The reason for this is that in many circumstances, male social value is determined disproportionately by the approval/disapproval of women. So when a woman turns a man down in this way, she not only rejects him for sex, but also reduces his social value.

Any "fix" for this will drastically reduce women's social power.

It's far from clear that women in general want this to happen. One complaint I've heard from a number of women about tech environments directly relates to this; a social butterfly who organizes parties and hackathons has lower status than the fat neckbeard who fixed all the performance problems.

In fact, activists regularly moan about this: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/acknowledging-non-coding... https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-tech-devalues-social...

> One complaint I've heard from a number of women about tech environments directly relates to this; a social butterfly who organizes parties and hackathons has lower status than the fat neckbeard who fixed all the performance problems.

Interesting perspective. On reflection, since I'd find any pressure to attend stuff like parties or hackathons and such kind of annoying, even if attendance isn't strictly required and especially if they're outside normal work hours and/or project schedules aren't adjusted to account for them, it likely would lower my opinion of someone if they kept advocating for or organizing that kind of thing. Even under the best circumstances I doubt it'd raise my opinion of them.

Media encourages male entitlement. Movies teach us persistence is the key to winning a woman's heart. Remember the cop character from Jessica Jones? He increases courtship aggressively with each rejection.

1. Cop, under mind control, tries to kill Trish Walker. 2. Cop stalks Trish to apologize. 3. Trish is frightened and tell him to leave. 4. Cop continues to stalk. 5. Cop and Trish hook up.

Step 5 should be Trish maces cop, and he loses his badge.

I wish it were that simple. I'm reading a book on trauma, and it vividly describes the link between fear and sex. We don't really understand how to talk about it publicly, discussions about this tend to devolve into ugly rape fantasy arguments. But it's going to be very difficult to just remove this sort of thing from movies and TV shows. It's too ingrained into our psyches.

Are you saying science suggests Trish slept with the cop because she was afraid of him?

This is exactly why talking about this is hard. People are too quick to draw causal conclusions. I didn't watch the movie. The movie will tell you why she slept with him. Science just gives context for what might be going on "under the hood" in similar, real, situations.

"an insult to their manhood." "can literally be dangerous to you."

Is that not indicative of being the product of a sexist environment? A man that cannot accept rejection and therefor feels he has a right to behave in a dangerous way, seems to be a problem with his view of himself, and men as a whole, the world.

> Is that not indicative of being the product of a sexist environment?

A large number of modern feminists strongly believe that most *ism is a result of institutional and societal force - i.e. that people oppress others because they've been taught to, their society pressures them to do so, and that not doing so can result in harm to them.

The problem is... how do you solve this? Whose fault is it? The institutional pressures are almost certainly not any individual's fault. But the fact remains that on an individual level, the man in this example is oppressing the woman, and something has to be done about that in the short term.

Sure. But by and large, the men are not the ones that suffer from the repercussions of this. No doubt that it hurts absolutely everyone involved, though.

> Seems like a no-win situation all round, really. If you take it, you're encouraging his behaviour (and making him feel like you're indebted to him). If you reject it you're going to find out how he deals with rejection, which, particularly in drunken scenarios, can literally be dangerous to you.

Yeah. A number of my female friends stay away from bars for that reason.

> I've talked to a few girls about this. While some are absolutely just out for all the freebies they can get, others have said that men will get increasingly aggressive when you turn down offers for stuff like that - like they insist on being "a provider" and you turning that down is an insult to their manhood.

This is really an unhealthy cycle. I don't understand why this is tolerated socially, at all [particularly] in a work environment.