The amount of rationalization in this thread is disturbing me.
What do you think I'm rationalizing?
How many dresses do you have? How many shampoos? Skin care products? Do you regularly shave your arms and legs? Did you ever try to wax any part of your body, and do you have any idea how it feels? Were you ever seriously concerned that the tips of your hair were splitting ever-so-slightly and you must do something about that?
You've displayed a severe lack of synthesis here. What you should have been thinking about were analogous items that a male would possess for sex appeal. You're seriously trying to make a point by asking me how many dresses I own? Obviously I own none, and obviously that does not speak at all to the amount of effort I exert trying to impress women. I also own precisely zero skirts, zero bras, and zero tampons!
To my knowledge, a male's sex appeal is not significantly improved by most of the items you've gone to the trouble of listing. I've never felt that I would be more sexy if my legs, armpits, etc. were waxed (although I have plucked my unibrow a few times). Nor, with the exception of acne control, do I think skin care products would increase the average man's sex appeal.
You've apparently failed to accurately conceptualize the idea of sex appeal. When I brought this up, rather than ask for apparently relevant or informative information (how much money will I spend on a date? how nice is my watch, jacket, car, apartment, etc? how much effort will I actually go to in order to seduce a woman or get laid? do i wear deodorant/cologne? do i use contact lenses? how often do i shave? how much do i care about hygiene? what kinds of clothes do i wear? what is my job?), you came asking about how many dresses I own and whether I regularly shave my legs, etc.
Seriously... apply equally?
Male sex appeal is quite different than female sex appeal, but there is a common ground. Clothing, hair (dye, rogaine, plugs, transplant, cutting and grooming), diet and exercise fall inside that common ground.
In a vacuous sense of the word, all organs are reproductive organs and you can feasibly claim that your job and apartment are part of your seduction routine, just like Bill Clinton's job and apartment were. But can you somehow delineate "seduction-related" activities from "other" activities and somehow make men and women spend the same amount of effort on "seduction-related", without making "other" an empty set? Try it! I don't think you will succeed. For example, any reasonable delineation would classify work time as non-seduction-related, which instantly skews the ratio towards women.
Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.
For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says
As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.
My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, this may have something to do with it.
So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support, but usually after I or, more rarely, someone else sounds the alarm, and usually without much persistence or apparent investment. There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems, which does nothing to disincentivize being piggish around here - some people seem to earnestly care about the problem, but this isn't enforced by the community at large, it's just a preexisting disposition (near as I can tell).
I would like help reducing the incidence of:
We could use more of the following:
Thank you for your attention and, hopefully, your assistance.