Triggered Rant on an Anti-Feminist's Lack of Perspective

[Glossophile]

I'm not sure which subforum this belongs in, so mods, I apologize if it needs to be moved.

I hope you all don't mind being my figurative bartender, 'cause I need to get something off my chest!
 
Lately, I've found myself lured into rabbit holes of YouTube shorts, and a frequent contributor is some kind of panel debate between multiple young men and young women on feminism.  I came across one clip in which a guy basically complained about how men often feel like they're putting in most of the effort of courtship (e.g. planning dates, paying for them, etc.) only to be given less attention and/or clarity than they'd be comfortable with.
 
I'm not going to claim that this is never a legitimate complaint.  Women are as varied in character as men, so there are bound to be some who really do not, in fact, duly appreciate their partners' contribution to the relationship, and such individual vices should not be excused.  But the vibe I got from the guy making this argument was just too general and seriously short on any apparent empathy for the opposite perspective.  It was overall very frustrating to listen to.  My immediate reaction was, "Yeah, maybe you have to be a little more proactive on the front end…but the woman more than makes up for it on the back end."
 
Let me begin with a few caveats.
 
First, I am neither a clinical nor an experiential authority on these topics.  Far from it.  I have only the informally acquired bits of knowledge acquired by an interested layman, many of which should be common knowledge, and I welcome correction on any point whose factuality may be an osmotic illusion of pop culture.
 
Second, I realize that the perspective I'm about to present is clearly reductionist and general.  There are more facets and nuances to dating and sexuality than the kind of reproduction-focused calculus that I'm about to describe, and those additional aspects, including individual personality and proclivities, will inevitably modulate such considerations to varying degrees.  Nevertheless, reproduction does play an important and frequent enough role to be quite helpful, perhaps even crucial, in making the point I want to make.  Also, I do not mean to suggest that any of this is necessarily a conscious thought process.  I suggest that this may all be better (though still not perfectly) described as musings on evolutionary psychology, but I'm no expert on that either.
                    
Third, although I find the perspective I'm responding to reprehensibly short-sighted, I won't lie.  As a heterosexual male, especially one with virtually no real sexual experience of his own, I must nonetheless admit to empathizing, on a superficial level, with the primal appeal of lower barriers to intimacy with women.  At the same time, however, I feel compelled to at least try looking at the same matters from a woman's point-of-view, and when I do, it becomes clear to me why it is toxic and wrong to broadly project that fantasy into real-world behaviors and/or expectations.

I don't claim to fully understand the female perspective.  I probably don't and never will.  I think I understand enough, though, to call out an apparent shortage of effort towards such inter-gender empathy in other men.  This isn't rocket science, guys!
 
So let's take a bird's-eye-view of the reproductive process from conception to birth.  There's a pleasurable part at the start and a very painful part at the end, but their distribution is severely lopsided, least of all because, on average, men climax significantly more easily than women. 
 
At the start, the man is almost guaranteed a bout of intense pleasure, while the woman will only experience comparable pleasure if she's lucky and/or discerning enough in her choice of partner.   
 
At the end, the woman is virtually guaranteed to experience extreme pain, while the man could never really share any of that burden even if he wanted to (likewise regarding the relatively less severe but still considerable aches and/or other inconveniences of pregnancy).
 
So for women, they bear a unique risk that potentially culminates in excruciation, while their odds of also experiencing pleasure comparable to that of men, who take no such risk at all, tends to be much lower.
 
So on balance, when a woman consents to sex with a man, she's almost always the one who takes the greater risk and makes the greater corporeal investment.  At least depending on how well she knows her male partner, she frequently takes the gamble that he has the raw talent, acquired skill, and/or patience to make that risk/investment worthwhile, and men failing or refusing in that regard is common enough to hardly even bear mentioning.
 
Of course, there may be some mitigation depending on the precise nature of the relationship.  So let's say we're talking not about a casual hook-up but about a long-term, committed couple who actually want children and go on to love their progeny.  Let's also assume that the man reliably brings the woman to climax, as is more likely (though still not guaranteed) in such a healthy and established relationship.  Even here, the man still gets the joys of fatherhood not just for free but with the bonus of an erotic climax.  While the mother also gets the joys of motherhood and an orgasm as a bonus, she also pays a heavy price that her male partner is biologically prohibited from sharing.  She may consider the results easily worth the agony, as any fit mother would, but that doesn't change the fact that there was an albeit temporary downside that could never apply to her male partner.  On balance, then, the female partner is still clearly left with the short end of the proverbial stick.
 
I think the risk of STDs is a wash, since it applies in at least roughly equal measure to both men and women.  As for various contraceptive mechanisms, few if any are 100% reliable, so even if it's minimized, the unique risk for women is usually still there.  The condom could break, the pill might be having an off day, or the man may lose control and fail to pull out in time.  In every such instance, the potential (biological) consequences fall 100% on the woman's shoulders.
 
There's also menstruation and uniquely female limits on fertility.  Think about it.  On a monthly basis, a woman's body undergoes a process that is inconvenient at best and painful at worst, all to prepare her body for a potential pregnancy, regardless of whether she's actively trying to get pregnant or even sexually active in any way.  Plus, if she ever wants children, it's not like she can have them entirely on her schedule.  She'll only ever have a limited number of eggs/chances, and regardless of how many she actually uses, there comes a point in her life when biology arbitrarily declares, "Nope!  Time's up!"
 
Meanwhile, sperm production is so painless as to never actually be felt in any conscious way whatsoever, and it continues all the way from puberty to the grave.  Sure, in the twilight years, motility and/or erectile function may weaken, but male fertility rarely if ever stops outright.
 
Finally, I'm less certain of this one, since my only source is a vaguely remembered YouTube video, but it said that women are overall a bit more sensitive to pain than men (due to greater density of nerve endings, I think).  If credible, this makes saddling women with childbirth even worse!
 
All of this ignores the question of whether even the best orgasm truly matches and thus compensates for childbirth in sheer intensity of sensation, which I doubt.  Meanwhile, what do men have in their corner?  Oh, testicular trauma hurts like hell…for a few minutes!  Men, I get it.  I do.  I've experienced a blow to the balls.  It's not fun.  But as bad as childbirth?  The difference in typical duration alone should make it no contest!  Prostate cancer?  Yeah, ovarian cancer makes that a wash.   
 
