Norah Vincent's book _Self-Made Man_ discusses these issues. In it, Vincent spends a couple months dressing and acting like a man, and she goes around living life as a "man": i.e. she makes male friends, goes on dates, and so forth. The first time she approaches a group of women in an attempt to get to know them, Vincent is shocked by their indifference and what to her eyes looks anew like callousness. In this passage, her friend Curtis is in on the ruse and takes her out to meet women):

"Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school. Rejection sucked.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it."

That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would never come. This wasn't some magic island in a beer commercial where all the ladies would light up for me if only I drank the right brew.

"Try again, man," Curtis urged. "C'mon. Don't give up so easily." "

She hadn't realized the sheer amount of rejection most men experience on a day-to-day basis in interacting with women. I suspect most women don't; I also suspect that most men don't understand how many implicit or explicit sexual offers many women get every day, and how that can become wearying too. In dealing with what I'd call the facts of dating life, Vincent says this:

"How do you handle all this fucking rejection?" I asked Curtis when we sat back down for a postmortem.

"Let me tell you a story," he said. "When I was in college,
there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn't particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn't figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. 'How do you get so many girls to go out "with you?' He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: 'I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it's that ten percent.'"

And this isn't true only of dating life, but of startup life and many other fields (including my own: writing). I actually teach a chapter of Self-Made Man to my freshmen (I'm a grad student in English at the U of Arizona), and part of the reason I do it is for what she says about rejection (and about empathy).

Most of the comparisons between men and women in startups, ability, and so forth are, I think, complete bullshit. But I do wonder if men don't have an advantage in persistence because of early dating experiences, where if they're to have any success whatsoever they must learn to accept and cope with rejection. This isn't because men are somehow born to be more persistent, but I think that, by the time they've been through at least a couple of relationships in which they have to be the ones who make the first move, they begin to get the idea that a) rejection is okay and b) they need a thick skin.

(See the Amazon link to Self-Made Man if you're curious: http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year-Disguised/dp... . If you want the chapter I teach to my freshmen, from which the above quotes are drawn, send me an e-mail -- seligerj [at] gmail [....dot...] com)