversion, etc.?
In other words, your explanation of women wanting to be pursued is that it feels feminine to be pursued, and women like to feel feminine. I.e. you go as far as “it feels good”, and then you stop. Do you think “WHY does it feel good?” is a useful question? Why does sex feel good—just because, or is there an evolutionary reason?
This stuff seems so obvious that I feel weird having to say it.
P.S. Yes it is easier to not do work. That’s true for both sexes. And yet men do the work of approaching much more than women do. Your “it’s hard” explanation doesn’t explain this difference. The difference is the entire thing we’re talking about.
“If cows had wings you’d have a story about why that is due to evolutionary pressure.” Yes, natural phenomena that exist tend to have natural explanations. But men aren’t the ones who are generally pursued.
The reason “why it is feminine” to be pursued is that the female sex has higher mating investment (egg, gestation, nursing, risk of physical injury in childbirth, etc), and is vulnerable and in need of support while pregnant and giving care to small children. Therefore the female sex has a strong incentive to have some assurance of male commitment before engaging in mating. Willingness to expend effort to make the first move is one sign that a man might be interested in making a commitment. Therefore the female sex has an evolutionary incentive to wait and see who approaches rather than make the first move. Our evolutionary drives give us nudges in the form of feelings, towards advantageous behaviors. Therefore women tend to feel better sitting back and letting men pursue. Therefore prefer to let men pursue—it feels better to them than the other way around so they do it more.
Behaviors that the female sex prefer and enjoy, we describe as “feminine.” For instance, in human beings it is evolutionarily advantageous for young women to ornament and display themselves so as to catch the attention of a wider range of men, and so have a wider range of suitors. Therefore things like makeup, fashion, dancing, figure skating, etc are feminine-coded. Men find it evolutionarily advantageous to struggle, compete, even to dominate, so fighting, rough competitive sports, poker, war games, etc are masculine coded. Men enjoy rough physical and mental competition; women enjoy looking pretty and graceful and being admired by large numbers of people for it.
What’s your explanation for why some things are seen as feminine and other things as masculine? Just random? Imposed by culture for some arbitrary reason?
>Indeed, even in college you shouldn’t be dating, unless maybe it’s your final year and you have good job prospects and actually you ARE looking for a wife you could reasonably marry in the next few months.
I thought JWs weren't supposed to go to college at all?
I'm not confused about that! My post says very clearly that women shouldn't ask men out if they're very into 1950's-style gender roles. I strongly advise that people reject those unless they have a specific kink for them, but I agree that men & women should play those roles if that's what they want. Now I'll have to write a whole post on why you probably don't want that
I’m looking forward to it :)
i don't particularly think that "wanting to be feminine" is something i can't admit to myself, but thank you for bringing it to my attention just in case. i don't disagree with your description of the dance between the roles, i just don't think it's arbitrary (or "designed"--figure of speech?) it seems like it just arises from incentives
I don’t think it’s arbitrary either, tbc.
Yeah, "are we having a good dance" IS the criteria that makes someone "suitable" - not whether or not they have asked you out. Walking up to someone and asking them out with no further context isn't useful information, but having a good dance with someone *is*. Asking someone out is asking if they want to continue dancing with you - it won't be very effective if you haven't had a good dance yet. Women aren't going to explicitly ask to continue the dance if they're not having a good dance. But they can and SHOULD be putting in effort to make the dance enjoyable.
It's not "wanting to be feminine." Both men and women want to have a good dance. If you see that your partner isn't putting in effort, you're not going to be interested. It very literally takes two to tango. A man might be the one to choose a woman just to get the dance started, but if they aren't both actively choosing each other in the middle of the dance, neither party is going to want to continue the dance.
_Being feminine_ is vague enough you probably don’t want to embody what some people understand by it.
> they’ll sleep with you and then move on, and you’ll still be single.
I believe the fear is that they won't move on, and you'll end up in a multi-year situationship.
Relatedly, I view SO as agreeing with you that the point of dating is to figure out if you're compatible, and that breaking up does not mean the dating was a failure. The failure is spending months or years in a relationship after you could have figured out it was never going where you wanted.
I think this further reinforces my claim. :) That failure mode is equally likely regardless of who the initiator is.
I feel that this has unblurred part of my world model, thank you!
There are degrees of “asking someone out”. “I want a provisional commuted romantic relationship” is different to “my friends are going to the markets on Saturday; you should come along”. Depending on your cultural vibes, the first might be a sexual invitation; the latter is making space for more interaction.
This is great food for thought! I think it’s possible to be more agentic and provide more signal/encouragement from the feminine role than the average woman goes for. It’s strange to me that a lot of this back and forth makes “asking someone out” so binary. In my experience, it can often be a collaborative process. Like maybe I serve up an easy opening if I’d like a guy to ask me out. Threading this needle is something I touch on in my latest post. But there’s probably much more to be said on that issue.