The point, to put it colorfully, is that we need to stop calling nature a "Mother," because no real mother would be such a bitch to her fellow females!  The idiom really should be "Father Nature" in my book!  So Mr. This-Is-Why-You're-Single-Ladies can just fuck all the way off!
 
Thanks, guys!  That felt good!

[Minimalist]

If credible, this makes saddling women with childbirth even worse!

It's Eve's own fault for biting that fucking apple.  Just ask the churchies.

[Inkubus]

I have no idea what it is you're asking.

[Reltzik]

I'm not sure which subforum this belongs in, so mods, I apologize if it needs to be moved.

I hope you all don't mind being my figurative bartender, 'cause I need to get something off my chest!
 
Lately, I've found myself lured into rabbit holes of YouTube shorts, and a frequent contributor is some kind of panel debate between multiple young men and young women on feminism.  I came across one clip in which a guy basically complained about how men often feel like they're putting in most of the effort of courtship (e.g. planning dates, paying for them, etc.) only to be given less attention and/or clarity than they'd be comfortable with.
 
I'm not going to claim that this is never a legitimate complaint.  Women are as varied in character as men, so there are bound to be some who really do not, in fact, duly appreciate their partners' contribution to the relationship, and such individual vices should not be excused.  But the vibe I got from the guy making this argument was just too general and seriously short on any apparent empathy for the opposite perspective.  It was overall very frustrating to listen to.  My immediate reaction was, "Yeah, maybe you have to be a little more proactive on the front end…but the woman more than makes up for it on the back end."
 
Let me begin with a few caveats.
 
First, I am neither a clinical nor an experiential authority on these topics.  Far from it.  I have only the informally acquired bits of knowledge acquired by an interested layman, many of which should be common knowledge, and I welcome correction on any point whose factuality may be an osmotic illusion of pop culture.
 
Second, I realize that the perspective I'm about to present is clearly reductionist and general.  There are more facets and nuances to dating and sexuality than the kind of reproduction-focused calculus that I'm about to describe, and those additional aspects, including individual personality and proclivities, will inevitably modulate such considerations to varying degrees.  Nevertheless, reproduction does play an important and frequent enough role to be quite helpful, perhaps even crucial, in making the point I want to make.  Also, I do not mean to suggest that any of this is necessarily a conscious thought process.  I suggest that this may all be better (though still not perfectly) described as musings on evolutionary psychology, but I'm no expert on that either.
                    
Third, although I find the perspective I'm responding to reprehensibly short-sighted, I won't lie.  As a heterosexual male, especially one with virtually no real sexual experience of his own, I must nonetheless admit to empathizing, on a superficial level, with the primal appeal of lower barriers to intimacy with women.  At the same time, however, I feel compelled to at least try looking at the same matters from a woman's point-of-view, and when I do, it becomes clear to me why it is toxic and wrong to broadly project that fantasy into real-world behaviors and/or expectations.

I don't claim to fully understand the female perspective.  I probably don't and never will.  I think I understand enough, though, to call out an apparent shortage of effort towards such inter-gender empathy in other men.  This isn't rocket science, guys!
 
So let's take a bird's-eye-view of the reproductive process from conception to birth.  There's a pleasurable part at the start and a very painful part at the end, but their distribution is severely lopsided, least of all because, on average, men climax significantly more easily than women. 
 
At the start, the man is almost guaranteed a bout of intense pleasure, while the woman will only experience comparable pleasure if she's lucky and/or discerning enough in her choice of partner.   
 
At the end, the woman is virtually guaranteed to experience extreme pain, while the man could never really share any of that burden even if he wanted to (likewise regarding the relatively less severe but still considerable aches and/or other inconveniences of pregnancy).
 
So for women, they bear a unique risk that potentially culminates in excruciation, while their odds of also experiencing pleasure comparable to that of men, who take no such risk at all, tends to be much lower.
 
So on balance, when a woman consents to sex with a man, she's almost always the one who takes the greater risk and makes the greater corporeal investment.  At least depending on how well she knows her male partner, she frequently takes the gamble that he has the raw talent, acquired skill, and/or patience to make that risk/investment worthwhile, and men failing or refusing in that regard is common enough to hardly even bear mentioning.
 
Of course, there may be some mitigation depending on the precise nature of the relationship.  So let's say we're talking not about a casual hook-up but about a long-term, committed couple who actually want children and go on to love their progeny.  Let's also assume that the man reliably brings the woman to climax, as is more likely (though still not guaranteed) in such a healthy and established relationship.  Even here, the man still gets the joys of fatherhood not just for free but with the bonus of an erotic climax.  While the mother also gets the joys of motherhood and an orgasm as a bonus, she also pays a heavy price that her male partner is biologically prohibited from sharing.  She may consider the results easily worth the agony, as any fit mother would, but that doesn't change the fact that there was an albeit temporary downside that could never apply to her male partner.  On balance, then, the female partner is still clearly left with the short end of the proverbial stick.
 
I think the risk of STDs is a wash, since it applies in at least roughly equal measure to both men and women.  As for various contraceptive mechanisms, few if any are 100% reliable, so even if it's minimized, the unique risk for women is usually still there.  The condom could break, the pill might be having an off day, or the man may lose control and fail to pull out in time.  In every such instance, the potential (biological) consequences fall 100% on the woman's shoulders.
 
There's also menstruation and uniquely female limits on fertility.  Think about it.  On a monthly basis, a woman's body undergoes a process that is inconvenient at best and painful at worst, all to prepare her body for a potential pregnancy, regardless of whether she's actively trying to get pregnant or even sexually active in any way.  Plus, if she ever wants children, it's not like she can have them entirely on her schedule.  She'll only ever have a limited number of eggs/chances, and regardless of how many she actually uses, there comes a point in her life when biology arbitrarily declares, "Nope!  Time's up!"
 
Meanwhile, sperm production is so painless as to never actually be felt in any conscious way whatsoever, and it continues all the way from puberty to the grave.  Sure, in the twilight years, motility and/or erectile function may weaken, but male fertility rarely if ever stops outright.
 
Finally, I'm less certain of this one, since my only source is a vaguely remembered YouTube video, but it said that women are overall a bit more sensitive to pain than men (due to greater density of nerve endings, I think).  If credible, this makes saddling women with childbirth even worse!
 
