I haven’t been able to find it, but I recall seeing sometime last year[1] a discussion somewhere on “rationalist”-adjacent Tumblr space about the dysfunction of the “dating market” — including those, especially men, “left out” — and positing that one issue was that things had not been made “equal” enough, specifically with regards to initiation. That is, that a big part of the problem is the “expectation”[2] that men do the pursuing, and that we need to get women to “initiate” as much as men[3].
I just bring that up because I’ve seen this image floating around lately:
Exactly. Trying to make straight women “chase after” men like men pursue women is a doomed project, fighting human nature.
[1]And thus, before recent events made discussing these topics much more fraught.
[2]You’d think that the people who position themselves as “the party of science” and claim to believe in evolution (as opposed to those awful creationist hicks out there) would be at least a little familiar with the work of Robert Trivers, and that in any sexually-reproducing species, the sex which invests less resources into offspring does the pursuing, and the sex which invests more — and pregnancy and lactation are huge biological investments — are the more selective ones.
[3]I recall one of the most “extreme” proposals, if perhaps the one most aware of the biology outlined above in footnote 2, was to — somehow — encourage people to broadly use (expensive) IVF with sex-selection for daughters to skew the sex ratio more and more female until women become forced, by male rarity, to initiate and pursue with the same vigor as men. (The sort of vague and ridiculous sci-fi proposal one expects from the “transhumanist”/“singularitarian” set.)