An honest debate about sex and gender would admit that finding (or choosing not to find) a mate is both the most-important and the hardest task in life, and that gender roles play important, well, /roles/ in making that both simpler and more-satisfying, /even if they're entirely socially constructed/. There are big pluses and big minuses to eliminating gender roles. I'd like people to be able to opt out, but it's more important that people still be able to opt in.
I don't think that wanting to gain information about the other party necessarily means the sexes are "at war". As you say, gaining information IS the point of "being interested" in someone. The hinge point seems to be whether you should gain information before going on a date, or set up the date first to gain information.
If you see the date as the primary way to gain information, then not asking someone out seems like throwing a valuable opportunity away. But there is plenty of information that you can get from someone before going on a date - and, crucially, the data point isn't simply "he asked me out so he has some interest in marrying me."
Fixating on "who asked out whom" is precisely what obscures where the information actually lies. As Cyn wrote, the way flirting naturally progresses is not a single moment of asking out, but instead a series of small escalations where both people take turns being brave. That's the collaborative dance that everybody wants! If the dance is going well, then officially asking someone out comes naturally - but it's actually completely unnecessary, because the information has already been gained. (by BOTH parties!)
So when a woman says "he hasn't asked me out so he's not suitable", it's not "he hasn't uttered words to invite me to a date", it's "we haven't had enough of a dance yet." Both men and women can be limp dance partners who do nothing to drive the dance forward. What makes a dance good is when *both* partners can see that the other is putting in *effort* - that the other is *invested*.
A man officially inviting a woman on a date isn't the One Defining Moment that proves he's the Masculine Pursuer. It's just the natural result when he's been continuously putting in effort. Women SHOULD be putting in effort as well - but asking a man out is not the only way to do so. Asking someone out is the output of effort, not the input.
Extremely well said! The question then turns to why some women have such an aversion to executing a particular step. "That step is a turn off" is a reasonable reason. All the other arguments are excuses.
Though it's also possible they haven't learned the right time to do that step, and so they keep failing at it and ending up with bad results. "I don't want to take the time to learn that step when I think men should have already learned it" is a reasonable answer, but uh.... lots of men also haven't learned it due to the social climate I hint at, so it's gonna remove good options. But if you're that bad at the step, it might let you avoid more bad mistakes than missed good options.
Well, if the point of the dance is to find someone who's a good dance partner for you, there's no particular reason that you have to do your partner's step for them. This goes in both directions: if the man isn't actively putting in effort, the woman has no obligation to push things further. If the woman isn't actively putting in effort, the man has no obligation to push things further either. BOTH sides need to be active. Is it really removing a good option, if the criteria for "good" is being able to do the thing that hasn't been done? Not "is this person a good option", but "are WE a good option?"
Yes, someone needs to be the first to put in effort to get the ball rolling. But it doesn't really matter who as long as the response is active. As both Wes and Cyn have said, "being active" doesn't have to be literally asking someone on a date. For women, it might be asking to go to a quieter room to talk. It might be Sasha Chapin's "responsiveness". What matters is that you're both actively engaged, actively taking risks and responding to each other. That's the filter - not "did they literally ask me out" but "are we, figuratively, asking each other out and responding, in an escalating cycle?" That's the same evaluation you'd get from a good date anyway. Why not start the process now?
“Women have an aversion to that step because that step is a turnoff for women” is not a reasonable reason, it’s a circular statement. Women don’t like thing because women don’t like thing. It’s like saying people like eating sweet things because sweet things taste sweet and we like sweet tastes.
If you want a reason you might ask questions like “what is it about the composition of things that taste sweet, that might make them good for human organisms to consume them, such that human taste buds give us rewarding signals when we consume those things?” You might get an answer like “things that taste sweet are things that have readily available simple carbohydrates, and don’t have toxic components that we perceive as bitter or foul, so that in the ancestral environment—where easily digestible energy was rare and good for survival—organisms wired to seek such foods out tended to survive.”
You could ask analogous questions about why it doesn’t feel good for women to pursue men—why pursuing men gives women unpleasant signals, like eating a bitter substance. If you were interested.
This piece brilliantly cuts through the surface-level "information theory" framing to reveal what's really at stake in dating dynamics. The insight that many women can't openly articulate their desire to embody the feminine aesthetic—even to themselves—is particularly astute.
The contrast between "Dating For Marriage" and "Dating For Discovery" resonates deeply. Your personal story about the JW marriage mindset illustrates how destructive it can be when dating is viewed solely as a commitment pipeline rather than a collaborative exploration of compatibility.
What strikes me most is your reframing away from the adversarial model. The war-between-the-sexes framing breeds exactly the kind of resentment and strategic thinking that makes genuine connection impossible. When one party is calculating information advantages rather than genuinely connecting, everyone loses.
The complementary dance metaphor is apt—masculine and feminine aesthetics exist not in opposition but in collaborative harmony. The tragedy is that modern discourse has made it nearly impossible to discuss this openly without being accused of regressive thinking, forcing people into these elaborate justifications about "information asymmetries."