All of this ignores the question of whether even the best orgasm truly matches and thus compensates for childbirth in sheer intensity of sensation, which I doubt.  Meanwhile, what do men have in their corner?  Oh, testicular trauma hurts like hell…for a few minutes!  Men, I get it.  I do.  I've experienced a blow to the balls.  It's not fun.  But as bad as childbirth?  The difference in typical duration alone should make it no contest!  Prostate cancer?  Yeah, ovarian cancer makes that a wash.   
 
The point, to put it colorfully, is that we need to stop calling nature a "Mother," because no real mother would be such a bitch to her fellow females!  The idiom really should be "Father Nature" in my book!  So Mr. This-Is-Why-You're-Single-Ladies can just fuck all the way off!
 
Thanks, guys!  That felt good!

While there's no point that you make which I strongly disagree with, I think it might make sense to draw a distinction between romance and sex.  The two are often seen together in an intimate relationship and for most people they compliment each other well, but it's perfectly possible to have an intimate relationship that features a heavy amount of one and zero of the other, and for some people that works great too.  I'm not suggesting you have a problem distinguishing between the two, but I would suggest that maybe this guy does.

The kinda-sorta-incel-ish-seeming attitudes that sparked your rant here are conflating the two, and I think that's part of what that person is misunderstanding.  (Or, perhaps, deliberately and knowingly misrepresenting.)  He's wanting sex without romance, or maybe sex with some romance but less than he feels forced to invest.  If he were more interested in romance, then planning a lovely dinner date might seem rewarding rather than a chore.  This is why he's complaining that he has to put in work on the romance side of the relationship: He's not there for romance.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but doing the normal dating thing probably isn't the approach he should be taking if those are his priorities.  Maybe cheap bar/tinder hookups are more his speed... or maybe he could make sure he's got the settings on his dating apps right so he's getting paired up with women who have similar goals for the evening.  Getting mismatched with women who have different goals than him could explain much of the frustration he expressed.

Also, I'd say that the biological component is... not so much of a factor as you make it out to be.  Nothing you said about reasons that human reproduction systems are inequitable is inaccurate, but for relationships where you're NOT actively in the process of trying to have a kid there are ways around almost all of it.  There's many forms of mutual sexual intimacy, and only one of them has much chance of resulting in a pregnancy.

If there is more hesitancy to be had by women than men on the dating scene, I'd suggest it has more to do with cultural expectations than biological ones.  Is this guy going to be a dick, or a predator, or a nice guy, or a "nice guy?"  Both men and women are capable of being toxic people that we should be afraid of dating, but our culture seems to shift the probabilities some so that the percentage of toxic men are higher than toxic women.  (Or, at least, shifts the nature and intensity of the toxicity, or something like that.)

There's also a double-standard in how society views sexually active men vs women: The men are virile while the women are sluts.  This double standard has faded significantly over the past century or so, but it's still present and can result in women being targeted for a lot of harassment and persecution that men won't experience, as well as a percentage of women who buy into that double standard themselves.

I would suggest that social factors like these could go further towards explaining a disparity of women being more hesitant than men in entering into a intimate relationship, or increasing the level of intimacy, than concerns related to their reproductive anatomy.

Finally, I'd suggest that this individual who triggered your rant might be overstating the degree of that disparity for one reason or another.  He doesn't sound like the most trustworthy source on this topic, and I wouldn't swallow the core premise of the case he's making without subjecting it to a skeptical examination first.

[epronovost]

In my experience, pretty much all young anti-feminists are people who simply can't or refuse to see any problematic from the point of view of women (that or grifters). They are also obsessively concerned by dating and sexual intercourse in general and not so much with any of the other subjects related to men-women relation in society. It's a fundamentally self-centered point of view and concerns. Ironically the more antifeminists they are, the more narcissic they sound and the more you actually see why they struggle in their relationship and social interactions in general and yet the least they get it. The level of projection is also depressing. Many of these young people accuse women of being extremely consumerist and superficial and yet they are themselves incredibly consumerist and superficial.

[Dānu]

Mmmm. I think what you've rattled off are largely misogynistic tropes.

[uniongap]

I'm not sure which subforum this belongs in, so mods, I apologize if it needs to be moved.

I hope you all don't mind being my figurative bartender, 'cause I need to get something off my chest!
 
Lately, I've found myself lured into rabbit holes of YouTube shorts, and a frequent contributor is some kind of panel debate between multiple young men and young women on feminism.  I came across one clip in which a guy basically complained about how men often feel like they're putting in most of the effort of courtship (e.g. planning dates, paying for them, etc.) only to be given less attention and/or clarity than they'd be comfortable with.
 
I'm not going to claim that this is never a legitimate complaint.  Women are as varied in character as men, so there are bound to be some who really do not, in fact, duly appreciate their partners' contribution to the relationship, and such individual vices should not be excused.  But the vibe I got from the guy making this argument was just too general and seriously short on any apparent empathy for the opposite perspective.  It was overall very frustrating to listen to.  My immediate reaction was, "Yeah, maybe you have to be a little more proactive on the front end…but the woman more than makes up for it on the back end."
 
Let me begin with a few caveats.
 
First, I am neither a clinical nor an experiential authority on these topics.  Far from it.  I have only the informally acquired bits of knowledge acquired by an interested layman, many of which should be common knowledge, and I welcome correction on any point whose factuality may be an osmotic illusion of pop culture.
 
Second, I realize that the perspective I'm about to present is clearly reductionist and general.  There are more facets and nuances to dating and sexuality than the kind of reproduction-focused calculus that I'm about to describe, and those additional aspects, including individual personality and proclivities, will inevitably modulate such considerations to varying degrees.  Nevertheless, reproduction does play an important and frequent enough role to be quite helpful, perhaps even crucial, in making the point I want to make.  Also, I do not mean to suggest that any of this is necessarily a conscious thought process.  I suggest that this may all be better (though still not perfectly) described as musings on evolutionary psychology, but I'm no expert on that either.
                    
Third, although I find the perspective I'm responding to reprehensibly short-sighted, I won't lie.  As a heterosexual male, especially one with virtually no real sexual experience of his own, I must nonetheless admit to empathizing, on a superficial level, with the primal appeal of lower barriers to intimacy with women.  At the same time, however, I feel compelled to at least try looking at the same matters from a woman's point-of-view, and when I do, it becomes clear to me why it is toxic and wrong to broadly project that fantasy into real-world behaviors and/or expectations.

I don't claim to fully understand the female perspective.  I probably don't and never will.  I think I understand enough, though, to call out an apparent shortage of effort towards such inter-gender empathy in other men.  This isn't rocket science, guys!
 
