Men need to be arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks to get women's attention. Women don't need that to get men's attention.
Men do need to be more aggrandizing in professional life. Men do not carry a baby to term and nurse it for years. All they bring to the mating game is wealth, status, and genes. Thus, professional success is much more important in order for a man to attract a mate. Thus men are much more aggressive and do whatever it takes to rise the ladder.
On the flip side, when a women is self-aggrandizing it is quite a turnoff to a man. It much more actively harms her reproductive success. So women learn not to do it, and that rubs off in professional life.
Call it an anecdote or a small sample or whatever you want, but being more aggressive and boastful and jerk-like has clearly worked better for me, even if I feel kind of bad about it sometimes the next day.
Which doesn't even imply "your" strategy isn't more succesful, however you want to define that, but it's definitely not the only way.
So the end result is that a woman might date the high quality male even though he's a jerk and dump the nice guy, simply because she's looking for quality.
The alpha-male / hot bitch thing works okay when everyone is looking for a one-night stand. When you get a little older and thoughts turn to finding someone to spend the rest of your life with, that sort of behavior just seems idiotic.
For men, the late teens to mid-twenties is the period where most mate competition takes place. This is where testosterone rates soar, as do accidental deaths as a result of risk-taking behavior http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep026685.pdf
No one you knows fits that description because like you said, everyone you know is in a relationship. What I described happens when people are trying to compete over mates. When everyone has a mate, i.e. past their mid-twenties for most part, they become much nicer.
Well, except for the occasional 30+ yo that likes to make cheap shots about folks over the internet via an implied link between maturity and intelligence.
It's funny, another thing I vividly remember doing around that time was flying off the handle and insulting people who had no beef with me and meant no offense whatsoever :-) The follies of youth...
Anyway, I'm 24, and engaged.
That's how it was when I was getting towards thirty, too. Ten years later, most of the people I knew then have divorced at least once and are far more cynical and bitter, with lower expectations relationship-wise.
> When you get a little older and thoughts turn to finding someone to spend the rest of your life with, that sort of behavior just seems idiotic.
True, but then my office is full of people who've been divorced more than 3 times, and each spouse isn't significantly different from the preceeding one (or at least what the co-workers complain about). I don't think that most people are that logical when looking for a mate.
Perhaps it's careful selection of company, perhaps it's different circumstances (none of us are really the type for one-night stands; note the boy-/girlfriend theme of my post!), or perhaps we read events to fit our theories about how dating works; but I've very rarely read someone arguing the middle ("being a jerk can work with some women, but many other women ultimately prefer a caring partner").
The parent post said "Men need to be arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks to get women's attention" and you responded "it's definitely possible to find a mate without [being arrogant]".
The fact that there are exceptions does not argue against the generalization; if you want to attack his point you need to attack it in general.
The original statement, on a literal reading, is universal ("the only way for men to get women's attention is to be a jerk"). Clearly, this was not what was intended: you call it a generalization, and that's the only reasonable reading, I'll agree.
As a counterpoint, I offered my personal experience. Admittedly, the plural of anecdote is not data; however, the fact that I know of literally no case where being a jerk got someone a girl does suggest that a closer look may be in order.
This argument works as a counterexample against a universal statement, but that doesn't mean you can't argue a more statistical version of truth based on these observations.
Men are over-represented at both ends of the spectrum. A possible explanation for this is male productive capacity which varies greatly compared to women.
And yes, behavioral tendencies which are biologically based tend to have broad effects. Testosterone encourages men to be aggressive in all things. On average, it must turn out better for them.
But there is a direct effect on getting a recommendation letter on mating success. Women like successful men.
The author is comparing men's success in impressing an authority figure of an unknown gender against a woman's success in the same. Yet, you've at once implied that the authority figure is necessarily male, and that any male/female relationship is inherently framed by sexuality.
Not only do I think that's bullshit, it doesn't relate to the author's original argument.
As a result, men have evolved/learned to self-aggrandize in social situations (including professional ones), while women have not.