That should be:
“I haven’t disagreed with any of that…” :smack:
That’s nonsense. I have never heard a man say a woman has to be shorter than him. What I hear constantly, though, is women expressing the desire that the man be taller than her. Men are, by and large, far, far less concerned with height than women are. I hear men say they like big breasts, or a flat stomach, or long legs, or a firm butt, but I never hear men say their woman has to be shorter.
That might be a deal-breaker for some, but certainly not most.
I’ll agree with you there. Most (not all) men find younger women more attractive.
Nah, that’s only a small subset of “macho” men who feel that way.
Only if they want a date, sug.
I haven’t seen any woman-specific problem behavior addressed in this thread (and no, “stop dating assholes” doesn’t count). Since I know that I can’t change the behavioral patterns of the men I date, it is left to the men who want women to change the attitudes that keep them from their objective.
Guys with confidence problems should internalize this concept: FORGET WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE. It doesn’t matter. Treat all girls/women the same. Don’t get weak-kneed around a girl just because she’s stunningly gorgeous, and don’t blow off a girl because she’s just average-looking. Forget the looks.
This came as an epiphany to me, as many things do, a few years ago when it hit me all of a sudden that if a big fat chick lost 50 pounds, she’d just look like a regular chick, and if a hot chick gained 50 pounds she’d just look like a fat chick…and that the hottest girls, inside, were just the same as the ugliest girls. They were just people, all the same, really. YOU are the one whose perceptions are being influenced by the fact that the chick is hot. HER perception is going to be the same no matter what.
Sometimes you have to force yourself to do this. You’ll encounter some girls who are very attractive but have a “bitchy” look about them, the kind of look that might make them seem unapproachable. Forget about it! Imagine you’re talking to some other girl. It doesn’t matter, they’re all human.
You’d be amazed how many beautiful girls are never approached by guys because the guys think they’re out of their leauge! Here are girls that try as hard as they can to look as good as they can, and it’s having a COUNTERPRODUCTIVE EFFECT because guys are too intimidated by their looks to talk to them. It really does happen. Just don’t even think about their looks.
I’m not discounting the importance of looks in life. See, it’s fine to be attracted to a girl just because of her looks. That’s what it’s all about, anyway, ultimately…but in conversation you’d be better off not even worrying about it.
I knew a girl once (back when I was in high school) who was angsting about the shortage of boys who were not only taller than she was, but enough taller than she was that she could wear high heels on dates. From listening to her talk, this was a catastrophe of global proportions. (I haven’t ever been able to make sense of her axioms; I merely report them because I find them amusing in their lack of any remote relevance to reality.)
Eventually one of her better friends turned around while she was in mid-hair-pulling histrionics and said, with massive, put-upon patience, “C, I wish I had your problems.”
That’s the only real-life example of caring about height I’ve personally come across; I think it was the group consensus of everyone else on the bus that the whiner was a shallow twit on that account. (That’s certainly the impression I had, and the impression I got from her friend’s comment.)
(The only other example I can think of is the old guy in the Ocean’s Eleven remake from a couple of years back saying, “She’s too tall for him.” Which was funny to me mostly because it seemed like an archaicism, as might be appropriate for a character of his age commenting on social situations.)
This strikes me as definitely being one of those cultural things. I’m willing to believe that there are a number of women who buy into the same axioms as C, because good gods, I can’t believe anyone could easily come up with something quite that crackpot without learning it from somewhere without losing all of my tiny remaining faith in the intelligence of the human race. (I’m not sure the notion that there’s more than one of them helps, but it at least reduces the, “Okay, where the fuck did that come from” factor.) It’s not something that shows up among the women I actually know and spend any significant amount of time with, though.
(Hm. I should ask my husband if I’m taller or shorter than the cute fellow at games night. We’re about the same height, and I haven’t paid attention to which way the error is. I know I’m taller than my boyfriend.)