Though I'd add: the jugaad social tech observation is fascinating but perhaps incomplete. Sometimes these elaborate justifications aren't just covers for taboo desires—they're how people actually experience their preferences. The felt sense of "this doesn't work because of information asymmetry" might be the genuine psychological reality, even if the underlying cause is aesthetic preference.
It feels good for women to be pursued rather than pursuing because being pursued is a better evolutionary strategy for women than pursuing, so human nature rewards being pursued with good feelings and pursuing with bad feeling to encourage women to pursue the more successful strategy. I.e. being pursued feels good for the same reason that fire hurts or we prefer looking at a landscape of a green field with some trees, water running through it, and mountains in the background than an inhospitable waste or why dead or diseased things provoke disgust. These feelings encourage us to do the evolutionarily smart thing: move our hands out of flames, settle in places with good survival prospects, avoid sources of disease.
Why is being pursued a better strategy for women? Because men have a category of women we desire enough to be willing to pursue, and much larger category of women we aren’t willing to pursue but are willing to sleep with if it drops in our lap. It isn’t a matter of gaining fine-grained information about compatibility like you’d gain on a date. It’s about learning which of two categories you fit in for him: highly desirable (and therefore potential partner), or meh but worth a throwaway fuck? Throughout human history women who pursued tended to be used as throwaway fucks by lots of guys. This is not a successful strategy for women, as it tends to leave them with vulnerable babies needing care and no man around to help. So the selfish genes that survived were those that made women feel bad about being used as throwaway fucks and about pursuing, and made them feel nice and feminine and good about being pursued.
This sounds like it would make a great world building doc for your fanfic, but I was addressing regular humans in the real world
What part seems like fanfic to you? Do you think the Venn diagram of “women I would spend effort to pursue” and “women I would fuck if it cost me no effort” is a single circle for most guys?
All the evo-psych stuff that claims a grand reason for this greater than "it's easier to not do work"
Do you dispute that our biological natures, shaped by evolution, cause things that were evolutionarily successful to feel good and rewarding, and things that were not successful to feel aversive? Like, people whose impulse when confronted with a dangerous cliff was to go run along the edge of it tended not to reproduce, so most of us have a wariness around heights; people whose impulse when confronted with a strange bug or snake was to go pick up up, likewise, so we have an aversion, etc.?
In other words, your explanation of women wanting to be pursued is that it feels feminine to be pursued, and women like to feel feminine. I.e. you go as far as “it feels good”, and then you stop. Do you think “WHY does it feel good?” is a useful question? Why does sex feel good—just because, or is there an evolutionary reason?
This stuff seems so obvious that I feel weird having to say it.
P.S. Yes it is easier to not do work. That’s true for both sexes. And yet men do the work of approaching much more than women do. Your “it’s hard” explanation doesn’t explain this difference. The difference is the entire thing we’re talking about.
It feels good for men to be pursued too! If men were the ones that are pursued you would have a story about why that is due to evolutionary pressure.
The real question is why is it feminine.
“If cows had wings you’d have a story about why that is due to evolutionary pressure.” Yes, natural phenomena that exist tend to have natural explanations. But men aren’t the ones who are generally pursued.
The reason “why it is feminine” to be pursued is that the female sex has higher mating investment (egg, gestation, nursing, risk of physical injury in childbirth, etc), and is vulnerable and in need of support while pregnant and giving care to small children. Therefore the female sex has a strong incentive to have some assurance of male commitment before engaging in mating. Willingness to expend effort to make the first move is one sign that a man might be interested in making a commitment. Therefore the female sex has an evolutionary incentive to wait and see who approaches rather than make the first move. Our evolutionary drives give us nudges in the form of feelings, towards advantageous behaviors. Therefore women tend to feel better sitting back and letting men pursue. Therefore prefer to let men pursue—it feels better to them than the other way around so they do it more.
Behaviors that the female sex prefer and enjoy, we describe as “feminine.” For instance, in human beings it is evolutionarily advantageous for young women to ornament and display themselves so as to catch the attention of a wider range of men, and so have a wider range of suitors. Therefore things like makeup, fashion, dancing, figure skating, etc are feminine-coded. Men find it evolutionarily advantageous to struggle, compete, even to dominate, so fighting, rough competitive sports, poker, war games, etc are masculine coded. Men enjoy rough physical and mental competition; women enjoy looking pretty and graceful and being admired by large numbers of people for it.
What’s your explanation for why some things are seen as feminine and other things as masculine? Just random? Imposed by culture for some arbitrary reason?
> This is a weird premise, because the whole point of going on a date is to gather information on whether you are compatible
you're assuming very different premises. isn't the whole point of going on a date to have sex？
No. You're right, we're assuming very different premises.
>Indeed, even in college you shouldn’t be dating, unless maybe it’s your final year and you have good job prospects and actually you ARE looking for a wife you could reasonably marry in the next few months.
I thought JWs weren't supposed to go to college at all?
It's discouraged, but it's an individual choice, and my parents were extremely education-pilled.
This is really nicely articulated ❤️