So let's take a bird's-eye-view of the reproductive process from conception to birth.  There's a pleasurable part at the start and a very painful part at the end, but their distribution is severely lopsided, least of all because, on average, men climax significantly more easily than women. 
 
At the start, the man is almost guaranteed a bout of intense pleasure, while the woman will only experience comparable pleasure if she's lucky and/or discerning enough in her choice of partner.   
 
At the end, the woman is virtually guaranteed to experience extreme pain, while the man could never really share any of that burden even if he wanted to (likewise regarding the relatively less severe but still considerable aches and/or other inconveniences of pregnancy).
 
So for women, they bear a unique risk that potentially culminates in excruciation, while their odds of also experiencing pleasure comparable to that of men, who take no such risk at all, tends to be much lower.
 
So on balance, when a woman consents to sex with a man, she's almost always the one who takes the greater risk and makes the greater corporeal investment.  At least depending on how well she knows her male partner, she frequently takes the gamble that he has the raw talent, acquired skill, and/or patience to make that risk/investment worthwhile, and men failing or refusing in that regard is common enough to hardly even bear mentioning.
 
Of course, there may be some mitigation depending on the precise nature of the relationship.  So let's say we're talking not about a casual hook-up but about a long-term, committed couple who actually want children and go on to love their progeny.  Let's also assume that the man reliably brings the woman to climax, as is more likely (though still not guaranteed) in such a healthy and established relationship.  Even here, the man still gets the joys of fatherhood not just for free but with the bonus of an erotic climax.  While the mother also gets the joys of motherhood and an orgasm as a bonus, she also pays a heavy price that her male partner is biologically prohibited from sharing.  She may consider the results easily worth the agony, as any fit mother would, but that doesn't change the fact that there was an albeit temporary downside that could never apply to her male partner.  On balance, then, the female partner is still clearly left with the short end of the proverbial stick.
 
I think the risk of STDs is a wash, since it applies in at least roughly equal measure to both men and women.  As for various contraceptive mechanisms, few if any are 100% reliable, so even if it's minimized, the unique risk for women is usually still there.  The condom could break, the pill might be having an off day, or the man may lose control and fail to pull out in time.  In every such instance, the potential (biological) consequences fall 100% on the woman's shoulders.
 
There's also menstruation and uniquely female limits on fertility.  Think about it.  On a monthly basis, a woman's body undergoes a process that is inconvenient at best and painful at worst, all to prepare her body for a potential pregnancy, regardless of whether she's actively trying to get pregnant or even sexually active in any way.  Plus, if she ever wants children, it's not like she can have them entirely on her schedule.  She'll only ever have a limited number of eggs/chances, and regardless of how many she actually uses, there comes a point in her life when biology arbitrarily declares, "Nope!  Time's up!"
 
Meanwhile, sperm production is so painless as to never actually be felt in any conscious way whatsoever, and it continues all the way from puberty to the grave.  Sure, in the twilight years, motility and/or erectile function may weaken, but male fertility rarely if ever stops outright.
 
Finally, I'm less certain of this one, since my only source is a vaguely remembered YouTube video, but it said that women are overall a bit more sensitive to pain than men (due to greater density of nerve endings, I think).  If credible, this makes saddling women with childbirth even worse!
 
All of this ignores the question of whether even the best orgasm truly matches and thus compensates for childbirth in sheer intensity of sensation, which I doubt.  Meanwhile, what do men have in their corner?  Oh, testicular trauma hurts like hell…for a few minutes!  Men, I get it.  I do.  I've experienced a blow to the balls.  It's not fun.  But as bad as childbirth?  The difference in typical duration alone should make it no contest!  Prostate cancer?  Yeah, ovarian cancer makes that a wash.   
 
The point, to put it colorfully, is that we need to stop calling nature a "Mother," because no real mother would be such a bitch to her fellow females!  The idiom really should be "Father Nature" in my book!  So Mr. This-Is-Why-You're-Single-Ladies can just fuck all the way off!
 
Thanks, guys!  That felt good!

[uniongap]

I'm not sure which subforum this belongs in, so mods, I apologize if it needs to be moved.

I hope you all don't mind being my figurative bartender, 'cause I need to get something off my chest!
 
Lately, I've found myself lured into rabbit holes of YouTube shorts, and a frequent contributor is some kind of panel debate between multiple young men and young women on feminism.  I came across one clip in which a guy basically complained about how men often feel like they're putting in most of the effort of courtship (e.g. planning dates, paying for them, etc.) only to be given less attention and/or clarity than they'd be comfortable with.
 
I'm not going to claim that this is never a legitimate complaint.  Women are as varied in character as men, so there are bound to be some who really do not, in fact, duly appreciate their partners' contribution to the relationship, and such individual vices should not be excused.  But the vibe I got from the guy making this argument was just too general and seriously short on any apparent empathy for the opposite perspective.  It was overall very frustrating to listen to.  My immediate reaction was, "Yeah, maybe you have to be a little more proactive on the front end…but the woman more than makes up for it on the back end."
 
Let me begin with a few caveats.
 
First, I am neither a clinical nor an experiential authority on these topics.  Far from it.  I have only the informally acquired bits of knowledge acquired by an interested layman, many of which should be common knowledge, and I welcome correction on any point whose factuality may be an osmotic illusion of pop culture.
 
Second, I realize that the perspective I'm about to present is clearly reductionist and general.  There are more facets and nuances to dating and sexuality than the kind of reproduction-focused calculus that I'm about to describe, and those additional aspects, including individual personality and proclivities, will inevitably modulate such considerations to varying degrees.  Nevertheless, reproduction does play an important and frequent enough role to be quite helpful, perhaps even crucial, in making the point I want to make.  Also, I do not mean to suggest that any of this is necessarily a conscious thought process.  I suggest that this may all be better (though still not perfectly) described as musings on evolutionary psychology, but I'm no expert on that either.
                    
Third, although I find the perspective I'm responding to reprehensibly short-sighted, I won't lie.  As a heterosexual male, especially one with virtually no real sexual experience of his own, I must nonetheless admit to empathizing, on a superficial level, with the primal appeal of lower barriers to intimacy with women.  At the same time, however, I feel compelled to at least try looking at the same matters from a woman's point-of-view, and when I do, it becomes clear to me why it is toxic and wrong to broadly project that fantasy into real-world behaviors and/or expectations.

