Insinuations doesn't replace evidence so blow that smoke elsewhere.
It wasn't intended as evidence.
They are a subcategory of the broader category you mentioned.
Why bring them up as standing out, then?
Hermeneutics mean you have more data available. If logic, truth, consistent ideas etc are important to you it means you have greater amount of pieces that needs to be sorted before you can make conclusions. People who know very little are faster to make conclusions since they have fewer facts to get in the way of their ideas. People who know a lot but aren't interested in consistent and coherent logic aren't useful either. This is why empiricism and rationalism are important but both fails on it's own.
Why do you equate knowledge with studying books? Either you consider books full of factual knowledge - and then I understand, or you exclusively think of material written in books as knowledge - ignoring all the other ways of attaining knowledge.
In my world, knowledge is simply the information processed by the senses - and as such, it's almost never complete or factual. It's probaby not even knowledge in any meaningful sense.
The value of knowledge is indeed about research and study, but that doesn't have to go on in a classroom - and it's especially vulnerable to misinformation if you trust it blindly. You have to apply common sense and logic, and most importantly you have to accept ignorance and the concept of a theory versus reality.
You're the one drawing conclusions based on popular theories and "data" - and the rest of us are drawing conclusions based on years of biological research about how genders respond to each other.
My guess is that you failed to separate physical/sexual attraction from the more cerebral/intangible attraction that goes on between two people - beyond the gender-specifics.
You started out with interesting information about the "Male Gaze" theory - and I agreed with what you said. Then you started questioning established male preferences related to the female - and then it went completely off-track. You let your own personal identity interfere with your relationship with the truth. That's not going to work.
We can certainly agree that attraction as a wholesome term is about more than just gender - and that gender could be one of the less relevant factors.
But no one here would dispute that, it's just you singing songs of the intellectually superior as per usual. You underestimate people almost by default.
Perhaps I do and your certainty is wrong?
I have no certainty - I have doubts. You're the one with one certainty after the other, and new ones almost daily.
But I do accept a few "everyday certainties" - because there's simply no detectable reason to doubt them - as of yet. That includes the male being attracted - physically - to the female and the other way around. Not without exceptions, naturally.
Oh, I do think you want the truth. But it's very obvious that you're emotionally invested in being an academic and an intellectual. It's very obvious that you feel good when you speak about how much you've read and how much you know.
That is a very common disposition, but it will invariably taint the relationship with truth - because the emotional desire to appear educated will often dominate over the acceptance of not being right - or not having understood the topic.