The Problem with Princesses and Pedestals
Oh no! What a loss!
Because I am perpetually looking for shiny new things to distract me from the inexorable horror of everyday life and/or give me subjects to write about, I have recently gotten into Reddit.
I belong to a bunch of different groups, some of which I have already blogged about already, including a group dedicated to “Nice Guys.”
In the online realm, the defining feature of “Nice Guys” is that they aren’t genuinely nice at all. As I wrote in a recent piece on Uber-Nice Guy Eddie Deezen, for these unfortunate souls, “niceness” is a mask that is angrily discarded the moment a woman has the audacity to reject their advances.
The “Nice Guys” roasted in this group subscribe to a false dichotomy in which good, kind, men of genuine worth like themselves, who would treat attractive women like princesses and Gods if given a chance are invariably turned down by women obsessed with good-looking, confident “Chads” with all manner of social currency who are lusted after precisely because they treat women like shit.
The toxic attitudes of these misogynists is a strange, unpalatable combination of self-hatred and entitlement. These men all seem to know that they don’t have much to offer women in terms of attractiveness, confidence or popularity.
What these men have to offer women, or at least what they seem to think they have to offer women, is worship and adoration. In post after post, they promise to treat the women they alternately desire and despise like princesses or queens, to put them on a pedestal and be chivalrous gentlemen who open doors and give roses and do all of the things that they imagine women should want.
The muddled thinking of the Nice Guy brigade seems to be, “I know I’m ugly and lacking in social graces but I will more than make up for those shortcomings by worshiping a theoretical girlfriend or wife as a God, and that is why I ultimately deserve to have an attractive girlfriend or wife who will have sex with me.”
I’m struck that these plain, average Nice Guys never seem to want plain, average Nice Girls. No, they want women they and society deem sexually desirable and attractive and do not seem to realize the hypocrisy in constantly complaining that the women they lust after similarly want a partner who is sexually desirable and attractive.
These Nice Guys don’t seem capable of thinking of women as equals or as human beings. Instead they either put them on a lofty pedestal and see them as something better than human or deride them as sub-human.
They don’t seem to grasp that blind worship is a terrible foundation for a long-term relationship, in no small part because blind worship is inherently unhealthy and damn near impossible to sustain, and can very easily lead to rage, bitterness and resentment once infatuation begins to fade.
The “Nice Guy” similarly doesn’t seem to understand that women are individuals with idiosyncrasies and quirks and unique needs and desires, not a monolith that invariably behaves the same way. They also don’t seem to grasp that not every woman wants a man to behave like a traditional romantic from the 1950s.
Not every heterosexual woman wants a self-styled “gentleman” who will open doors and show up at their front door with roses and a desperate need to impress rooted in deep-seated insecurities.
If you love spaghetti you might think that no woman would be able to resist a man who makes her homemade spaghetti every night but if a woman doesn’t like spaghetti then an offer of homemade spaghetti every night means less than nothing.
These toxic men seem to think that the main reason that they are rejected in favor of what they see as over-sexed sadists is because they are unattractive physically when really it’s their attitudes, personalities and weird combination of arrogance and self-pity that are the real turn-offs.
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