With her typically blunt Aspergers-fueled style Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist offers suggestions for men in the workplace.

This is not grand stuff. Okay. I mean, women are doing better in school than men, outearning men, and look, now even Time magazine says women don’t need marriage as much as men do. So it’s not like women are in trouble. But still, men could do some stuff to make life better for women at work. Here are some suggestions: ...

4. Show your forearms.
If you are going to insist on making the workplace sexual, at least do it in a way that appeals to women. Women like to look at mens' forearms. That’s right. In the same way that men like to look at womens’ cleavage. It must be from the days when women were looking to mate with a guy who was strong enough to kill a lion. Or something.

Source: Brazen Careerist

The emphasis in item #4, I think, would be on the if. If you're not interested in making the workplace sexual (other items in her list steer away from it) then by all means don't. But! It's actually pretty nice to get that sort of information out there.

We men tend to look at the world, and each other, from a constructedly masculine men's perspective. So generally speaking we assume that women are going to be interested in parts of men that men think they ought to be...

...and then when women don't respond the way we imagine they ought to we say they're all mysterious and viva la difference and all that.

Personally I don't know about the lion-killing forearm hypothesis, but then Trunk admits she's just guessing too. If I was cooking up "evolutionary psychology" guesses it would be that women care about men's forearms because that's where the muscles are that let us gently roll our fingers around or across the clitoris before, during, after, or instead of intercourse. Men, who because we seem to care a great deal about penis size, typically imagine that's the main thing women care about as well. Which, if I may digress yet further, would explain why a) men are so inclined to send penis photos to random Craigslist recipients and yet b) are rarely rewarded with enthusiasm when we do.

Aaug, here's another brief digression that's still about men's assumptions that it's our perceptions that shape what's sexy: you know how women sometimes wear certain clothes, or else wear them a certain way, and we just assume they have to know we're going to interpret it as sexual? Well, if you're a man, next time you think about rolling up your sleeves or leaving them down ask yourself if you understand what it might mean to the women around you. I mean, do you have to "know" what you're doing, right? You have to have thought about it, right? No? Bingo! If you're not "asking for it" then maybe neither are they.

My main point, though, is that to the extent that Trunk's right that women are now doing better in school, that in many demographic slices they're earning more than their male counterparts, and that they're no longer as dependent on marriage, then at some point men are going to have to start facing up to the fact that we're not inherently the "wallets with legs" to women that MRAs and (some) evolutionary psychologists imagine we are. (What did I say about men thinking our assumptions are universal ones?) Sooner or later, since humans and not just men and not just women are "visual creatures," it might be a good idea for men to start thinking about our own visual appeal.

In which case be grateful for Penelope Trunk's suggestion.

I'd just add that this advice really resonated for me. Back when I was regularly participating in Osbasso's Half-nekkid Thursday photo meme one of my most popular entries was... an off-the-cuff photo of my forearms!

Who knew?

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)