Good heavens, I thought MY posts sometimes went into overtime 
I enjoy reading books by men about men, and why they are what they are. But you have to remember, this sort of 'scientific" study, whether about men, women, or cat and dog owners must be taken with a grain of salt. All statistics can be skewed to the benefit of the auther.
Comments on yours:
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Originally Posted by CanvasShoes
Nope. They may be factors in how SOME women choose mates. But not in how women choose mates.
You’re somewhat young aren’t you? I know you already know this, but there are approximately 3 billion females in the world. It’s physically impossible for you to know “most” women. As to your last sentence, do you mean the percentage of wealth women overall have compared to the wealth (say just in America) that men have control of?
Yeah, you’d likely be right there, IIRC a debate we had in here some time ago, according to the US Census website, the amount of those making 6 figures a year was something like 75% men to 25% women.
But you missed my point, which wasn’t women’s ability to qualify for the fortune 500, but that nowadays most of us make EMOUGH to be satisfied with our lives and to keep ourselves in reasonably comfortable style. Something which used to be almost the exclusive provence of men.
Sorry, in the interest of space and time, I may not respond to each point in your post. So if I miss something you really wanted me to respond to, please post another inquery, but for now, I’m going to try and shorten this monster a bit. I know I’m not the only one suffering from “old people eyes” that has a hard time getting through a huge post of tiny fonts :).
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We’re individuals, with reasons and motives as varying as those of your sex.
Well, first things first. Remember, the subject of THIS particular thread is not men and women and what they want, but the self named, self proclaimed Nice Guy [superscript]TM[/superscript] and the ways in which he treats women that are anything but nice.
At any rate, yes, what you describe above are issues which pop up in the man/woman thing. But they’re not really related to what’s going on with the Nice Guy and his “all women just want to date assholes” whines.
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The comcept you describe above seemed to be quite true for a much larger percentage in decades such as the 70s and earlier, but are getting to be much less a reason for a woman to want a man in this day and age.
Which interestingly enough, is BETTER for women, and not so good for men. Isn’t that ironic? Money, power, rank, dominance projection USED to be much greater "equalizers’, (specially money and power) for men.
[quote]
I think you’re very much on target here. Women can make their own money and live their own lives. They don’t “need” a man, quite right. This is definitely worse for men. But is this better for women? I’ll answer that in a sec.
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Nowadays women can get their own power, money and rank. Which basically leaves “dominance projection”. By which I’m guessing you mean sexual attraction for the most part?
But, once again, this really has no bearing on the Nice Guy’s problems. A person being the 'dominant one" does not equal that he isn’t a nice guy. Further, and more importantly, that is just biological/societal tendency, reasonable intelligent couples work these things out with communication and compromise. In other words, that it, the tendency for a man to be dominant, and a woman to want some dominance exists, does NOT then equal that those necessarily have to define the relationship.
Well of course they’re popular, it’s human nature, I’m not surprised that a lot of immature men want a slave girl that they can “train up right”. Again, just because the tendency or desire to be dominant and have the “little woman” be the gatherer to your big strong mammoth killer is there, does NOT mean that that adults have to give in to that immature side of themselves.
Well, that’s a whole 'nother subject and thread, that of the workaday sex wars.
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Now, since a lot of men don’t “get” us and our needs, they’re totally lost in what to do, how to “win”. They’re used to fighting for things the male way. Solution, not emotion driven.
Of course they can. Lots of men do. Please note, as I said to Matt that in my above statement I said “a LOT of men” not men. On the flip side, there are a lot of men who do very well at the EQ side. To say “they can’t” is to further a stereotype against your own sex.
Oh, and BTW? Where you say above that how you know that “most” women are a certain way because of your experiences and those of your male friend etc? I’m nearly 46, since the age of 20 I have worked in male dominated fields. Which means I’ve been up close and personal with a TON of men, in all their glory and humanity. I don’t think they fall into either a stereo type or even a label of “most” about anything, and neither do women.
