Ok, I'm gonna try and keep this as short as possible, but I've been thinking about this for a couple days and I just needed to throw this out to see if I'm crazy or not.

The gist of my argument centers around the expectations that are placed on men and women in terms of what they would bring to a long-term relationship. Obviously I'm gonna shorten and simply this for the sake of brevity, but I believe that the major factor that men and women are judged by in terms of long terms relationships are as follows:

-Women: are primarily judged by their physical attractiveness

-Men: are primarily judged by their income/earning potential.

Now, obviously there are indeed other things that I am leaving out (such as recent revelations that women judge men by their physical appearance often much harsher than men judge women), but I think that those two traits are the two major ones. Now, here is my argument about the difference between them:

-Women constantly complain about the expectations that are placed on them in terms of how physically attractive they are supposed to be, and how that is evidence of female oppression and the patriarchy and all that crap. Now, I will admit that the standards of physical beauty for the most part are higher for women than for men (though thats a very complicated argument for another time), but women never sympathize over the salary and money-making standards that are placed on men. Any man who rejects a woman as not being up to his physical standards is labeled a chauvinist and a sexist-pig, but women are basically given carte blanche to throw any man to the curb who doesn't meet her salary requirements.

The difference is this: any given person wields a TREMENDOUS amount of personal control over how attractive they are. You are in nearly complete control over what food you put into your body, how much time you spend working out, and what clothes you were. Essentially, living up to society's standards of physical beauty is entirely dependent on INTERNAL circumstances. You decide what to eat, when to exercise, and what to wear, no one else has control over you when it comes to those things.

HOWEVER, when it comes to standards that men are judged by, their salary and earning potential, those things are based almost entirely on EXTERNAL circumstances. You have to get someone to hire you for a job, you have to get customers to buy your product, you have to get other people to give you the money that are you judged by. Yes, you can certainly do things to make yourself more valuable/employable. You can study hard and get good grades, you can go to graduate/professional school, you can work as many hours as you possibly can. But at the end of the day, the decisions of whether or not to hire you, to give you that raise, and to buy your product, are entirely in the hands of other people. A woman is in complete control of whether or not she will go to the gym, but I can't simply go out and start printing my own money whenever I feel like it. If I'm a salesman and my paycheck is dependent on how many sales I make, then I have to go out and convince people to buy my product, but I don't think anyone has ever gone to purchase a gym membership and ended up having to try and convince the gym manager to sell them a membership, or having to go and convince the cashier at the supermarket to sell them healthy food.

So, I hope you all understand the points I was trying to make, and why I felt they were rant-worthy. Look forward to your feedback.

TL;DR One of the major piece of evidence that feminists use to prove patriarchal oppression of women is shown to be bullshit as women yield a much, much greater degree of personal control over the standards that they are judged by than men do.