Once upon a time I attended this huge seminar, with something like 800+ participants. One evening we had a guest speaker who, without bothering to introduce his topic, started right off with a male beauty contest.
We had to subdivide into regions, and pick a semifinalist from each, and then choose one from them.
Some of the guys really got into it, posing, whipping off shirts and throwing them to the audience; a lot just hated it, and stood there with their arms severely folded, waiting for the point of it all. Some of the women cut loose with wolf-whistles and hooting.
Finally, though, we had our winner -- a guy I thought was pleasant enough in looks but not anything to write home about.
And our speaker stepped forward and said, "399 guys have just had the experience of being rejected
solely on the basis of looks." He pointed out that our culture is such that, while before the contest, women may fight like cats in a sack,
afterwards the losers console one another with "You totally deserved to win, I can't believe they didn't pick you" kinds of things. Our guys here in the seminar, however, had no such network and were having to not only deal with the rejection, but do so alone.
But we were just getting started. With all the guys up on the stages, there were plenty of seats empty, so Speaker had the women fill in the middle section -- according to income: 6-7 figure incomes in the front rows, and falling off after that. Considering I worked as a shift supervisor in a pizza joint at the time, I was surprised to find that I was not in the very last row (though I was in my row alone): there was one woman behind even me.
Oh, jeez, I think, I can see where this is going. Sure enough, Speaker said that when he gave the word, we women were to attempt to "pick up" a guy and see how far we could get in 20 minutes.
I'm an introvert anyway. And I'm feeling quite worthless all the way in the back; I totally wrote off approaching any of the semifinalists, let alone the winner. I get it, I'm thinking, and I'm just going to sit this one out. Thanks anyway.
"And if you're thinking about not playing," Speaker announced, "
you're already playing."
Aww, f uck! Busted! Well, I was at the seminar at all to get out of my comfort zone, so I scrunched up what few guts I had, cast about for guys physically nearby, and --
The woman behind me stood up and launched into some speech about wanting to see what this looked like from "back here". She had zero income as such -- she was independently wealthy.
And Speaker told her (without actually laughing in her face) that if she was
really interested in what things were like from the bottom of the economic heap, she would have played it through; as it was, just as the game was about to begin, she was standing up to announce, "I'm more valuable than you think I am!"
So then game was on. I decided to play Ms. Nice Guy, on the grounds that, if the guy I approached didn't like me, well, that was
his loss. Speaker afterwards confirmed that, yep, that's quite a common guy strategy.
So I picked out a guy -- a good-looking guy, too, in my opinion better than Mr. Seminar-pageant-winner -- and invited him for a drink of water out of one of the coolers by the ballroom doors.
Long, uncomfortable ("introvert", right?) story later, I got much "farther" than I dreamed I could -- we walked out onto the beach together and he
let me put my arm over his shoulders (which was funny as he was rather taller!) Still, I was ever so grateful for the bell that called us back in.
We heard later of one couple who actually had to be called back out of the room of one of them.
The post-mortem was fascinating. Few women wanted to speak up; those who had the guts, admitted being ashamed of acting exactly like guys they despised for acting like that. . . .
The guys were great; they shocked and surprised themselves and had no problem admitting it. One of them pretty much summed it up with: "This [trolling for babes] is what I do! And,
here I'm all like, 'What do they want from me?'" and he mimed recoiling like a heroine in a melodrama, which was funny
and he meant it. Another guy, one of the semifinalists, said the rich women "were so pushy! It was like they thought they could just
buy you or something!" Which is, so I hear, something that pretty women tend to get from rich guys.
So there we were, us XXs and XYs, and each individual one of us quite spontaneously acting like the opposite sex. And the only thing that changed was the dynamic of a) who gets valued for what and b) who pursues whom.
In other words, those behaviors are not sex-linked; they are artifacts of the circumstances.
If you're interested in this further, Speaker was Warren Farrell, author of
Why Men Are the Way They Are, which title was, I believe, intended to fox women into reading it.
If you're fond of thinking that you always know why you do what you do, you won't like it. If you recognize that we're all driven by unexpected and unsuspected forces, internal and external, you'll learn a lot. I highly recommend it, but I especially recommend it for the women in your lives.