I'm just gonna preface this by saying I don't have a source or a study. This is all observation and intuition.

Women barely even know how they want to be treated. Given that women's dating preferences are so based in hierarchy (top 20% of men), they literally just look around to see what other women are chasing or what society shows them to be attractive men. A lot of the time wires get crossed in some of these females minds where "high value" and "unattainable" come to mean the same thing to them, which is why I assume serial killers and mass shooters get fan mail from women.

This would also explain why dating standards seem to change depending on the time period and culture. A female dating coach literally goes over how women end up with these expectations in this video. Women learn at a certain point in their lives that High Value = Men with options. The reality is men with options give you a very small slice of their attention when their bored cause he has 5 more in his phone just like you. Women end up associating "slice of attention" with "High Value" and thus end up literally trying to chase chad/fuckboys.

Women will go on social media, compare their looks to the girls they see on their with their boyfriends or whoever their hanging with, and then have it in their mind that since she's with him, I deserve a man like that too. The height obsession in American is a direct consequence of this phenomena. The more women see women arbitrarily making that "6 foot guys are hot" distinction, the more she's going to try to chase those guys to make herself feel better amongst the imagined hierarchy if women she has her head. Essentially, tall men are trophies for women to show off to other women. Even when it comes to sex it's about her cause she feels more attractive fucking the guys that other women want.

This also would explain all those "my one friend who pulled hella even though he's a short balding Indian janitor" stories everyone on here seems to have. They only got that way cause they started off with uglies and eventually worked women's brains to their advantage to the point where just being wanted by X number of women was enough for the surrounding females.

You could say this is just "status" at play but your status can literally change depending on what celebrities are shown on TV and in movies and are regarded as attractive. Status also includes money and looks. A little tangent but this obsession with hierarchy and "the men at the top" is why humanity isn't ever going to escape the plagues of capitalism. Women would rather have capitalism with a bunch of Playboy billionaires that 40% of them are trying to grasp whilst getting pumped and dumped over everyone living a theoretically equal lifestyle with minimal inequality with 90% of them living a modest lifestlye with husbands. Not a real statistic but you get the point I'm trying to make.

I do get that this is a human thing to an extent, and men also do this to a wayyy less extreme. It just seems to be strained by the way women's sexuality and brain works. Since they naturally want to submit, that kind of means they need to be told what to do and what the status quo is. I have literally had grown women tell teenage me at jobs that something was my fault or my responsibility because "You're the man". They literally need to be told what to do. That's why a ton of them have this "I want you to take initiative" thing going on.