I don't claim to fully understand the female perspective.  I probably don't and never will.  I think I understand enough, though, to call out an apparent shortage of effort towards such inter-gender empathy in other men.  This isn't rocket science, guys!
 
So let's take a bird's-eye-view of the reproductive process from conception to birth.  There's a pleasurable part at the start and a very painful part at the end, but their distribution is severely lopsided, least of all because, on average, men climax significantly more easily than women. 
 
At the start, the man is almost guaranteed a bout of intense pleasure, while the woman will only experience comparable pleasure if she's lucky and/or discerning enough in her choice of partner.   
 
At the end, the woman is virtually guaranteed to experience extreme pain, while the man could never really share any of that burden even if he wanted to (likewise regarding the relatively less severe but still considerable aches and/or other inconveniences of pregnancy).
 
So for women, they bear a unique risk that potentially culminates in excruciation, while their odds of also experiencing pleasure comparable to that of men, who take no such risk at all, tends to be much lower.
 
So on balance, when a woman consents to sex with a man, she's almost always the one who takes the greater risk and makes the greater corporeal investment.  At least depending on how well she knows her male partner, she frequently takes the gamble that he has the raw talent, acquired skill, and/or patience to make that risk/investment worthwhile, and men failing or refusing in that regard is common enough to hardly even bear mentioning.
 
Of course, there may be some mitigation depending on the precise nature of the relationship.  So let's say we're talking not about a casual hook-up but about a long-term, committed couple who actually want children and go on to love their progeny.  Let's also assume that the man reliably brings the woman to climax, as is more likely (though still not guaranteed) in such a healthy and established relationship.  Even here, the man still gets the joys of fatherhood not just for free but with the bonus of an erotic climax.  While the mother also gets the joys of motherhood and an orgasm as a bonus, she also pays a heavy price that her male partner is biologically prohibited from sharing.  She may consider the results easily worth the agony, as any fit mother would, but that doesn't change the fact that there was an albeit temporary downside that could never apply to her male partner.  On balance, then, the female partner is still clearly left with the short end of the proverbial stick.
 
I think the risk of STDs is a wash, since it applies in at least roughly equal measure to both men and women.  As for various contraceptive mechanisms, few if any are 100% reliable, so even if it's minimized, the unique risk for women is usually still there.  The condom could break, the pill might be having an off day, or the man may lose control and fail to pull out in time.  In every such instance, the potential (biological) consequences fall 100% on the woman's shoulders.
 
There's also menstruation and uniquely female limits on fertility.  Think about it.  On a monthly basis, a woman's body undergoes a process that is inconvenient at best and painful at worst, all to prepare her body for a potential pregnancy, regardless of whether she's actively trying to get pregnant or even sexually active in any way.  Plus, if she ever wants children, it's not like she can have them entirely on her schedule.  She'll only ever have a limited number of eggs/chances, and regardless of how many she actually uses, there comes a point in her life when biology arbitrarily declares, "Nope!  Time's up!"
 
Meanwhile, sperm production is so painless as to never actually be felt in any conscious way whatsoever, and it continues all the way from puberty to the grave.  Sure, in the twilight years, motility and/or erectile function may weaken, but male fertility rarely if ever stops outright.
 
Finally, I'm less certain of this one, since my only source is a vaguely remembered YouTube video, but it said that women are overall a bit more sensitive to pain than men (due to greater density of nerve endings, I think).  If credible, this makes saddling women with childbirth even worse!
 
All of this ignores the question of whether even the best orgasm truly matches and thus compensates for childbirth in sheer intensity of sensation, which I doubt.  Meanwhile, what do men have in their corner?  Oh, testicular trauma hurts like hell…for a few minutes!  Men, I get it.  I do.  I've experienced a blow to the balls.  It's not fun.  But as bad as childbirth?  The difference in typical duration alone should make it no contest!  Prostate cancer?  Yeah, ovarian cancer makes that a wash.   
 
The point, to put it colorfully, is that we need to stop calling nature a "Mother," because no real mother would be such a bitch to her fellow females!  The idiom really should be "Father Nature" in my book!  So Mr. This-Is-Why-You're-Single-Ladies can just fuck all the way off!
 
Thanks, guys!  That felt good!

While there's no point that you make which I strongly disagree with, I think it might make sense to draw a distinction between romance and sex.  The two are often seen together in an intimate relationship and for most people they compliment each other well, but it's perfectly possible to have an intimate relationship that features a heavy amount of one and zero of the other, and for some people that works great too.  I'm not suggesting you have a problem distinguishing between the two, but I would suggest that maybe this guy does.

The kinda-sorta-incel-ish-seeming attitudes that sparked your rant here are conflating the two, and I think that's part of what that person is misunderstanding.  (Or, perhaps, deliberately and knowingly misrepresenting.)  He's wanting sex without romance, or maybe sex with some romance but less than he feels forced to invest.  If he were more interested in romance, then planning a lovely dinner date might seem rewarding rather than a chore.  This is why he's complaining that he has to put in work on the romance side of the relationship: He's not there for romance.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but doing the normal dating thing probably isn't the approach he should be taking if those are his priorities.  Maybe cheap bar/tinder hookups are more his speed... or maybe he could make sure he's got the settings on his dating apps right so he's getting paired up with women who have similar goals for the evening.  Getting mismatched with women who have different goals than him could explain much of the frustration he expressed.

Also, I'd say that the biological component is... not so much of a factor as you make it out to be.  Nothing you said about reasons that human reproduction systems are inequitable is inaccurate, but for relationships where you're NOT actively in the process of trying to have a kid there are ways around almost all of it.  There's many forms of mutual sexual intimacy, and only one of them has much chance of resulting in a pregnancy.

If there is more hesitancy to be had by women than men on the dating scene, I'd suggest it has more to do with cultural expectations than biological ones.  Is this guy going to be a dick, or a predator, or a nice guy, or a "nice guy?"  Both men and women are capable of being toxic people that we should be afraid of dating, but our culture seems to shift the probabilities some so that the percentage of toxic men are higher than toxic women.  (Or, at least, shifts the nature and intensity of the toxicity, or something like that.)

There's also a double-standard in how society views sexually active men vs women: The men are virile while the women are sluts.  This double standard has faded significantly over the past century or so, but it's still present and can result in women being targeted for a lot of harassment and persecution that men won't experience, as well as a percentage of women who buy into that double standard themselves.

