today in personal insights: I realized that part of the reason I got really excited about PUA stuff when I first discovered it is that the Dominant Narrative is that Men Like Smart Women and hearing that makes my brain go “oh no but I’m not smart, clearly no one will ever love me”
and PUA is like “actually men don’t care how smart you are or what you’ve accomplished, all they care about is physical appearance!” to which my brain’s response was “oh good then I’ll be fine, I’m pretty hot”
which uh makes a lot of sense given where I actually am in the distributions of those two traits? idk
(and can I find a good reason to be annoyed at the people who promote the Men Like Smart Women narrative for ideological reasons? I mean obviously the real answer is some combination of the two, and maybe it’s best just to get as close as possible to the real answer and promote that. or maybe people are different enough from each other that promoting a single narrative is sort of hopeless. but I do have to grudgingly admit it seems good on the margin to encourage women to spend more time trying to be successful and less time on makeup?)