males don't seem to have a problem combining constant horniness and sexual/rommantic obsession with a willingness/ability to work at school and elsewhere (not that it is easy)

Because they can be lazy.

Aren't women always pulling the same sort of bullshit on men by playing "hard to get"?

As usual, when a woman does it and has power, it is OK. When a man does it or has some power, it is bad.

And people wonder why I say the societal dialog is almost completely under the control of feminists and women?

Show me where society has EVER helped men and boys in the past five decades to get THEIR needs met...

NO men are bad, evil and useless and since men want sex, they are inferior to women (who ALSO want sex, but since it gives women EVEN MORE power to pretend otherwise, the lies persist)

I was thinking about something.

A lot of what men seem to be looking for in social interactions with women is a set of hard-and-fast rules. Women seem to be actively trying to screen that out. Is this true?

I think it's partially true. The thing about being hot is that it isn't a natural attribute. It's a set of behaviors, some of which are relatively benign and some of which are actually unhealthy. Brandeis found an inverse correlation in women between health and attractiveness, but when you think about what it takes to be attractive, this is no shock. So there's a signal going on here: "I am willing to submit myself to expense, fuss and even physical pain just to please you." It's not hard to see why some would find this attractive.

However, that "you" isn't general. It's all done for a specific type of man, and that's the man the douchebag is trying to either be or emulate. Big muscles and dark tans indicate money and leisure for things like gyms and tanning beds, or maybe even tropical beaches. Expensive clothes and jewelry = money. Willingness to look like an ass in public without feeling like an ass = status. Willingness to behave in ways that might risk losing a woman = confidence.

There are rules here, and they work, for both sexes.

What about when it doesn't work? Because there are other things to screen for, and one of them is the kind of empathy and self-assurance that lead to flexibility and confidence in social situations, including intimate ones. It's someone who really "gets" you and likes you, whether you're male or female. Getting this, though, requires a situation without rules, or at least without the kinds of rules that govern the above-defined subculture. In this situation, you have an ongoing negotiation, but of a less visual kind.

One thing that has puzzled me is how a lot of wannabe PUAs bemoan the fact that ugly women have even higher standards than hot women. This is how it might be true. Mr. Good Catch might very well be financially stable, ripped, tanned and peacocked, but if he fails an early test for empathy, that 6.5 who should be grateful that he gave her the time of day might very well ditch him in favor of the chubby loser in the 3-year-old tech fair T-shirt.

Well, thinks Mr. Good Catch, he must have money and he's using her for sex.

Probably not, knowing the men I know who look like that. What he might have, though, is social comfort and flexibility, which isn't signaled the same way, and he might be seeing something similar in the 6.5 that he values over hotness. He might also be trying to be anti-cool, which is yet another set of signals and another set of rules.

I think there are other kinds of signals, too. I know some actual rock stars and the women who love them, and that's a whole 'nother world, even though many rock stars are douchebags and the women are often hot. I dangled a toe in academia many years ago, and found yet another set of social signals. I also know that there are kinds of protest signals, where people do the opposite of the hot/douche thing but also don't have the social skills.

What I'm thinking, though, is that there tend to be several streams going on at once in different directions, and dating dissatisfaction often comes from wanting all of those streams to align. They want a high-status mate who is also high comfort and empathy, and can also ditch the trappings of status at random without undergoing any kind of emotional or physical change.

Unhappiness, they've found, often lies in the space between reality and expectations.

It's a theory, anyway!

I have said that I used to be a nice guy, but people keep thinking I make this stuff up.

I was the proverbial Catholic altar boy. I was raised to be polite to women. yada yada

I was most definitely not given the social skills nor did I pick them up, that would have enabled me to express interest in a woman that I wanted to try to get to know.

In high school, the girls I dated, including my steady, asked ME out. I never did any of the asking.

I was apparently hot looking, at least to some segment of women, from all the comments I get about my past photos.

More than one girlfriend has remarked that I had one of the nicest personalities of any guy they knew.

None of this, NONE OF IT, helped me when I actually had to begin doing the heavy lifting of pursuing those girls I DID want.

It is one thing to stand there and talk to a girl as a friend, I mean WHAT ELSE does a naive guy know but to do that with any girl he really likes.

Next thing I know, I find out the OPPOSITE is really the truth, that if the relationship does not begin early on, BEFORE a friendship blooms, you can kiss THAT situation goodbye.

So, SUDDENLY, I am branded a dishonest chap for NOT having known the secret kabuki rituals that women take for granted that all guys know.

Worse yet, I look back on past interactions with women who I actually DID want and who actually DID give me signals they also wanted me, and feel remorse that I had NOT been taught how girls do things in life.

Heck, had I tried to turn the interaction into a relationship, I would have fucked up over and over and probably caused the situation to become unsalvageable-- gradually losing my esteem and cool in the process.

SO, for women to trash pick up artist books is to tell otherwise good men that they should remain completely powerless and let the TRUE SKEEVES, the ones who spend all their time figuring out schemes to get at women (for the men's selfish needs), have the field remain open to ONLY them-- and maybe this is darwinism at its finest.