Ok, with this follow up, I now understand yesterday’s Cartoons Hate Her piece much better (yesterday’s confused me).

This one makes more sense but I want to point out that the quote below isn't true…in fact men get a TON of crap and shamed by other men for seeming to make too many efforts or engaging in too degrading of behavior, in an effort to attract women. They don't get told they're “centering women”, they get told they're simps, cucks, soyboys, pathetic, pussy-whipped, etc. Both sexes try to pressure and shame their cohorts out of making too extensive efforts for a really obvious reason…they're in competition and don't want an arm’s race to the bottom that makes their entire sex worse off.

Why would women all want to have to spend 2 hours of effort per day on their appearance, when it will actually change nothing about any of their respective odds of attracting someone, since those in the top will still win and now everyone’s standards are just higher and everyone has to do more work? Why would men? It’s to everyone’s benefit to try to keep standards as low as possible and try to restrain the most competitive from running the board and making everyone do more work just to keep up. This is just basic economics.

And why you will see a lot of women using allegedly feminist theory to try to prevent such an arm’s race, and to try to convince men they don't/shouldn't really want those women who make those efforts, and that they should lower their standards. Men do precisely the same thing and try to shame guys who make more efforts at being nice, fit and attractive, having engaging and fun/personable social skills, etc, and also do the same thing of trying to convince women they should lower their standards or that they don't really like and shouldn't be attracted to those guys. They both do this for totally understandable reasons, and the same reason that employees don't generally like it when someone is willing to work twice as hard for half the pay.

This is the disconnect here…this totally natural inclination really has very little to do with relationship power dynamics, gender roles, oppression, feminism, etc. It just gets dressed up in that language bc sophisticated social discourse sounds better than what is really going on, which is just basic economics of competition and trying to get rid of scabs.

Maybe this is why there's so much confusion about feminism. To me there is real feminism about actual social/legal oppression or unfairness...and then there's this stuff, which is just basic intrasexual competition using feminist language because it's more effective to shame/guilt/intimidate. Men don't have an equivalent social ideology offering them high-brow words to use to try to shame their fellow competitors out of trying so hard, so instead they just resort to personally insulting each other when a guy is making too many efforts (that they don't want to all have to make), to be pleasing to women.