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They WANT to 'work" harder, but the work isn’t as simple as just putting in more hours, or studying harder for that medical degree. They’re being “judged” so to speak by us for what is INSIDE OF THEMSELVES, what they have to offer EMOTIONALLY and more importantly and more frightengly emotionally STRENGTHwise. … attraction is JUST not there for us, and it DOES NOT MEAN that we are rejecting you because we “all only want assholes” for Crying Out Loud!
Sounds to me as if you’re merely regurgitating paragraphs from the book you’re reading.
Don’t you remember the old adage from aeons ago? Don’t believe everything you read? And an even more important one, statistics lie.
Based on many of your posts, it seems that you yourself have faced way too many frustrating rejections by the opposite sex. And what the women themselves tell you when they do reject you is NOT what you want to hear, or believe. So, you went looking for answers that made more sense to you, and gave you more of a sense of comfort in why this was happening to you.
Trust me. What this book says is an interesting commentary on very general tendencies and human nature. But it does not come even close to scratching the surface on the realities of the dating world. Don’t try and get your answers and comfort in statistics and generalities.
Instead, listen to some of the people here, and in other places in real life. They have been out in the trenches, they know the realities of the dating world. Not some clinical book.
Noooo, to quote Guin did you even READ the thread? It is NOT about “men”. It’s about Nice Guys [tradmark]. As has been described, disclaimered and explained NUMEROUS times here.
And yes, THOSE men, the self-proclaimed whiny “all women want assholes etc…” jerks DO need to change.
Well there’s a very easy and convincing, albeit not particularly scientific, way to show this. Just go to any “personals” website, take an equal number of profiles randomly selected of men and women, and compare their height with the desired height-range of those they will consider as a “match”. I am reasonably certain you will find that most women require a match who is taller than she is, while most men do not require a woman who is shorter than he is.
For example, I just did a quick sampling of 10 men and women at Yahoo Personals. Only 4 of 10 men listed their maximum desired height for a woman as less than their own height, while 8 of 10 women listed their desired minimum height for a man as greater than their own. What’s more, the difference requested by the men, when such a preference was shown, was only an inch or two, while the women’s requested height difference was often as much as 5 or 6 inches.
Just noticed this. You have a husband AND a boyfriend?
Sorry, I did Aeshines a disservice by not addressing the whole height issue. It is true that a lot of women want a man who is taller than they are. But it has far less to do with the desire to be “dominated” than it does with the desire to not feel big, gawky and unfeminine next to the man.
Women are judged for their looks a whole lot more by society and especially the media than are men. According to those demanding and exacting requirements, we’re “supposed” to be dainty and feminine.
Not to mention the painful jr. high days where many girls are taller than nearly all the boys and are namecalled and put down for it horribly. The lasting scars from that many times leaves an unconscious desire to not repeat that misery, and to fulfill society and the media’s demand that we be “feminine” where feminine according to Hollyweird is small and dainty and perfectly shaped.
I don’t think that’s true. Try my experiment with the personals ads. You will find lots of very small women who still want a tall man. It’s not uncommon to see ads for women who are 5’0 but want to date a man who is at least 5’11. Surely a 5 foot tall woman isn’t worried about feeling big and gawky.
No, they’re just judged by different criterea. Height is certainly part of “looks”.
And according to other demanding and exacting requirements, we are supposed to be tall and muscular.
Well try being a short boy in Jr. High; I guarantee that’s worse.
Have you read the book? This isn’t pop psychology fluff; it’s hard core, looking at arguments in detail and rigorously arguing a position. I myself don’t agree with everything he says, but it is the gold standard for that side of the argument.
As for the “all statistics can be skewed” comment–that’s a simplistic invalidation for anything in the social sciences that doesn’t suit your taste. One should be skeptical and cautious, but such a trite blowoff won’t work.
At the very least, you’ve got to engage with the data/arguments first and then blow them off!
The power of a generalization is that it gives one information about a wider population which one does not have the means to know completely.
My sloppy writing. I meant to say that the wealth a woman possesses is not an important factor to men in mate selection. That factor ranks low on their list.
