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Lynn Gassiz-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones has the definitive takedown of the “women want bad boys” conceit.

If we women really crave, above all else, guys who are nothing but trouble for us, shouldn’t John Hinckley have totally nailed Jodie Foster? Aren’t scary violent guys with guns exactly the kind of jerks that, according to the Nice Guy™ narrative, we should be falling over ourselves to sleep with? Or could it, just possible, be that the reason lonely murderers weren’t getting laid to begin with was that they already had that violent streak in them, and when women met them, they encountered things that made the hair on the back of their neck stand on end.

She said it here.

And while a seeming counterfactual would be the numerous fan mail, including marriage offers, tendered to Ted Bundy after he confessed to being a serial killer, the fact that his admirers numbered at best in the low hundreds in a nation of hundreds of millions says only that for every Whacko Jacko there’s a Whacko Jill.

Lynn continues (emphasis mine)

In fact, though we’ve all had the experience of rejecting guys who were genuinely nice enough, but not for us (the guy, say, who totally disagrees with you about whether he wants kids, or who’s the most amiable fundie you could ever meet, but you’re Unitarian, or who otherwise just isn’t on the same page as you regarding something on which you really need to be on the same page), we’ve also all rejected guys who made the hair on the back of our neck stand on end. The guy who carries a knife, and one of his first questions is whether you’re connected with any guy bigger than him, who could beat him up. The drunk who volunteers, right off the bat, that he’s going to beat up any guy who pays you any attention. The guy who tells you a long story about how God sent messages to him in traffic lights to go and find his ex-girl friend, and then says, by the way, you look a lot like her, and you look rather romantic, right now, against that post. Oh, we may sometimes fall for the smooth talking guy with great pecs who will cheat on us in the end (just as men fall for the female equivalent), but we also have a basic sense of self-preservation that, when we listen to our gut, leads us to avoid the most scary dangerous men who want to go to bed with us.

That line about bigger boyfriends who could beat him up is classic by the way. And classic projection too. I’m not sure you could completely parse the notion in a thousand pages but some of the high points include:

• Internalizing the worthiness trap that says men must be “higher status” to “earn” or deserve “higher status” women. (When, in fact, women, being human beings just like everyone else, tend not to imagine themselves as prizes granted.)
• Tacitly acknowledging their acceptance of a particularly primitive patriarchal system wherein female partners are effectively spoils of war instead of, well, partners.

• Weirdest of all, an abiding insecure certainty that their place in the system is uncertain and, especially, that they’re unlikely to succeed in it. (This is similar to the assumption I think drives a lot of men’s preference for virginity or inexperience which is that they won’t compare favorably to any of the woman’s previous partners.)

But the big thing that’s implied is that the NiceGuy™ strategy is really a secondary strategy in an “alpha male” paradigm… that if the NiceGuy™ was only bigger, only able to beat up other men, and maybe better with a knife (a knife?!?!) then instead of all the smarmy “Pickup Artist” tactics he could just grab you by the hair and drag you out and nobody better try and stop him.

There’s also the… interesting assumption that all women want big, rich, violent partners. There’s also the assumption that all women’s attraction is transactional — that if you don’t “lock her in” some how she’ll kite off with anyone bigger, richer and/or more violent than her current partner.

There’s also the equally interesting tangle of assumptions that — assuming women are autonomous anyway — their attractiveness quotient is linked to their attraction to big, rich, and violent men such that the more beautiful the woman the bigger, richer, and more violent her partner is likely to be. Or, assuming women aren’t autonomous, that the more physically attractive they are they’ll automatically fall prey to end up in relationships with those selfsame bigger, richer, or more violent men.

What’s most disturbing, of course, is that none of this seems to be particularly true about women. Yes, some women sent Ted Bundy love letters just like some men are Ted Bundys or John Hinkley Juniors. But just as it would be… rash to assume all men are or want to be closet Ted Bundys or John Hinkley Juniors, so it would be rash to assume all women have or would like to send them love letters.

A post from last April about Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen has been picked up on by the social-referral site StumbleUpon.com. I’m glad it’s been picked up — I think it’s a good piece about an important topic. I have no idea, however, who originally, um, stumbled upon the post and linked it, nor how to find that original link so I could thank or otherwise credit them.

At any rate thanks. Welcome. While you’re hear you might also want to check out

• Em & Lo’s post The World Needs More Male Nudes
• Christina Lloyd’s blog Erotica Cover Watch, which advocates the whacky idea that publishers should put actual men on the covers of erotica written by and for heterosexual women.

• Hugo Schwyzer’s post Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men and his follow-up post More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts

Oof! I can’t believe I missed this the first time! Kink In Exile reflects on Rule #2 of the bogus, corrosive Two Rules of Desire (It’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desirable) and finds it wanting. (Italics mine.)

