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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.)
You can bargain with whatever you have. Party X wants something from party Y, and to get it tries to... 'convince' the other party by 'showing' them that he has something they want. How that is not bargaining I don't know and I don't care.
Raising the bar for definitions like this is, to me, an irrelevant game of words at best. If we don't disagree on the factual matter at hand then I have to ask again, what are you insinuating my argument is when I use the term 'bargain'?
This seems similar to objections to general manosphere terminology regarding the 'sexual market place'. Where the accuracy or utility of the terminology is disregarded due to it being too vulgar.
I mean, this is about love and companionship and all those nice, beautiful things, right? A relationship just can't be so ugly. True love is beautiful.
Well, from the perspective of a woman, maybe that's the case. They don't see their requirement for money as something vulgar and emotionally negative. They just see it as the way of the world at worst and a necessary stepping stone towards true love at best. But for a man, at least speaking for myself, it does seem rather crass and vulgar to gatekeep something as talked up as affection or 'love' behind a financial requirement. Really betrays and diminishes the entire concept. I mean, that's not something men are supposed to let get between their affection or 'love', right?
Not too vulgar, but as potentially misleading. For example, simply changing the denotation of a word doesn't automatically change its connotations. Hence, one's reasoning can be affected by associations with a word's old reference.
Well, you said:
"You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals."
Well, if "bargaining" specifically means something like handing over money for sex, then certainly masculine traits are irrelevant to the sexual encounter. A femboy, a coward, a dishonest man etc. could do that.
But it seems that you also want to say that anything a guy does to make himself (more?) attractice is also bargaining:
"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."
However, the connection between masculine traits and attraction becomes more integral here. For example, most women find the ability to obtain resources as more attractive than the mere possession. A trust-fund baby is less attractive than a self-made man, because the latter (if the wealth was acquired honestly, not purely by chance etc.) can provide under a wider range of circumstances, e.g. the loss of his wealth. And if you think of your own (platonic) difference in regard for the two men's characters, it's at least because of the masculine traits required to obtain wealth are admirable, whereas the luck required to be born into wealth deserves no admiration at all.
Similarly, you want to say that a woman who buys and uses make-up to attract men is bargaining. However, in that case, feminine traits (delicacy, attention to the comfort of others etc.) are also usually relevant to the success of the woman, in a way that isn't the case in archetypal bargaining, e.g. a woman who gets a hot husband by her family offering a big dowry.
The extension of "these behaviours aren't really masculine/feminine" seems to depend on the claim that there are bargaining for sex, which is true if you stretch the scope of 'bargaining' far enough. However, it doesn't follow from that subsumption of these behaviours into the category "bargaining" that we can infer that they have the properties of archetypal cases of bargaining for sex (or companionship or whatever). The problem is that such non-sequitur inferences are very tempting due to the connotations of "bargaining", even given an explicit change in its reference.
You're right to make the analogy with "sexual marketplace", which is misleading for similar reasons. I have been in brothels and I have dated, and while there are similarities, it's a reciple for loose thinking to refer to both as "sexual marketplaces". Devoted as I am to capitalism and economic analysis, I'm more devoted to rationality and clear thinking, which are harmed by expecting that the associations (descriptive and normative) of words will change simply as a matter of broadening their definitions.
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