There are significant incentives to do so. Men who treat women as children reap very large rewards compared to those men who treat women as equals.
Is that true? What are the incentives and rewards? Are there circumstances under which this is a bad idea - for example, do relative ages or relative social position matter? (For example, what if the woman in question is your mother, teacher/professor, employer, or some other authority figure with power over you?) Are there also incentives for men to treat other men as children, or for women to treat men or other women as children?
I'm pretty sure he's trying to say basically the same thing as this OB post (specifically the part from "Suppose that middle-class American men are told..." on).
The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.