I would suggest that social factors like these could go further towards explaining a disparity of women being more hesitant than men in entering into a intimate relationship, or increasing the level of intimacy, than concerns related to their reproductive anatomy.

Finally, I'd suggest that this individual who triggered your rant might be overstating the degree of that disparity for one reason or another.  He doesn't sound like the most trustworthy source on this topic, and I wouldn't swallow the core premise of the case he's making without subjecting it to a skeptical examination first.

[uniongap]

It all boils down to millions of years of human evolution. I love studying human evolution. Dr. Louis Leaky had a theory that our knuckle walking ancestors started to walk upright due to a form of prostitution. Males learned that if they brought food to females that they would be more inclined to mate with them. Thus the males that figured this out had to gather food in their arms and walk upright on their back legs. Those males that mastered this then would pass on their genes. The rest is history. Well there are other theories why we walk upright like climate change where the forests were disappearing, etc.

[Glossophile]

While there's no point that you make which I strongly disagree with, I think it might make sense to draw a distinction between romance and sex.  The two are often seen together in an intimate relationship and for most people they compliment each other well, but it's perfectly possible to have an intimate relationship that features a heavy amount of one and zero of the other, and for some people that works great too.

It's funny you should mention that, because I was recently pondering how exactly one would define "romance" as distinct from both friendship and just plain sex.  This is my own current best attempt.

A relationship is romantic if and only if...

(1) ...it is contingent upon all partners being of compatible romantic/sexual orientations and gender identities,...


(2) ...it has a built-in implication that some form of consensual sexual activity will take place between the partners at some point if it has not already, unless the relationship ends before a sexually active stage is reached,...

(3) ...in the interim before the first sexual act and/or between subsequent such acts, the partners often engage in affectionate behaviors that, while not immediately leading to sex, are nonetheless reminiscent of if not identical to forms of foreplay (e.g. kissing),...

(4) ...the partners use unique and culturally-determined rituals and symbols to express and/or develop the relationship,...

(5) ...all of the above features are implicitly exclusive, in that it is considered highly unethical to bring in additional partners without the consent of those already involved,...

and...

(6) ...all of the above features are layered atop a core which would otherwise be indistinguishable from a friendship, ideally a close one.

The kinda-sorta-incel-ish-seeming attitudes that sparked your rant here are conflating the two, and I think that's part of what that person is misunderstanding.  (Or, perhaps, deliberately and knowingly misrepresenting.)  He's wanting sex without romance, or maybe sex with some romance but less than he feels forced to invest.

Agreed.  I think alot of progress could be made if both men and women were more honest about what exactly they seek in any given interaction with potential partners.  Another problem is probably men being led by a stereotype to believe that women who just want casual sex are too rare to be worth looking for.

There's many forms of mutual sexual intimacy, and only one of them has much chance of resulting in a pregnancy.

True, of course.  Point taken.

If there is more hesitancy to be had by women than men on the dating scene, I'd suggest it has more to do with cultural expectations than biological ones.

You're probably right.  I think I focused on the biological stuff simply because people seem much less attentive towards it, and part of my point was that the deck is already stacked against women by biology before the socio-cultural stuff even comes into play and makes things still much worse for them.

I would suggest that social factors like these could go further towards explaining a disparity of women being more hesitant than men in entering into a intimate relationship, or increasing the level of intimacy, than concerns related to their reproductive anatomy.

I'm inclined to agree.  Of course, we then have to ask why those socio-cultural attitudes come from in the first place.  The Abrahamic faiths share more than their fair share of the blame, but to a certain extent, even that just passes the buck.  I can't help but think that, in the natural state of humanity, women exercise the greater prerogative over who they have sex with and when, and alot of the social factors can be traced back to men subconsciously trying to use culture as a way to compensate for that primal disadvantage, while lacking the perspective to realize that women have plenty of downsides too.  I have no idea if that's even close to true, but it is an interesting sort of headcanon nonetheless.

[Inkubus]

It all boils down to millions of years of human evolution.  I love studying human evolution.  Dr. Louis Leaky had a theory that our knuckle walking ancestors started to walk upright due to a form of prostitution.  Males learned that if they brought food to females that they would be more inclined to mate with them.  Thus the males that figured this out had to gather food in their arms and walk upright on their back legs.  Those males that mastered this then would pass on their genes.  The rest is history.  Well there are other theories why we walk upright like climate change where the forests were disappearing, etc.

That is amazing, do you have a link?

[Rhythmcs]

The point, to put it colorfully, is that we need to stop calling nature a "Mother," because no real mother would be such a bitch to her fellow females!  

Sure she would.  No one is crueler to other females than a female.

Nevertheless.... Females exercise jack shit in their natural state. If you don't like what they're saying - just beat them.

[jerry mcmasters]

It all boils down to millions of years of human evolution.  I love studying human evolution. 

Same here.  Not my strongest subject but always fascinating.  The denial by many that there isn't gender-specific sexual software designed by millions of years of evolution running in both the background and foreground of our brains always makes me wonder what the agenda is.  It's so obvious, and human history and culture seems to be pretty much what one would expect if the physical description of sex and sexual development is as you describe.  Doesn't mean we are slaves to it and can't have "modern" conceptions of sex and sexuality, but it's undeniably there.

Dr. Louis Leaky had a theory that our knuckle walking ancestors started to walk upright due to a form of prostitution.  Males learned that if they brought food to females that they would be more inclined to mate with them.  Thus the males that figured this out had to gather food in their arms and walk upright on their back legs.  Those males that mastered this then would pass on their genes.  The rest is history.  Well there are other theories why we walk upright like climate change where the forests were disappearing, etc.

Interesting but...doesn't sound persuasive.  The biggest competitor pre-historic man had in sexual selection was other pre-historic men (an unlearned assumption on my part), and the development of walking upright confers many many advantages over the knuckle-dragger, only a minor one being impressing the women with bringing food or gifts that it seems they could still do while not walking upright, as apes can still do.  Tool and weapon use might be the bigger advantage. (again just speculation, not something I know much about)

[epronovost]

It all boils down to millions of years of human evolution.  I love studying human evolution.  Dr. Louis Leaky had a theory that our knuckle walking ancestors started to walk upright due to a form of prostitution.  Males learned that if they brought food to females that they would be more inclined to mate with them.  Thus the males that figured this out had to gather food in their arms and walk upright on their back legs.  Those males that mastered this then would pass on their genes.

