We are all animals at night

Your comment is complete nonsense.

Men go to the gym for themselves and secondarily, because it raises their attractiveness and confidence in front of everyone, not just women. They chat up strangers at bus stops, because dating is a literal lottery for the guy.

No they don't. They earn more because their jobs are in more demand and there their skills are in lower supply.

The question was which job required more skill. And the answer is very clearly: the architect's.

> i actually agree with this sentiment quite strongly. part of the reason gender identity and dysphoria, queerness, and fluid gender roles are so despised by conservatives and religious fellows, especially when it comes to masculinity, is that it threatens the dominant power structure of the last few thousand years.

No, it's because it's all total mental delusion, and we stand up for the truth above coddling people who should be receiving mental health treatment. You cannot be half a man and half a woman unless you're in the tiny proportion of people with an intersex genetic disorder. It has nothing to do with power structure and nothing to do with religion.

>sex work, and women’s empowerment is especially looked down upon. what else is labour but selling your body, yet somehow a woman is a slut to be shamed, and simultaneously the object of sexual desire.

Prostitution is despised because it is fundamentally exploitative of everyone involved, and bad for the stability of society. The origins of the taboo probably also involve the very high level of venereal disease that accompanied it until very recently. And it's not like that problem has been entirely solved either.

>men need these latent structured in place to remain a) powerful and b) keep their sense of worth and identity.

Delusional.

>why else is being gay or “throwing like a girl” insults every western boy heard in the 90s?

Boys don't want to be seen as girlish for the same reason that girls in the 90s (and the 2000s, and the 2010s, and probably the 2020s too, by the way) don't want to be seen as boyish. When boys go through puberty they are competing with each other to be masculine. When girls go through puberty they are competing with each other to be feminine.

Irrationality (own or others') can trap people in situations where self-destruction is the most rational choice.

Furthermore, we have a bit of a scoping issue on our hands: we default to assuming that self-preservation is rational.

Self-preservation may be rational behavior for animals. But humans are qualitatively different from animals in at least the following aspects:

- We have language, which lets us continue our thoughts beyond the immediate moment.

- We are continuously aware of our own mortality.

In that light, many of the relatively irrational choices that we make, can still seem more rational in comparison with an alternative of just sitting around and waiting to die. (Terror minimization theory.)

It gets better. A being that exists, can suffer, dread, and die; not to mention, cause others to suffer, dread, and die. A non-existent being, on the other hand, doesn't have any problems at all. "Destruction" is just the process of going from existence to non-existence, and "self-destruction" is just an egosyntonic drive towards non-existence. You don't exactly act self-destructive because you want to exist more, quite the opposite.

So, from a thinking being's perspective, self-preservation is at least as irrational as self-destruction, if not more so. Of course, either way, people's thinking is much less rational than we give it credit for, while people's actions - much more. But this only reinforces the point: that the most rational evaluation of the question of self-destruction is simultaneously the most counterintuitive.

(Incidentally, if this line of reasoning makes sense to you, you can check out "Every Cradle is a Grave" by Sarah Perry. If it doesn't, also check it out, it probably contains a rebuttal to your first few arguments, and then you have no other choice but to really start thinking.)

>it's near impossible to see all of the collateral damage you make when destroying yourself.

It's still way easier to see than all of the collateral damage you make when not destroying yourself. See: the environment, the economy, the culture. All turned to shit, thanks to the presumably rational actions of presumably rational actors pursuing individual self-preservation and prosperity.

Which is why you see so many young people finding life hardly worth living. Some of them even revert to what they perceive as "traditional" value systems - ironically, the same ones that made life hardly worth living in the first place.

But of course the prostitutes are to blame /s