Well, David, I did say the gaze would work “at certain moments.” The man has of course to be alert and see where he would be welcome, and watch that he doesn’t come off like Peter Sellers as a clueless Inspector Clouseau. But if he is led to be confident of his growing masculinity rather than letting it be denigrated and destroyed by the umpteen movies and television shows and commercials and other kinds of entertainment that promote the stupidity and repulsiveness of men and boys, he will choose the right moment.
Also, the “eeeww” business and women being so full of themselves and all this putting down of men so extensively comes from feminism and in its venom and intensity is rather new in our culture, but old enough for quite a few young people to have grown up inside of it and to accept it as reality when it is only a cultural moment, and one that will pass. We see this moment full blown on campuses today, what with the influence of women’s centers and the like, and the distortion of the curriculum away from classic works that when understood in their fullest sense support a healthier view of human nature and the relationship between the sexes. And of course it is also reinforced by popular culture and things like The View. An article in the Post points out the one-sidedness of this. All of this, including the alpha/beta bit, is part of the package that is keeping men from developing their finer qualities and natural male confidence, and perhaps keeps women from helping them do that. And women and girls, too, who are not the perfect ten and all that, also have to develop confidence in their femininity and better qualities.
There are many aspects of this which can’t be gone into here, having to do with the unnatural coarsening of our culture, the strange egalitarian belief that everyone has to get the best of what is being called the best at any time or else some monstrous injustice is being committed, and the extent to which animosity between the sexes, admittedly a perennial in human nature but not to the extent of today, has overtaken their natural complementarity.