[4gotunameagain]

It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?

There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..

[interloxia]

A different explanation that rings true to my experience is that people are drawn to confidence rather than a desire to be abused.

Toxic abusers and high school garbage are good at signalling strength despite their poor character and choices.

[LorenPechtel]

Confidence and power.

And all too often they don't recognize until too late that that power will be turned on them.

[hnbad]

The tell-tale phrase of a soon-to-be victim in a relationship with an abuser is "he's not like that when we're alone", not "I can fix him".

There's a difference between confidence and dominance. It's difficult to grasp given how much our culture tends to conflate them as desirable traits in men but the main distinction is that one is about resilience and the other is about abuse.

Confidence is attractive. Unless you're deeply insecure (and abusers often are insecure even if they try to mask it in displays of dominance) you're likely attracted to confidence in potential partners - yes, even as a straight guy. Just like an insecure person can use dominance to mask their insecurity, a confident person can also act submissively. This isn't just true in BDSM, it's actually a social dynamic many people engage in completely naturally.

An abuser (or I guess the pop-psych term is usually "narcissist" but let's not open the can of worms on whether that is ever applied "correctly") will often seek out a confident partner they can manipulate into a position of vulnerability they can take advantage of to control them.

The problem with power is that it is nearly inseparable from abuse. Abuse will inevitable arise from any power imbalance because the mere circumstance of being in a position of power can easily lead to absuses of power unless you're extremely diligent about your use of it. A healthy social dynamic always requires a balance of power - even if there may be a local imbalance in any one-on-one dynamic it can be offset by the wider network if it is stable and strong enough. If you look at powerful men in modern society almost none of them are actually confident. The few who are tend to paradoxically stand out for their humility and deference (i.e. taking credit for their losses and sharing credit for their accomplishments). But this is of course much more difficult than starting out from a position of power and fearfully lashing out at any potential rival.

[4gotunameagain]

Sure, that also must be a factor.

But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)

It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.

[Tzela]

No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things. There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth. There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.

[fc417fc802]

"[ Indirectly ] drawn to X [ due to trait Y ]" is not the same as "directly desires X". You are strawmanning the other party.

The OnlyFans example can be twisted in a similar manner.

[brabel]

It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl

Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.

[habinero]

Please don't treat half of the people on this planet as if they were some alien species. Treat people like people.

[brabel]

People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.

[habinero]

Or -- and hear me out -- you're just wrong.

Which is likelier -- that

(1) the behavior of four billion people can be described by a sentence or two

or

(2) you have an extremely small and shallow reference pool and not enough experience and/or capability to understand and escape it?

Bro science isn't real

[hnbad]

The second most recent video from the YouTube channel you linked uses a "triggered feminist" meme image from 2016.

The image itself is a still image from a video posted on Alex Jones' YouTube channel covering a protest against Trump supporters. If you actually watch the part of the original video the image was taken from, you quickly realize the woman in question just has the misfortune of having very naturally emotive facial expressions and the still is taken from an argument between her and a Trump supporter about the alleged concern of immigrant sex abusers and that if you consider the fact they have to yell at each other to overcome the noisy environment she doesn't actually appear at all outraged or angry.

I don't explain this to dunk on the channel - it easily does that by itself. I explain this because the fact that the channel you cited a video from uses this meme in 2026 (10 years after it was first taken, i.e. enough time to learn about its origin and move on) is extremely symbolic of the approach you seem to favor for finding explanations to social phenomena. Yes, "it's just a meme", but that's the point: memes are shorthands that carry cultural context (or in this case entire fossil records of cultural history), they're not just funny pictures.

_That_ isn't "what we evolved to like". "Men" aren't "probably worse". Don't sell yourself short. You exist downstream from tens of thousands of years of human history and at least a hundred thousand years of prehistory. We had already developed tool-making and cooking before we even became _Homo sapiens_ so in all likelihood you can expand that prehistory into the millions of years of _Homo erectus_.

Science has moved on well past the mythology of barter economies or "hunter gatherer" societies where the cavewife tending towards the babies with her oldest daughters while cavehusband and the boys were out hunting the mammoth.

We know that the thing that allowed us to survive as a species was not just our big brain but our close-knit society that cared for its injured, elderly and disabled and was at times so welcoming we now know that early Homo sapiens at times even interbred with our closer extinct sibling species. In fact, our big brains had to come downstream from this because it made childbirth dangerous and arduous while also requiring us to spend the first years of our lives unable to defend ourselves and the first months in fact so reliant on others to help us survive that disruption of those early bonds can traumatize us for life or in extreme cases even cause us to die. Even as adults "touch starvation" has serious mental health implications.

If you think "what we evolved to like" is not "appropriate", chances are the problem isn't what we evolved to like - e.g. ripe fruits - but what systems the modern social order has put in place to make exploitation of those preferences useful for those in positions of power (or extreme wealth, but I repeat myself) even when doing so will harm you - e.g. abundant high fructose corn syrup in every part of your diet so you think food is tasty and crave more of it although it doesn't satiate you.

[rnewme]

No one said there were.

[habinero]

> nice, timid guys were friendzoned

There's a reason why "nice guy" is a stereotype. The people who describe themselves like this aren't nice or timid, but insecure, angry and judgmental. They tell stories like "women like assholes" to avoid coming to terms with the idea that they're unlikable.

[LorenPechtel]

Note that "insecure" is not incompatible with "nice" and "timid". Doesn't make them unlikable.

And it's not that women like assholes. Rather, people (not just women) like the traits that let an asshole get away with being an asshole.

[hnbad]

Both the "nice guy" and the "asshole" are insecure. The latter is just better at masking their insecurities in such a way that others mistake it for confidence.

This is especially true when eveyone involved is young enough not to have a wide enough frame of reference to gauge what's an indication of actual confidence versus abuse and has a brain undergoing massive hormonal shifts that intensify emotions, encourage risk taking and make them seek out novelty. Let's remember that most of the "nice guy" stories people like to tell are about early adulthood or more often than not their late teens.

[butlike]

1,000,000% this

[bloppe]

Just take off those glasses and everyone will realize you're secretly hot

[4gotunameagain]

Oh this is not a spiteful view of the world, I've been quite lucky with my love life, thanks.

[butlike]

I think it was a quip on movie tropes