Friday, January 11, 2013

A little light culture: Out of the nice guy trap Pt 1

I see that nice guys are in trouble again. There was a Tumblr set up to mock guys who used a dating service called OKCupid and whose profiles featured bitter statements about the women who weren't putting out for them because they were "nice guys". Lots of fun was had mocking them and, even better, getting all self-righteous about hating them.

And it's easy to mock. The guys being mocked are driven by a sense of entitlement. They have been nice to girls and, instead of getting sex, they are being relegated to "the friend zone". In the bitterness that follows, they suggest that women only want sex with bad guys.

So there was much mockery.

Hey, I have an idea, why don't we match up all these bitter nice guys in their twenties with all those still attractive women in their late thirties and forties who can't get a date? Heh, heh, heh.

Well, no, you're not supposed to mock deluded women. Only deluded men are fair game.
The Friend Zone is a bullshit, misogynistic, make-believe land Nice Guys have come up with to demonize women for not wanting to date them. They use it as an excuse to ignore the fact that there are Actual Reasons behind their decision to not pursue a relationship or have sex with this guy.
That's a very good point, but the exact same thing could be said of the woman who wrote the next bit I cite. She too can't see that there are "Actual Reasons", and good reasons at that, why no one wants to date her.
Because when I look around at my girlfriends - bright, attractive,successful, fabulous women in their 40s who are single - I sincerely begin to wonder: Is there even one solvent, kind, desirable,heterosexual single man in his 40s left in Britain? 

My friends and I have a horrible suspicion that the answer is no.
The answer is "no" because desirable, heterosexual men tend to get married in their thirties.

I don't think it's a coincidence that attitudes of the women who can't find love exactly mirror the attitudes of the men who can't. The men claim that women just want to be friends with the nice guys while giving sex to bad guys. The women claim that the guys who are available to them are either just players who only want sex or determined partner-hunters who only want the best choice available to be the mother of their children.

Here's a wacky thought. Imagine there was a social revolution, let's call it "the sexual revolution", wherein we attempted to throw all the conventions about sex out the window so that everyone could now have sex based solely on whatever any two (or more) consenting adults could agree upon. One of the first things you would expect to follow from this would be that lots of people, probably most people, would take a time out from pursuing more permanent relationships to see how much fun they could get out of this. Love and marriage wouldn't disappear but people would think, I'll see how much fun sex I can get first; I'll experiment and do all the stuff I want to do.

What harm could come from that?

Well, you can decide for yourself what does or doesn't count as "harm", but it is pretty easy to predict one set of consequences. First of all, the age that people will get married at will rise. In the mean time, women are going to be interested in having sex with the highest status men available to them and high status males are going to return the favour by eating up the easy sex they offer them like honey. But that isn't going to be an equal match up. High status men are going to discover they can have lots of partners available and they are going to be more interested in multiple partners than women are. And men, being interested in multiple partners, are going to be less exacting about how high status the partners they seek are—they'll want some high status partners, particularly as regular dates, but they'll cheerfully settle for much lower status partners in between or even coinciding with their higher status partners. Meanwhile, because the marriage age is older and high status men can always find partners from a younger age group if their current partner disappoints them (while most women don't have this option), a lot of women are going to run out of time in which to find a partner while their status is still relatively high. All of which is to say, you very quickly are going to get exactly the world that all those "nice" guys and all those "bright, attractive,successful, fabulous women in their 40s who are single " complain about.

Put up your hand if you've never known women in their twenties who have had sex with guys who obviously have lots of other partners and equally don't have the slightest intention of being in a relationship with them simply because that guy is really attractive to them?

The losers in this situation are going to be men who don't have enough status to get sex and women who have just enough status to get sex from higher status men and spend their time pursuing those relationships until they lose their status end up single and unwanted. And that, not surprisingly, is exactly the groups the people complaining bitterly come from.

And maybe that's just fine. Life is under no obligations to be fair and if you think it is you might want to consider the next severely handicapped person you see and ask yourself what his or her love life is like. Some people just get crapped on in life and maybe you're one of them.


I know, that's not very kind of me. But how could a culture based on everyone freely pursuing the kind of sex life they think of as best for them be any different?



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