Nice Guys as Neither Lovers Nor Fighters
From ErosBlog is a response, evidently from a woman, to the question of why women prefer assholes. I'm splitting up the quote, which is actually one paragraph, which will help make a point:
Girls don't like nice guys because they are almost always self-deprecating. That's the crux of their "niceness," they're modest. Understand, that societal pressure lead most women to believe that they need to be protected, or at least have to marry someone who COULD protect them if necessary. When a guy puts himself down, a girl generally thinks "he's nice, but if I were in a vulnerable position, would he stick up for me?"
When I first came to the end of that sentence, I thought to myself, "well, I would stand up for a girl, and if it came to blows, then so be it." But that reaction was anticipated:
The answer is invariably no, because it's obvious that the man will not even stick up for himself. While nice guys will argue that they WOULD stick up for the woman, she has no proof that this is fact. So she dates an asshole, feeling that if worse comes to worse, he'll go to bat for her. This isn't true, but there is more evidence to support that than the nice guy doing it.
The emphasis is added, because "invariably" means "in every single case", not "probably", which I suspect a lot of people (myself once included) think. So by showing that there is one case that is the opposite literally disproves Amber's case. But if Amber said "probably", her case would have been stronger, since I'd argue that, in most cases, nice guys would say they'd stick up for a girl (partly because nice guys actually believe it—in error, usually—and partly because to say otherwise would be suicidal in terms of dating potential), but when it comes to putting up or shutting up, the latter is usually the case. There's a line in the book 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter (which I'm misquoting, having picked up the book, skimmed it, and set it back down), where the father is speaking to his daughter's boyfriend or potential boyfriend that goes something along the lines of "if you make my daughter cry, I'll make you cry". It's a noble sentiment, and it's a sentiment I share: on at least one occasion I've offered to speak to a female friend's boyfriend who was being a jerk to her. That in the wildly inaccurate belief that there was anything I could actually do about it.
The problem, then, is never one of sentiment for nice guys, but rather one of action. If it came to blows over a girl, I'd bow out pretty quickly. (Which is rather embarrassing, seeing as how I'm no 98-pound weakling, but a 6'3", 200+ pounds guy with a broad and fairly thick shoulders.) To put it plainly, I'm not a fighter. Nor, if the last 8 years are to be taken as evidence, am I a lover. Being a lover and being a fighter, it then seems to me, are somehow related to each other.
