A puzzlement specific to this era surely beckons: Why are males still the ones doing the asking, to begin with? Especially since micromanagement fanatics might contend that the best way to protect men from courtship mishaps and to protect women from sexual misconduct purely along those lines would be in having females solely to do the soliciting.
But obviously (below), that isn't likely happen on a broad scale no matter what the amount of cultural redesign propaganda is dispensed and taught. [Existing exceptions are singles hang-outs, certain telecommunication services, and online matchmaking venues where a more significant percentage of women may indeed initiate proceedings or be the outright "pursuers", occasionally of blatant degree.] In theory, however,
if contemporary women were still as desperately needy of the opposite sex as men, then the former should/would eventually buckle under and request dates if there was suddenly and magically a famine with regard to the latter already amply, willingly, and ubiquitously choosing to do so with a hound-dog intensity.
Why Don't Women Ask Men Out on First Dates?: ... As noted in the histogram, a great majority of the women, 93%, preferred to be asked out -- only 6% preferred to do the asking. The majority of men preferred to do the asking, 83%, while 16% preferred to be asked out on a date. It is interesting that more men preferred to be asked out (16%) than there were women who preferred to do the asking (6%). That difference suggests that 10% of men may be waiting quite a while for a woman to ask them out on a first date.
Preferences are one thing, but what about actual behavior? We asked the survey participants how many times they had asked someone out on a first date in the past year. As can be seen in the histogram, males reported significantly more instances of asking someone out in the past year. On average males asked four women out on a first date in the past year. In contrast, most females did not ask anyone out on a first date in the past year. We also asked how many times the survey participants had been asked out on a first date in the past year. On average, males reported that they had been asked out about once. Females reported that, on average, they had been asked out about 5 times.
Men of my generation, who went to college in the 70s and 80s, mostly embraced the goals of the feminist movement. Greater equality, or at least equity, between the sexes seemed fair. And, from a male perspective, there might be some benefits for us as well -- including less inhibited female sexuality and the anticipation that women would begin asking us out on first dates. So we waited. And waited... and... we are still waiting!
So, after decades of increasing sexual equality, why are women not assuming equal "risky initiatives" responsibilities? Even if doing so can be at times anxiety provoking and sometimes result in painful rejections that are difficult not to take personally, wasn't one of the goals of women's movement "equal rights, equal responsibilities?" Over this time period, many other aspects of gender-role behaviors have indeed changed -- for example more women than men attend college today. However, this part of the courtship script -- female indirect nonverbal proceptive signaling and male direct verbal initiation -- apparently has not much changed. This suggests that something deeper than arbitrary social gender role assignments may be involved in the development and persistence of this robust sex difference....
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