Why Do We Ask Why Women Seem to Prefer Bad Boys to Nice Guys? part II
Read parts I and III of this article
Our hypothetical young female will probably deeply internalize just how much she sucks. No one could possibly ever like someone who is so worthless as she. She’ll be lucky if anyone ever shows any interest in her at all. In fact, she’d probably better latch onto the first guy that comes along.
Alternatively, our hypothetical young female can internalize the media’s classic good girl role instead, which is nothing more than a nurturer of others — a civilizing force, as it were. What does a properly good girl want in a guy, in the artificial realm of media?
They want someone who lets them really, completely fulfill that role — who needs their specific nurturing and civilizing. If she’s the best nurturer ever, then obviously she doesn’t suck. Her love will somehow save the wild boy, domesticating him into a good provider.
So what’s likely to be the first guy she meets who actually shows some interest in her? Someone with a huge ego, who’s more interested in what she represents than who she truly is. Someone who thinks she’ll have sex with him. Someone ‘mysterious’ or ‘dangerous’ — who obviously has mastered the media’s implied package deal of cool — and thus makes her feel slightly less inadequate than usual. Someone the media tells her needs her complete, selfless devotion and nurturance.
Someone who’s willing to come up to her and actually ask — long before a nice guy has worked up the courage to do so.
According to the media, nice boys don’t need her nurturing — they’re already civilized, thus not exciting or fulfilling enough for a nice girl. The fact that bad boys are sometimes just genuinely unpleasant, nasty people doesn’t enter into the equation at all.
Some poor girl who’s deeply internalized her media assigned gender role will buy into it heart and soul — no matter how much she’s subsequently torn apart by it. She won’t be able to get rid of this harmful media-created delusion until she dumps the artificial crap her society’s trying to feed her, and learns who she really is.
So let’s turn around this hypothesis regarding the excessive internalization of societal roles, and analyze it bluntly and critically. First, for intellectual curiosity, does the hypothesis answer all the potential questions it raises? I think the answer is yes. We can test it by flipping the original question — by asking why nice boys don’t prefer bad girls as much as nice girls seem to prefer bad boys.
How would the ‘excessive internalization of societal roles’ theory answer this question? A nice boy, by the media’s definition, is one who is a good provider, already civilized, and not really in need of a nice, nurturing girl. What’s a bad girl? Someone who refuses to be a nurturer at the cost of her personality — perhaps even someone who is in charge of her own sexuality, rather than ‘saving’ it for one guy in need of her nurturing.
A nice girl preferring a bad boy is an expression of a (peculiar) cultural norm: women nurture and civilize men, who consequently provide for them. So what would a nice boy preferring a bad girl be saying, in the societal rubrics we’re speaking of here?
The implied expression would be of a male providing for an uncivilized, sexually free woman. While there are stories about this sort of idea, it is not societally seen as a good thing. Our society seems to believe men are supposed to be in control of women — not the other way around, and not a lack of anyone controlling at all. The fact this control-based rubric is horrifically damaging to those involved doesn’t matter to the society or the media supporting it.
So yes, the hypothesis does explain why the reverse of the original question does not flourish as a societal concept — it doesn’t match society’s favored rubrics.
Secondly, because I like considering things like this, let’s check out the original questioners again. Why do nice guys plaintively ask why good girls prefer bad boys? Is that assumption really true all the time — or could the original question be based at least partly on nothing more than sour grapes, i.e. the ‘nice’ boys are asking this because they’re not ‘getting any,’ and the bad boys apparently are?
Are these young men really nice, if they’re not willing to just be friends with a girl, rather than expecting sexual favors in return for their company? Are nice boys really nice if they’re not willing to transcend restrictive cultural gender roles — for both themselves and the women in their lives? Let’s remember slavery to a limiting societal gender role is stifling both to the master as well as the slave.
I see another arrangement alongside the traditional gender roles (which tend to fall into that bad-boy dominating, but providing for a nice-girl stereotype) and cuckolds (that nice-guy who provides for, but doesn’t dominate a sexually-liberated bad-girl). You might be getting to this, but just as with the consumerism culture, there are more latent choices which the culture does its best to conceal or at least discount. What if traditional gender roles are reversed in a relationship? What if they’re abolished altogether?
What if, regardless of who provides, the woman dominates and protects the man? What if, rather than having distinct roles, there’s more of an equal footing and both partners provide for their family and simply do what needs to be done? What if both partners in a relationship are “bad” in the sense they’re sexually liberated and are in an open relationship? What if there is neither a bad or nice individual of either gender in a relationship, but balance is achieved by two balanced individuals because they’re able to thrive without falling into the existing stereotypes?
I personally wish nice-guys would just stop the whining, they’re not going to get things just handed to them without asking and making an effort. The nice-girls who whine are the same way; they want choices to be handed to them, but if they’re not going to leave their walled city of passivity and seek out a life partner, well they should just come to terms with the fact that they’re going to be choosing primarily from the barbarians trying to break down their gates. Along the lines of my comment in the previous part, relationships need to achieve a personality balance. I don’t think a relationship would reach critical mass without balance, and even if it managed to do so, it would be largely dysfunctional, just as destructive as two extremely dominant personalities in a relationship who butt heads constantly and may even fight. Happiness is achieved through recognizing one’s own limitations and excelling at working within them. Failure and misery are the most likely result of trying to be something one simply isn’t capable of being, and then falling short, and then blaming others for that failure.
I’ve found I work best when I ignore gender roles. It’s definitely a harder way to go, to assume that courtship and such won’t follow The Formula. It’s worth pointing out that this generally isn’t a problem in same-sex relationships, because each of the partners can either define their own roles, or utterly neglect to do so (I’ve found the same-sex relationships I’ve been in to be quite satisfactory in this respect). Many, if not most women, are put-off by not being wined and dined while dating, and expect to receive a follow-up call rather than making one, or not receiving advances for all those other things where men are expected to take the initiative. Nice-guys probably lose out plenty because they’re not forward enough. Many nice girls lose out because they’re not forward enough. People like me just keep moving along until someone else understands. It’s just a more conscious form of sexual selection, and I simply don’t care that it’s supposedly not the way things are supposed to work, it’s how it works as far as me, myself, and I are concerned.
The short answer on gender roles, as far as I’m concerned is, no, there is no “nice” when they’re involved, and it cuts both ways. A man who slaves away to obligate a woman to him is a slave, no matter how devoted she is to him. The woman who is obligated under the typical social assumption to exchange sexual favors and raise his young is likewise a slave, no matter how gentle and kind he is. The notion of that arrangement is heavily sugarcoated, but for an intellectual species, it should be a repugnant. Animal behavior research seems to indicate more and more that mammals’ mating relationships are not that simplistic even though they’re less intellectual than humans are. I’d also best not get started on the ridiculous obsession many human cultures have with virginity and those other ways the prevalent social model is designed to limit the sexual expression of both men and women, marginalize homosexual relationships, and tell both men and women what sorts of jobs they may be qualified for but it would be improper for them to take.