I'm a straight man who wants to be attractive to women, but society's masculine sex figures (capeshit heroes, underwear models, etc) are shaped for the male gaze even when they're ostensibly meant to be attractive to straight women.* So I'm afraid that emulating their examples, or cultural "common knowledge" about how to perform attractiveness, is mostly making me more attractive to men. Recently I was looking at a male friend's Bumble with some female friends and felt like I totally didn't understand female desire. And men seem a lot more interested in me than women.
Does anyone have reading suggestions? I'm NOT interested in redditisms like "women like rolled up sleeves", I want something more holistic and contextualized.
This post was prompted by a /r/MensLib post but please don't continue their comment fights here.
* Except for "women's media". Boy bands, romance novels, reality TV, etc. I would much rather read theory than consume a lot of pop culture though.
edit: holy shit guys please give me THEORY RECS. I don't care about individual opinions, the internet is full of them already and the comments are full of what I already talked about: cultural "common knowledge" about how to perform attractiveness.
For sure, it's gonna be a cultural analysis. I read The Sexual Politics of Meat recently and it made a lot of stuff explicit that was previously just a background hum to me.
I know I said I wasn't interested in anecdotes but I'm curious about this group signifier thing - are you talking like socioeconomic or friend group level? Or like subcultures
Looks like an interesting read, thanks.
As far as groups go, I was kinda thinking about queer culture (sorry ik you're straight). There are a ton of different queer subgroups, and some people work very hard to indicate one allegiance over another. If you go look at fashion advice social media, there are literally a ton of posts asking things like "how can I look more like a lesbian, but not too much?"
I think straight relationships actually work the same way. Like recently I was talking about dating app profiles with some friends. The women were all complaining about guys who have fishing pictures, and I joked that it's the male version of women with a bunch of pics with horses. Both of these are usually bad pic ideas, because they signal that you're part of a group who statistically is dominated by one gender. If there was no "horse girl" culture, then maybe it would be a great idea for a pic because the men would think it's cool they share a hobby.
Political affiliation is a pretty important group in modern American dating as well. I know it relies on dumb stereotypes, but I'm absolutely trying to figure out how likely a guy is to be a chud or something before I interact. In practice, and as long as you meet a basic standard a conventional attractiveness, I think the culture / group identity stuff is way important than how well you appeal to some nebulous idea of what women actually like.
This is interesting. Do you think your friends feel the same way? For me that's not how I approach desire. Being in the right groups (at least sort of leftist, not a rich kid, compatible sense of humor, etc.) affects whether I want to get to know them more, and I might think someone is less hot if they open their mouth and they're an awful person, but the base starting point of whether I'm attracted to them or like emotionally desire them is mostly physical. Hard to tell through apps of course.
I always viewed this as a class thing - men usually say horse girls are "crazy" which is gross but it is an expensive pursuit. Cars/guns/probably fishing have like an actively misogynistic culture so I get how that gives you a politics/personality preview. Is there a fucked up horse girl culture I don't know about?
I think that just because you start with physical features when thinking about attractiveness doesn't mean you're not working with cultural preferences or assigning groups. One of the first things I notice about someone physically is their age. I'm only interested in people around my age, so what I'm doing here is assigning them a group based on my observations of their appearance. This is even mediated by culture to some degree, because part of the way I guess someone's age is how they dress and act and stuff. Also, if one lived in a culture where different age relationships were normalized, maybe that would affect their attraction.
Somebody else in your thread said they were into nerdy looking guys in graphic t shirts, which isn't at all uncommon. What I don't think is happening here is that people are imagining the platonic ideal of exactly the type of man they want to have sex with is a cute but nerdy one. That doesn't mean the attraction isn't real though.
I didn't read too much into the horse girls and fish guys thing. It's just that both groups are notorious for being obsessive I guess.
Thanks for your thoughts - take care!