I’m trying to unpack this sentence, I think it means something like this: “I signal sexual availability so that males will offer me favours in exchange, but I have enough plausible deniability so that I don’t have to follow through” plus “whenever a male accepts such an exchange, I get a self-esteem boost”. I don’t know if such an interpretation is generally what other people have in their minds.
Just a bit of personal experience / observation / commentary:
Your interpretation is the Evo side of the Evo-Cog boundary. The cognition (adaptation-executer) side of it is that when a young appealing-to-the-target woman “girl-games”, it triggers conditions where the targeted man (or men) executes adaptations that survived in human genetics that make him act more friendly and helpful towards the woman, or make him feel valued (which for other reasons explained in a previous post on Dark Arts that I can’t find, incites reciprocation by doing things of value to the other person) and therefore already situated in a different type of social interaction where it appears more advantageous (to the subconscious) to cooperate.
Basically, yes to your interpretation in terms of why the process exists, but that is not at all what is going on in the minds of the participants—the young men genuinely feel nervous and valued and uncertain about the girl flirting or charming them and the motivations behind it or whether indeed there are any at all, and they also in most cases genuinely feel the urge to be helpful or friendly ‘simply because’ the girl was friendly / flirty, and subconsciously there’s all this stuff about getting into closer relationships with people that seem attractive because overall that gives more opportunities later for actually getting into serious romantic relationships or, y’know, getting some good casual sex.
Just a bit of personal experience / observation / commentary:
Your interpretation is the Evo side of the Evo-Cog boundary. The cognition (adaptation-executer) side of it is that when a young appealing-to-the-target woman “girl-games”, it triggers conditions where the targeted man (or men) executes adaptations that survived in human genetics that make him act more friendly and helpful towards the woman, or make him feel valued (which for other reasons explained in a previous post on Dark Arts that I can’t find, incites reciprocation by doing things of value to the other person) and therefore already situated in a different type of social interaction where it appears more advantageous (to the subconscious) to cooperate.
Basically, yes to your interpretation in terms of why the process exists, but that is not at all what is going on in the minds of the participants—the young men genuinely feel nervous and valued and uncertain about the girl flirting or charming them and the motivations behind it or whether indeed there are any at all, and they also in most cases genuinely feel the urge to be helpful or friendly ‘simply because’ the girl was friendly / flirty, and subconsciously there’s all this stuff about getting into closer relationships with people that seem attractive because overall that gives more opportunities later for actually getting into serious romantic relationships or, y’know, getting some good casual sex.