So there is an interesting twist on this whole sex positive thing that I just wanted to mentioned because it’s come up a bunch recently. Think of this as a placeholder for a post…

If sex is something women have and men want how does this impact men’s self confidence? I’ve heard a few men express that it is novel to feel sexually wanted, not because they were not sexually wanted in the past but because there is not a space in which that is typically expressed. This is remarkable because all of the conversations I have had about this with all the various people these conversations have happened were in the last couple of months. Why is it so new and crazy to think that maybe men want to know that they are found attractive and desirable? I mean I want to hear that expressed by a partner…

Read the quote in context here.

I was told for the first time in real life that I’m “handsome” some time last Summer. By a friend I’ve known since we were both teenagers. In the 1970s. What was cool was she wasn’t saying it romantically or anything, just as a casual remark comparing me to someone else our age (who she’s also fond of.)

People have mentioned it in reference to the photos I’ve posted. And I get the impression hetero women talk to each other about attractiveness in men. But as KIE’s friend said, there’s not a space in which it’s typically expressed. To the point that I’m pretty sure women might be surprised how few hetero men have ever heard it said. And certainly ever heard it said about them.

Which harks back, incidentally, to something Holly of The Pervocracy said earlier this month. (For the record I have a quibble only with the quoted paragraph, the rest of her post is dead on and worth reading.)

It always bothers me when straight guys claim they “can’t tell” if another guy is attractive. It’s such an annoying form of overcompensation. (It’s also not true; maybe a totally straight guy can’t make fine distinctions or have a “type,” but he can tell you whether Gilbert Gottfried or Brad Pitt is more attractive.) I didn’t ask if he gave you a boner, all you have to do is use your eyes and a completely detached, theoretic sense of attractiveness. It won’t make you gay.

Read the quote in context here.

See, this isn’t exactly right. We can tell if another guy is attractive to us. Even if he doesn’t give us a boner. That’s not the point. The point is that, outside of maybe Brad Pitt, we don’t have much of an impression of which men are attractive to women. Because, again, physical, visual attractiveness in men, for men, doesn’t really have a lot of vocabulary that… well… doesn’t originate with men. So we can get opinions by the senior George Bush or John McCain that former Vice President Dan Quayle was so handsome they expected women to riot. And I’m pretty sure most men would have agreed that he ought to have been that appealing to women since he embodies a lot of what men think is good looking. But… but… that didn’t happen.

For the record, I still don’t think I personally look all that great in the sense that in no way do I conform to what I consider standards of attractiveness. I get that other people on-line think otherwise, but I still think that’s only because nobody online sees my face.

Since both Rules of Desire are problematic, and since they conspire to make us feel undesirable for any reason but the worthiness of our accomplishments or status (largely, I believe, as a byproduct of accommodating other of men’s preferences), it’s just one more barrier that needs to fall before gender equality is really gonna work. And not because men should be objectified equally to women (wrong direction) but because not understanding that we can appear as physically attractive leads us to go a little overboard on the worthiness front. From which much hilarity does not ensue.

Anyway, it’s great to hear that both Holly and Kink in Exile, as well as MayMay, the authors of Erotica Cover Watch, and maybe a few others, are noticing and/or contributing and/or starting a discussion of the matter in the last few months.

Jessica of Jezebel says, of a study that on the… um… face of it seems to small (sample of 52 families) to warrant anything but a “hmmm…. interesting…”

According to a new study, “men were more likely to pair up with women whose bone structure was similar to their own mothers, with a similar effect holding for womens’ choice of men,” the Guardian reports. Read all about it here.

This is another one of those studies where there’s got to be more to it than that because I’m pretty sure that people have been making that observation for a very long time. Even before Freud. :-)

At any rate it’s certainly true for me, although I always figured it was just familiarity. The women in my family, including my mom, my aunts, and my grandmothers all tended towards dark hair, medium height, and farmer/athletic/active builds rather than thick or thin who dressed simply and wore little or no makeup. And surprise, most of my partners, especially my long-term ones, have been… dark haired, medium height, and muscular rather than thick or thin, etc., etc. I’ve always sort of assumed people feel the same entanglement of familiarity in attraction.

I still could be wrong though, and it could just be me and I could just be a giant Freud-could-rest-his-case pervert. Even though the (small) study says maybe otherwise. :-)

The tricky part for me, though, is that being of, um, roughly medium height, build, hair color, and activity level my mom and all my other women relatives were actually just… pretty much like about 65-80% of the U.S. population at the time I was receiving any potential preference “imprinting…” and so once again I feel the prospect of perversion slipping from my grasp! :-)

Anyway, without further criticizing a study I’ve only read about second or third hand I’ll just say I’ll be impressed if the researchers were able to filter out the standard bell-shaped curves of bone structure with the sample size they used.