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True cultured men know the mark of being an intellectual gentleman is to only be attracted to obvious signs of intelligence like girls wearing glasses. Everything else is just window dressing.
I see some of the above replies and while I do acknowledge that there is an attraction to data presented beautifully for its own sake, Aellas entire dataset is just her own experiences. Its a personal journal arranged in the style of a corporate presentation. My personal objection to Aella isn't some slut shaming crusade, rather its the extremely obvious nerd parasitism that she feeds upon which clearly can't exist outside of some specific spaces like rationalist forums and hence my opening about the paraphilias common in rat spaces.
Her largest survey had over half a million respondents.
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Counterpoint: being attracted to women for stereotypically-masculine traits is childish and gay.
[Note that by "childish and gay", that's "this is how attraction works when your age is only measured in single digits" and "not confident/socially capable enough to trust you can dominate a more feminine woman", respectively. It's also preferring more "universal" traits than specifically masculine ones, if you prefer that framing.]
I won't deny the 'gay' bit (though I like my men with a bit more meat on them), but as much fun as homersoc_ style 'tomboy breaking' can be, a sizable part of the interest for me at least is finding someone who's interested in domming me. I can dom and trust myself to do so; it's just not really my favorite. That's not universally connected to masculine traits -- lipstick doms do exist -- but I'll point to scottieman's Anthology of Rat Bullying as an example of what would otherwise be 'normally' traditionally feminine top (uh, barring the last image, cw: m/f and one m/m/f) framework that becomes tomboyish as much by having the character act as a dom as by any overlapping or shared interest with the subs.
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But then how do you explain tomboys, who are obviously the patrician choice for any straight man?
By noting that "childish" isn't "immature" and "gay" isn't "faggotry".
As the post demonstrates, things are just simpler when you're inherently on the same page, but it's also [weirdly] a conservative thing; either of you could have had a more conventionally attractive relationship, but instead you chose this.
It's why the childhood friend never wins in coming-of-age stories.
I'll note that this doesn't seem to be symmetrical; there's no real male counterpart to the tomboy archetype. AFAICT, women don't fantasize about doing their nails and gossiping with their BF(F)s, or at least there's not nearly as many of them as guys who fantasize about playing videogames and shittalking with their GFs.
The chauvinistic side of me wants to say that it's because girl stuff is just objectively lame, or at least less cool than guy stuff. I think that's half-right, but I feel there's still something missing.
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Pun intended?
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