Women's standards ("the bar") are indeed low, but not for the reasons you think

A common aphorism on the femosphere is that "the bar" (meaning the standards men need to meet to date or have sex with women) are depressingly low. To the point many women seem to lose faith in men entirely.

Women complaining of this phenomenon will often recount experiences they've had with unemployed or unemployable boyfriends, FWBs who smoke weed all day and barely shower, hookups who live in a studio flat with a mattress on the floor and not much else. And so on. These experiences tally up over time and leave a woman feeling understandably bitter and helpless; they feel men as a rule are not dependable. The observation they come up with in the concept of "the bar" is that men, in general, don't actually have to live up to a high standard to find a willing romantic or sexual partner.

I agree with them. But I have a caveat. Standards for male behavior when interacting with women have fallen dramatically, with one exception: looks.

While the standards expected of a man in terms of financial security, personal responsibility, general competencies (changing oil, replacing lightbulbs, installing shelving), career, health and wellbeing (getting big isn't the same thing) and even basic hygiene have fallen dramatically, standards for looks have inversely risen.

What this ultimately means is that a woman will, as a revealed (not a stated) preference, tolerate men who are messy, incompetent, emotionally unstable, incapable of holding down a basic job, irregularly shower etc, provided that he passes a high looks threshold (good body, tall, nice jaw and face etc.)

We're all aware of the datasets available from OKCupid, POF, Tinder etc that give us a macro-level view of this phenomenon of looks-above-everything. But it's also useful to think about it anecdotally. I'd invite both men and women on this sub to think about examples of this you've seen in action. I'm sure we can all recall: The perennial pothead who sleeps on his girlfriend's couch while she goes to work, the guy who is in his late 20s and still "deciding what to do with his life" in-between psychedelics, the unstable man whose only hobby is the gym and who gets fired from retail jobs within the induction period for losing his cool with customers - and so on. I think a good portion of us can remember these sorts of archetypes never really lacking for female attention.

I'd like to conclude with this. As much as I tend to lean towards biological determinism, I'd like to believe there are "better angels of our nature", as Steven Pinker once said. Perhaps it is a cope, but the ball for enforcing a higher standard of competency, geniality, productivity and general decency among men is in women's court. It is within women's power to, if they acted collectively, ensure that these sorts of men are deprived of access to sex. Whereupon they'd either have to improve themselves in a real and tangible way (that doesn't involve roids), or just fizzle out with no positive feedback for their own bad behavior (so it's ultimately good for them too).

In our modern era, men define femininity, and women define masculinity. I'll make another post outlining how and why I think this transformative shift away from "men defining what a man is/women defining what a woman is" occurred and how it affects all of us. Suffice to say, women are victims of this structure too.

As impractical as it seems, as a general principle I feel we should all start insisting on a higher standard of moral and ethical behavior from each other.

Thoughts?