Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.

Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.

Further I doubt that there are what males would call action scenes in twilight because if there had been, males would have willingly watched it. What you are calling action scenes were probably status scenes involving violence and cruelty. I assume this because many, possibly most, romances have status scenes involving violence and cruelty. Love interest cruelty in romance is as predictable and repetitious as the girl moaning in porn. The point is not action, but to prove the love interest is potentially capable of cruelty and violence.

In an action scene, James Bond is in grave danger. In a romance cruelty scene, the love interest hurts someone really badly without the audience ever feeling the love interest to be in danger. The heroine is never in danger from the love interest, but the main point of the scene is that she could be. He is dangerous and badass. Hence the propensity of the prince to knock off relatives of the princess with that prominent and lovingly depicted sword.

In contrast, the main point of an action scene is that the hero is in danger. For example the henchman Jaws in "the spy who loved me" is way more badass than James Bond, so that the audience believes James Bond is in danger. No one is ever more badass than the romance love interest.

So yeah...there's a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all

That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don't really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around. Hence Saint Paul's policy that females should remain silent in church, wear a head covering, etc - harmless ways to make all females in church artificially lower status than all males in church, thus artificially making all males in church hot, thus making it possible to accomplish his directive: "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband." without the woman having to wait until they run out of eggs in their thirties, thereby causing their status in the sexual market place to drop like a stone until, at last, due to their lowered sexual market place status, they finally find that males are hot enough that they want to put out the necessary effort.

In order to ban hypergamy, Paul had to make females not want hypergamy.

Like Groucho Marx, you will only find them interesting when they start losing interest - hence the extremely low reproduction rate and high fertility clinic attendance rate of intelligent well educated women.

Observe the reasonably high rates of marriage near the age of maximum fertility among Mormons, Palestinians, and Amish.

Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.

a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe,

Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?

If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.

Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you, (naked girl moans a lot) all romances look identical to me.

All romances have a plot that corresponds to marriage as commanded by the New Testament, and endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century: Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.

And now we have a completely different system, and all the indications are that women do not like it, even though they said, and keep on saying, that the new system is what they want.

I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.

Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.

Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy's observations, because you are female and can see the truth from inside, whereas I can only see it from outside.

Downloading a girly cartoon romance at random, labelled as a romance and intended for a female audience, and skimming it: Princess is much younger than the prince, and has been given to the prince to seal a peace treaty: The deal was that she was supposed to marry the King, but the King took one look at her and unilaterally changed the deal, giving her to the Prince instead. Prince treats her like the small brat that she in fact is. Prince is a leader of men, commander of the army, and has slaughtered various people in princess' immediate family. The deal is that her land conditionally surrenders to the prince's King as a result of military defeat, but the prince has to marry her so that her people get representation and her royal lineage does not totally disappear. Story is that, like the King, he does not want to marry her, because she is a small brat and much hotter chicks keep trying to get his attention, and she homicidally hates him because he has with his own sword killed one of her beloved relatives, and his army under his direct command has killed most of her other relatives (hence the marriage)

Skipping over a zillion frames of the prince in manly poses experiencing deep emotions, thinking about deep emotions, and talking about deep emotions, to the end, they start to like each other just in time for the scheduled wedding,. Final scene is that he goes off to war again and realizes he misses her. He wears the sword with which he killed her beloved relatives in every frame except for a frame when they go to bed, including the frame where he realizes he misses her.

Well I did not check every frame, but every frame that I checked he is wearing that sword, except when they were in bed. As far as I could tell in my somewhat superficial reading, he never regrets or apologizes for killing off much of her family, and treats her as an idiot for making a fuss about it until she stops making a fuss about it.

My account of the story is probably not completely accurate, (aagh, I am drowning in estrogen) but it is close enough. Prince, Princess, sword, arranged marriage, and sword.

So, I would say that the intended readers of that romance rather like patriarchy, and I would not believe anything they said to the contrary.

as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy's writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! ... Im absolutely not going to tolerate this.

How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable "tone"?

How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?

And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area - teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games.

I don't think so.

Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviously 100% caused by recent environmental differences.

Socialism did not make them good cooperators, it made them layabouts and criminals.

And, come to think of it, that is a good parallel to the social decay we have seen following state attempts to impose egalitarianism on the family.

Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?

Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.

Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.

Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.

Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like?

Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.

So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been social decay since Queen Victoria was crowned.

Show me a family where husband and wife fairly share the task of picking up the socks, and I will show you a family where dad sleeps on the couch and Mum's lovers visit every week or so to use the main bed.

It is just not in women's nature to have sex with their equals, so the egalitarian family just does not function. Legal measures to make it egalitarian invariably backfire and fail to have the desired effect. Maybe after some millenia of evolution, women will evolve the capability to have sex with their equals, but right now, does not work.

Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough

Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently negative, value.

Why not go one step further with the debt system, and allow people to pledge themselves into debt slavery? That would remove the feckless from circulation, and ensure that they had responsible supervision.

The supposition is that if someone goes into debt for a post graduate degree in English literature or a master of fine arts in advanced basket weaving, they are making a responsible decision, so should be allowed freedom of contract, but if someone goes into debt for food and stuff, they are making an irresponsible decision, so should not be allowed freedom of contract.

Seems to me the reverse supposition is wiser - that it is more desirable to allow the stupid to voluntarily choose to restrict their future freedom of action than it is to allow the smart. And I am also inclined to doubt that those who go into debt for a postgraduate degree in English literature are the cognitive elite.

You cannot, or at least should not, ask people to contract to that which they cannot perform. Thus, moment to moment consent to sex, requires in practice moment to moment consent to marriage, which abolishes marriage. Abolishing marriage violates freedom of contract.

Which is not moral progress.

If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.

Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.