u/WiseCherry778

The funniest thing about men constantly complaining that women only want the “top 10% of men” is that men themselves are probably even MORE concentrated in who they desire. Men will spend hours online acting like women invented shallow attraction while their entire sexuality revolves around a tiny percentage of women they consider exceptionally attractive.

Just look at male behavior instead of listening to male self-reporting. Look at who men follow on Instagram. Look at which girls blow up online. Look at the women getting millions of likes, comments, donations, subscribers, and obsessive attention from men. Look at the porn men consume. Look at the women men send to their friends. Look at the girls men suddenly become nervous, generous, attentive, funny, and emotionally available around. Men do not distribute attraction evenly at all.

Most men are not fantasizing about average women. They are fantasizing about extremely attractive women with pretty faces, tiny waists, nice bodies, polished aesthetics, sex appeal, confidence, and hyper-feminine energy. Even men who claim they “prefer natural women” usually mean naturally beautiful women who still perfectly fit beauty standards. Men say one thing, but their behavior says something completely different.

And honestly, I think a lot of men DESIRE high-maintenance women far more than they admit. They love glamorous women, beautiful women, socially desired women, “Instagram girls,” women with expensive aesthetics. The problem is that a lot of men also feel intimidated by those women because they associate them with a level of status, money, confidence, charisma, or attractiveness that they themselves don’t feel they have.

So instead of saying “I want this type of woman but I don’t think I can attract her,” they moralize it instead. Suddenly she’s “too high maintenance,” “too materialistic,” “attention-seeking,” “not relationship material,” etc. Meanwhile he still follows 400 women who look exactly like her and consumes content centered around women like that daily.

Male online spaces are FULL of this contradiction too. You constantly see men asking how to get hotter women specifically. Not how to become emotionally healthier. Not how to build meaningful relationships. It’s always “how do I pull girls out of my league,” “how do rich guys get beautiful women,” “how do I become attractive to hot women,” “how do I get Instagram-type girls,” etc. Men absolutely care about status through women and female attractiveness. They just don’t like hearing female attraction described in the same blunt way male attraction usually is.

That’s why I don’t buy the narrative that men are somehow less shallow or less selective than women. Men are extremely selective visually. Probably more than women in many ways. The difference is that male selectiveness has always been normalized, while female selectiveness gets treated like some societal problem.

I honestly think a lot of men were comfortable with attraction being hierarchical when women were the ones being ranked, evaluated, and chased. But now that women openly evaluate men too, suddenly everyone wants to pretend attraction should be completely egalitarian and morally pure.

I honestly think if women collectively woke up tomorrow and decided to give men unlimited sex with zero expectations attached (no commitment, no exclusivity, no emotional investment required), a massive percentage of men would completely lose interest in relationships. I think a lot of men see relationships as the structure that gives them stable access to sex, comfort, emotional support, validation, care, companionship, etc. Not necessarily because they deeply value partnership itself.

And before anyone gets defensive, obviously not all men. I know good men exist. But after a certain point it starts feeling less like bitterness and more like pattern recognition. You hear the same stories over and over: men cheating during pregnancy, losing attraction after childbirth, replacing wives they built lives with for younger women, emotionally checking out once the “fun” part fades, staying only while the woman is useful or desirable in some way. It’s hard not to notice how conditional a lot of male “love” seems to be.

What really gets to me is that women are constantly told men are “simple” and “visual” like that’s supposed to excuse everything. But women are expected to emotionally invest, nurture, build, sacrifice, support, understand, forgive, stay attractive forever, stay emotionally available forever, and still somehow believe we are deeply loved for who we are underneath all of that. I’m starting to think a lot of women are searching for emotional intimacy from people who fundamentally do not experience relationships the same way we do. Women keep looking for this mutual soul level connection while a lot of men seem primarily motivated by access, convenience, validation, and routine comfort.

Again, I know exceptions exist. I know some men genuinely love and cherish their partners deeply. But those relationships honestly feel rare enough that when I see one, it almost shocks me. Like wow, he actually sees her as a full human being and not just as a role she performs in his life.

you can see it everywhere if you actually pay attention to the behavior instead of what people say. the same men who complain about women being “too picky” are the ones whose entire attention is on women above average. their feeds, their likes, what they react to in real life, it’s never the women “on their level.” so when they do end up dating an average looking woman, it’s not because that was their ideal. it’s because that’s what was accessible to them. and there’s a difference between choosing something because you genuinely want it and choosing it because it’s what you can get. many women can feel that difference. nobody wants to feel like the realistic option instead of the desired one.

that’s why the whole narrative that “average women don’t want average men” is so one sided. it ignores the fact that a lot of those same men don’t actually want their equivalent eithe, they just accept it when they don’t have better options.