To keep it real with you, I'm pretty much at that age where it's silly to spend much time talking about what women want*, mostly because the very question implies that all women are some sort of homogeneous collective waiting for you to do the secret sex dance which, if performed correctly by rote, will permit you to frolic winsomely in vag valley. Regardless of the cultural / political implications of the question, it's also something you're supposed to be pretty much over by sometime in your late twenties.
To put this in context, I saw Whitesnake back in Vegas about three months ago and as I listened to timeless cock-rock classics like "Is This Love" and "Give me all your Love," I found it incredibly awkward to hear a man nearing sixty mewl on and on about love and sleepless nights. It's not unlike the uncomfortable feeling one gets watching the Norma Shearer / Leslie Howard version of "Romeo and Juliet" and understanding that at 34 and 43 respectively, they're just too old for this shit. Congratulations if you got that last reference - we're cribbing from the same Film Studies book.
Nevertheless, this question keeps popping up like some sort of perennial whack-a-mole, and the blunt foam hammer chained to the game console that's more often than not used to answer reads "girls only like complete assholes," which brings us to the point of this post: do "girls" really like "assholes?"** Ladder theorists***, neck-bearded misanthropes, and weeping emos from John Hughes movies say yes, but pretty much every woman I've ever known in my entire life says no, which brings us to the point of this post.
A friend of mine back in high school said that girls want a guy who is "at least somewhat domineering," which is not quite the right usage of that word, but we can run with it. Girls want a guy who acts like a guy, and not a simpering, snivelling man-child. The point at which most ladder theorists miss the mark is to mistake aggressiveness for hostility, jocularity for vulgarity, and independence for ignorance. In other words, when a guy is a little handsy and jokey with his girl, makes up a rude-sounding nickname for her that he uses in public, and occasionally blows her off to drink beer and watch Family Guy ****with his buddies, well, these things are expected. Not necessarily desired, mind you, but expected.
What is neither expected nor desired is the butt-sniffing, the hourly calls, the sparkly-eyed awe-struck saccharinity of hanging on her every word and treating her like a golden goddess that a NBLT***** would give her. She's a person, damn it, and it's no more appropriate to idolize her than it is to denigrate her. This is what I like to call the White Elephant treatment - the subject's object d'amour is so precious, so rare, so sacred, that she must be kept apart, and cared for in isolation.******
What this means is that girls don't in fact like assholes, they like guys who display a certain degree of guy-liness, and who treat them like actual people. They also don't like guys who simper and fawn, and throw themselves prostrate to beg for sex. Do some girls like a guy who is more dominant, more aggressive, more controlling? Yes they do. Do some girls like a guy who steps back and lets the woman take control? Yes they do. Do women like a guy who refers to women generally as a collective slab of lubricated meat into which he can thrust his disused man-pole? I'm just going to guess that's a no, but then I was never in Poison.
So NBLTs, remember: the guy with the girl your lusting after isn't an asshole. You're jealous because he's banging her like a screen door in the wind, and you're sitting on the sidelines writing Battlestar Galactica furry slash fiction and getting a beat-off blister. Move on, gird thy loins, and man up. Likewise, acting like an asshole won't help you, because you're actually going to act like an asshole, most likely because you don't spend enough time socializing, and instead squander your day blogging about shit that everyone already knows.
*Notice that this does not in any way stop me from proceeding.
**For the remainder of this post, we're going to go ahead and speak in broad generalities about men and women. If you appreciate the distinction, and the quotes preceding the above asterisk, you probably don't need to bother with the rest of this post as you've long surpassed any lesson in the arbitrary nature of gender dynamics that this blog might give you.
***Yes, I know I'm pretty much scrounging up the internet from 1999, but I can't think of a better catch-all for the troubled sub-class to which I refer, and thus I call them ladder theorists.
****Self-referential linking! This blog works on a lot of levels!
*****Neck-Bearded Ladder Theorist
******Good on you for catching that subject-object implication. You're a real smarty!
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