That doesn't sound very scientific. There is no way to prove or disprove such a hypothesis. The "climate change" hypothesis at least can be supported by the fossil record for the development of bipedality within hominids.

[Dānu]

It all boils down to millions of years of human evolution.  I love studying human evolution.  Dr. Louis Leaky had a theory that our knuckle walking ancestors started to walk upright due to a form of prostitution.  Males learned that if they brought food to females that they would be more inclined to mate with them.  Thus the males that figured this out had to gather food in their arms and walk upright on their back legs.  Those males that mastered this then would pass on their genes.

That doesn't sound very scientific. There is no way to prove or disprove such a hypothesis. The "climate change" hypothesis at least can be supported by the fossil record for the development of bipedality within hominids.

No proof?! What more proof do you need?

[Dom]

It all boils down to millions of years of human evolution.  I love studying human evolution.  Dr. Louis Leaky had a theory that our knuckle walking ancestors started to walk upright due to a form of prostitution.  Males learned that if they brought food to females that they would be more inclined to mate with them.  Thus the males that figured this out had to gather food in their arms and walk upright on their back legs.  Those males that mastered this then would pass on their genes.

That doesn't sound very scientific. There is no way to prove or disprove such a hypothesis. The "climate change" hypothesis at least can be supported by the fossil record for the development of bipedality within hominids.

In my non-scientific historic view, I think it has to do with females being less agile during pregnancy, and raising a child alone always has been and always will be difficult. Hence, females tend to be instinctively more discerning in who they partner with. (As always, of course not everybody). This is becoming less relevant in a society that can abort unwanted fertilization and where females can work in decent jobs. But for a long, long time it was imperative that females chose reliable partners. But then, a lot of our instincts are becoming increasingly irrelevant today, including the super hormone charge young people endure. It just makes one do stupid things, procreation isn't all that important anymore.

[Reltzik]

While there's no point that you make which I strongly disagree with, I think it might make sense to draw a distinction between romance and sex.  The two are often seen together in an intimate relationship and for most people they compliment each other well, but it's perfectly possible to have an intimate relationship that features a heavy amount of one and zero of the other, and for some people that works great too.

It's funny you should mention that, because I was recently pondering how exactly one would define "romance" as distinct from both friendship and just plain sex.  This is my own current best attempt.

Well, the philosophers don't agree on the definitions.  (Big surprise.)  And I'd say that the boundary between friendship and romance is... well fuzzy.  Some cases are clearly on one side or another, but there are borderline cases where it's very hard to say which category the relationship falls into.  It might make sense to not view the two categories as entirely distinct.

Anyhow, I'll look at your definition and critique it.

A relationship is romantic if and only if...

(1) ...it is contingent upon all partners being of compatible romantic/sexual orientations and gender identities,...

Mmmm... I'd dispute that.  For example, a biromantic heterosexual individual might be in a same-sex romantic relationship, even if they have no sexual attraction to their romantic partner.

(2) ...it has a built-in implication that some form of consensual sexual activity will take place between the partners at some point if it has not already, unless the relationship ends before a sexually active stage is reached,...

This doesn't account for ace (asexual) people and their romantic relationships.

(3) ...in the interim before the first sexual act and/or between subsequent such acts, the partners often engage in affectionate behaviors that, while not immediately leading to sex, are nonetheless reminiscent of if not identical to forms of foreplay (e.g. kissing),...

Often in the sense that it happens in most relationships, sure.  Often in the sense that it must frequently happen in any relationship that qualifies as romantic, no.  Romance can be conducted entirely through love letters, for example, severely limiting foreplay-esque activities.  ... it's not necessarily a good idea to conduct a romance entirely by the post, but it doesn't disqualify the relationship as romantic.

(4) ...the partners use unique and culturally-determined rituals and symbols to express and/or develop the relationship,...

Again, frequently seen, but again I'd say it's not a complete "only if" prerequisite for a relationship to count as a romance.

(5) ...all of the above  features are implicitly exclusive, in that it is considered highly unethical to bring in additional partners without the consent of those already involved,...

In our culture, yes.  Oh, there are open relationships and polyamorous constellations, but the default assumption is still a closed relationship, and that's something that partners should be on the same page about if they deviate from the norm.  That said, other cultures have different norms and default assumptions.  Look at the traditional culture of the Trobriand Islanders for an example.

and...

(6) ...all of the above features are layered atop a core which would otherwise be indistinguishable from a friendship, ideally a close one.

This... doesn't feel right as an outright requirement for a romantic relationship (even if it is a healthy and frequent feature), but I can't put my finger on why not at the moment.

Anyhow, lemme try to spin out a definition.  This is off-the-cuff and is probably flawed.

Romance features the following:

* A deep (or at least deepening), loving, emotional bond with the partner(s), with emphasis on affection, admiration, and emotional intimacy.


* Courtship activities (eg dates, presents, dancing, etc), usually with the purposeful and conscious motivation of creating, deepening, or maintaining the relationship.  This can continue past the end of a courtship phase.  Married romantic partners will often still dance with each other and go on date nights, for example, as part of what they do to keep their relationship healthy.


* Priority being given (or at least having the potential to be given as the romance deepens) over other types of relationships in one's life.  (eg, one's significant other being a more important relationship than a relationship with one's friends, parents, etc.. to the point where if forced to choose between it and another, a person will choose to maintain the romantic relationship and lose the alternative).  The "potential" qualifier might be better repurposed as indicating the degree of the romance, wherein that sort of sacrifice is an indicator of a very deep romantic relationship and refusing to make such a sacrifice is an indicator of a shallower romantic relationship.

* A tendency towards a merging of the partners' lives, such as entangling of finances, cohabitation, sharing of friend circles, coming to view one partner's family members as the extended family of the other partner(s), formal or informal adoption of the other's children (or something similar like becoming a step-parent), consulting together on major life decisions, approaching life challenges as a united team rather than separately, etc.

I'd say that none of these are make-or-break requirements, but a relationship that firmly checks off most these boxes could qualify as a romance even if one these elements is missing.

I would suggest that social factors like these could go further towards explaining a disparity of women being more hesitant than men in entering into a intimate relationship, or increasing the level of intimacy, than concerns related to their reproductive anatomy.

