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One key aspect of dating is illegibility. It starts with flirting, where (I have read that) a key goal is to maintain plausible deniability and avoid creating common knowledge. Is the other party really interested in you, or are they just friendly and generally flirty? There is a reason why "I think you are hot and I would like to have sex with you" is not the equilibrium pickup line.
Most people can't freely chose whom they are attracted to. However, I think that there is a larger dissonance between what the median woman is attracted to and what society thinks a good woman should be attracted to. Admitting "I am attracted to good-looking, rich, high-status men" marks you as a shallow gold-digger. So it is reasonable to enter a mode of cognitive dissonance where you don't notice that common trait and instead focus on how you like men for being funny or whatever.
As an intuition pump, suppose that society deeply frowned at being attracted to boobs, because they are only for feeding babies and anyhow we have formula milk now so they don't really matter. Men still have the same preferences, some prefer smaller tits, some larger ones, but few prefer flat-chested women. But admitting to that would mark them as some kind of perverts. So their brain protects them from themselves and becomes really good at not noticing how they like boobs, and will invent all sorts of other proxies or unrelated variables to explain whom they find hot. Then you come along and talk about SMV and how chest shape is really a major driver of attractiveness in women. Obviously the men would go "well, there are certainly a few degenerate men who have a boob fetish, but most men are good and don't care about boobs at all".
Where did you read this? This completely tracks, I would like to know more.
This is also in line with how jealous people will not admit that they are jealous of someone else, but will invent all sorts of excuses for why they dislike that other person. Is there a word for this proxy-variable phenomenon?
Not OP, but this off topic comment thread was interesting enough that I saved some of the best quotes (from the top reply) and was able to find it again now, a decade later.
You and everybody else still single, right? (...as well as those of us who are married but would like to give our kids useful advice and have grandkids someday, honestly) It feels like the Sexual Revolution burned all the oversimplified restrictive scripts that one might have read in some stuffy old Guide to Mannerly Courting, but then instead of the result being "we're all free! we can just do what feels right!" it turned out to be "you're still screwed if you don't follow the right script, but now everybody disagrees about what the right script should be and it's too contentious to talk about or write down".
I'm not even sure if the above interpretation of proper flirting hasn't also already been obsoleted by cultural changes! (I was already married ten years ago, thankfully, and it's even harder to analyze this stuff from a distance) After ten years of "you find a guy by just swiping right", do women still know or care about the old "you can find a guy by giving plausibly-deniable signals of invitation and escalation" techniques? Ten years after this cute comic prompted the "Schrödinger's Rapist" debate, are men still eager to try carefully interpreting possible plausibly-deniable signals? Granted, the remaining alternatives are awful, but it feels like they're all that's left.
Yeah, but if you try denying it to the wrong guy, this was called cock teasing (which now apparently is also a porn category, goddammit is everything nowadays porn?). You have to be careful with your signalling. This is why everyone, man or woman, wants the Simple Easy Rules For Direct Communication but we're not going to get them.
Yeah, that's what the Schrödinger's Rapist conversation was all about. Men who didn't understand that women inductively match "a stranger is trying to flirt with me" to frighteningly high odds of "and he might get really nasty or dangerous about it if I'm even a bit too gentle or too harsh (or both, because nasty men aren't all big on logic) about shutting it down", arguing with women who didn't understand that making the guys nice enough to listen about this problem more wary just ends up increasing the proportion of public flirtation coming from nasty men who would never have listened in the first place.
I admit I suddenly developed a lot more sympathy and respect for women with "resting bitch face" (and even for some non-superficial negative personality traits) when I realized how useful that probably is as a defense against accidentally signaling (or being mistakenly perceived as signaling) invitations they didn't want to offer. Even if the person making a pass isn't at all nasty, more explicit rejections are much more emotionally upsetting to give! In the moment it hurts more to be rejected than to reject someone, but (unless there was a reason for rejection more substantial than "I'm not very attracted to you") IMHO the pain of being rejected goes away faster.
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Rationalization?
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