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Why do you dismiss this so readily? In my view, this topic is the crucial point of life for many men.
Why such a callous dismissal?
I don't find my 'dismissal' callous. I explain it in the rest of my post.
You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals. They give it away for free to those they actually like. And how much you work has nothing to do with it. That fact doesn't just leave the authors 'constructive masculinity' dead in the water, it leaves practically every 'socially positive' definition of masculinity dead in the water.
As other people have said, you don't necessarily have to bargain. Just attain high status and signal interest, and the rest takes care of itself.
I am optimistic we can find a way to encourage prosocial behavior without literally making women property.
I.e. bargain.
No, a bargain is a quid-pro-quo. "Oooh, that tall guy from Goldman Sachs is so hot, and he's looking at me" is not a bargain.
You are bargaining with the hypothetical woman when you decide to become a tall guy working at Goldman Sachs to garner her interest. You bring being tall and having money, she brings whatever.
This is starting to sound like the noncentral fallacy, and perhaps a particularly bad version of it. "I can stretch the meaning of X to include Y, therefore I can extend judgements about central cases of X to Y" is not a good argument.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
Is a woman wearing makeup to attract men "bargaining" too?
I think you are employing the 'I don't like the connotations of this so I'm going to call it a fallacy' fallacy. I'm not stretching the meaning of 'bargaining' here at all. Beyond that I don't know what you are insinuating that I am arguing for. I am giving a description of reality. If you want to use different words to describe it, go ahead. It doesn't change the fact that most men have to learn that just being themselves isn't good enough. They need something more. Which is where the entire self improvement become masculine and worthy crap comes from.
Kind of. She's leveraging what she already has.
To help elucidate a bit, a part of the frustration monetarily successful women have described in media is that they want to be able to bargain for a better man than their looks could command but can't since a lot of men don't care about their money. I.e. their money has no bargaining power over the men they want. So they write articles about how men are intimidated by successful middle aged women or whatever.
You don't think it's stretching "at all" to extend it to interactions with no agreement on sufficient conditions for the exchange, articulated negotiations, or legal enforcement? And from a political or commercial context to a romantic one?
But I totally agree with your first two sentences and I don't know what the third one means. My complaint is that thinking of "You have to work hard to gain the romantic approval of others" as "bargaining" is trying to generate a specific emotional response by including the former in the latter category (which, sure, you can do with the right defintions) where the archetypal form of similar bargaining would be e.g. prostitution or arranged marriages.
She's amplifying it, granted. But that doesn't make it bargaining.
Why put it in terms of "bargaining power", rather than "men are largely indifferent to money in a partner, at least for deciding whether to have sex with them"?
(Maybe it also extends to whether they consider women to be marriage-material, but the evidence I have seen is about women's sexual success. And some of that has been dubious e.g. relative frequency of simultaneous partners, but that presupposes that a sexually attractive woman is more likely to have multiple simultaneous partners, something I don't know to be true. Sleeping around seems to require attractiveness on the part of men, but desperation is a sufficient condition for even unattractive women.)
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