I'm inclined to agree.  Of course, we then have to ask why those socio-cultural attitudes come from in the first place.  The Abrahamic faiths share more than their fair share of the blame, but to a certain extent, even that just passes the buck.  I can't help but think that, in the natural state of humanity, women exercise the greater prerogative over who they have sex with and when, and alot of the social factors can be traced back to men subconsciously trying to use culture as a way to compensate for that primal disadvantage, while lacking the perspective to realize that women have plenty of downsides too.  I have no idea if that's even close to true, but it is an interesting sort of headcanon nonetheless.

Again, there's not a firm consensus about the "natural" state of humanity.  But I think it's telling that "primitive" societies, meaning societies built on little technology or societal complexity such as hunter-gatherer tribes, often feature much freer and opener sexual relationships, as well as disproportionately greater examples of matriarchal leadership and customs.  Historically the freedom of women to occupy typically-male roles or vice-versa in a society was increasingly replaced by barriers and stigma through the bronze age, solidifying in the iron age.  I'd guess that had less to do with technology, and more to do with the increasing complexity of a society trending from hunter-gathers to specialized tradesmen in city-states to sprawling kingdoms and empires interacting with other kingdoms and empires through trade and politics.  This suggests that it's less an innate psychological feature or rational choice arising from reproductive biology, which would affect simple and complex societies equally, and more a consequence of the hierarchies and customs that societies must develop as they became more complex.

... at least, to a certain point.  It's also interesting to me that the values that values of modern liberal societies -- things like personal liberty, an end to formally stratified social class, people being citizens in participatory democracies rather than subjects of a sovereign ruler, equality under law, freedom of conscious with respect to religion rather than having government or a mob force people to practice a favored religion, etc -- have been among the most effective values for the various waves of feminism to leverage, and the advances they made in turn has led to more sexual freedom and engagement.  Perhaps the trend of complexity leading to more sexually-restrained women reverses past a certain point of complexity, or perhaps "societal complexity" is multidimensional in ways that are critical here.

[Cavebear]

Wow, there sure seems to be a lot of both nonsense and reality in the above posts and I sure am not going to try to correct errors in so many posts or "like" the ones that make sense. There are just too many in the past day. So I will just speak my understanding...

Originally, evolution had aggressive insemination by one gender. Both parties would attempt to forcibly inseminate the other and the weaker one would have to bear the physical cost of bearing the young. Later, some creatures evolved to adapt to either insemination or bearing. At that point, gender for established (for good or ill).

Basically, some members of a species produced milt (sperm) and some produced egg. Among ocean creatures, the meant there had to be both. Ny various methods (tides, moonlight, sunlight), species learned to coordinate release lilt and eggs. Well, those that didn't died out...

As evolution went on, the specific goals of gender separated. Let's jump ahead to mammals. Females produced fewer eggs while males had a plentitude of sperm. That's because an ova is a whole cell and sperm are not. Sperm are just carriers of an XY DNA package. Their only purpose is to get their tiny (and biologically cheap) package to an ovum by any way possible.

And isn't isn't easy. The female vagina is somewhat acidic. Sperm struggle to survive in an environment they are not accustomed to. On the rare occasions where a sperm among thousands or millions survives meeting an ova, it still has to be the first to use the small packet of chemicals to penetrate the ova membrane.

And it isn't guaranteed that a joined sperm and ova will attach to the uterus, of course. It almost seems impossible that the system produces pregnancies at all.

And then, the pregnancy... Yes, it seems unfair that females bear the burden of producing and birthing children. I can hardly imagine how that feels. But that's biology and there isn't much we can currently do about that.

If you have a better idea how it could work, I'd love to hear about it.

But the whole thing is evolution and that's that how things go.

[Rhythmcs]

The central complaint in the op, relating to males feeling that they do all the courtship work, probably isn't evolution at all. That's the patriarchy at work. You want a girl to pay for dinner? To be assertive or aggressive in their pursuit of you? Dating a feminist is a great way to achieve that outcome.

To my mind, that's the tragic irony of incel and anti-feminist types. They clearly and repeatedly indicate that this patriarchal courtship shit isn't for them, but they also tend to loathe the group of females that would be most likely to shrug it off and satisfy the malcontents courtship fantasies.

[Glossophile]

* A deep (or at least deepening), loving, emotional bond with the partner(s), with emphasis on affection, admiration, and emotional intimacy.

I considered this one covered by the "layered atop a friendship" clause in mine.  Otherwise, you made some great points, particularly about priority and merging of lives.  Speaking of mergers, here's how I might aim at the best of both our definitions.

The term "romance" or "romantic" best applies to a relationship if and only if…
 
(1) …it is contingent upon compatibility of romantic orientations and gender identities, with sexual orientations often but not always serving an important role as well,…

(2) …as it deepens, its priority relative to other relationships increases, at least rivaling if not outranking even close familial ties when and if sufficient depth is attained,…
 
(3) …as its deepens, it tends to increasingly merge partners' lives and social circles, culminating in long-term cohabitation, joint finances, sharing of most if not all friends, and the treatment of each partner's family as an extension of the other's,…
 
(4) …it is initiated, deepened, and/or maintained by one or more unique rituals and/or symbols the specifics of which are determined by culture,…
 
(5) …its expression, development, and/or maintenance includes one or more unique forms of affection, typically though not necessarily sexual and/or quasi-sexual in nature,…
 
…and…
 
(6) …the above features are layered atop the sort of emotional and at least potentially loving bond which is otherwise barely if at
all distinguishable from a friendship, ideally a close one.

Historically the freedom of women to occupy typically-male roles or vice-versa in a society was increasingly replaced by barriers and stigma through the bronze age, solidifying in the iron age.  I'd guess that had less to do with technology, and more to do with the increasing complexity of a society trending from hunter-gathers to specialized tradesmen in city-states to sprawling kingdoms and empires interacting with other kingdoms and empires through trade and politics.  This suggests that it's less an innate psychological feature or rational choice arising from reproductive biology, which would affect simple and complex societies equally, and more a consequence of the hierarchies and customs that societies must develop as they became more complex.

... at least, to a certain point.  It's also interesting to me that the values that values of modern liberal societies -- things like personal liberty, an end to formally stratified social class, people being citizens in participatory democracies rather than subjects of a sovereign ruler, equality under law, freedom of conscious with respect to religion rather than having government or a mob force people to practice a favored religion, etc -- have been among the most effective values for the various waves of feminism to leverage, and the advances they made in turn has led to more sexual freedom and engagement.  Perhaps the trend of complexity leading to more sexually-restrained women reverses past a certain point of complexity, or perhaps "societal complexity" is multidimensional in ways that are critical here.

Very astute take!