I agree with this point. In the past it would have been hard or actually prohibited for a woman to earn a living and live alone. Now it’s easy.
The vast majority of humanity is not “reasonably intelligent” (i.e., truly interested in introspection and self-development) and never will be. Sadly, the communication levels of most couples is fairly atrocious.
Yes, we agree: it’s a tendency and not a necessity.
In other words, a very strong tendency…
…for men to prefer to be dominant in a male-female relationship.
That’s right: it’s a tendency and not a necessity.
Not to be a smartass, but this seems to be a cognitive difference between men and women. Women seem to have trouble with the idea of a tendency or non-absolute. I say, explicitly, “tendency”; nowhere do I say “all” or use language that implies “all.” But several times now a woman has fired back at me, “But that doesn’t mean ALL or ALWAYS!” No, indeed it doesn’t.
Contrariwise, when a woman wants to complain about something (this is another tendency!), she seems to prefer “all” and especially “always.” And this seems to be so no matter what the language, as my wife always (in this case not a tendency, but a fact) says, “You always [itsumo] do this or that.”
I think this was pointed out by the authors of Men Are From Mars. Another very good book (but in a different category altogether from Goldbergs!).
I said “men can’t” meaning “men as a population can’t” provide to the female population–in the aggregate–the EQ levels that females desire. I believe this. One cause might be the fact that men, while on average equally intelligent to women, nevertheless have a greater standard deviation in IQ. That means there are a lot stupider men than women, and also a lot smarter. This is a proven fact, and ETS has had to use this in explaining publically why the top scorers on the SATs tend to be men, which is not PC but is nevertheless the reality of the thing. This is also why most true geniuses tend to be men, and why most truly stupid people tend to be men.
In the past, in days of lower literacy, this effect would tend to be muted, since average intellectual achievement would have tended to be low. But what would be the effect on a highly educated population? Women, for dominance reasons, will not want to be with a guy stupider than she. The smart men probably want smarter women, but not always, so the smart men grab some genius women but also a few average gals too. Now you have a large population of average-intelligence women who have made the most of their gifts by going to college and quite a few really smart women left. They now have to pick from the remaining average men (not a problem) but also a large population of below-average men.
The effect is dissatisfaction for the women and frustration for the stupider guys. I’ve seen a lot of smart females really struggle to find someone at their level.
What does this have to do with EQ? My guess is that EQ correlates with IQ, since their both mental abilities. And the point I’m trying to make here is that, in modern society, the combination of higher education and the difference in IQ standard deviation will lead to problems. I think if you think about it you’ll find this makes sense.
Perhaps you find the notion of these tendencies distasteful, but to me they’re as plain as day. Is there any doubt at all that men care a great deal about looks, for example? Perhaps you’re not aware of it because men try to avoid the topic around women, but men always, always talk to each other about how “hot” women are. You can be looking at a photo in a magazine, or whatever, and: “Yeah, she’s really hot.” “Oh hell yes.” Etc.
Again, have you read the book?
Again, who needs science when you can just instantly invalidate anything you don’t like.
Not so. I had one very bad period in undergraduate life when I did everything “right”: I was well groomed, basically decent looking, I worked out, I could cook, I was sensitive and kind, etc. I didn’t want cheap hookups. All I wanted was a soulmate to share life with. I was rejected once or twice, but that’s not what has stuck with me. It was the vast lack of energy I experienced in the social system of that time. No interest toward me, even though I was doing what the culture of the time said I should be doing.
I realize now what it was. Women don’t want a guy who’s “different.” They are extremely picky in that regard (tendency!). I didn’t drink and I didn’t like parties. That made me hard to categorize; hence, I was a flop.
And I didn’t project dominance. That’s why I changed my approach when I went to grad school. It clicked when I saw Jerry Lewis transform. And it worked. It really, really worked. Just acting like a cool, indifferent, and dominant person on the surface had amazing results. Even though I’m married now (no, I’ve never had an affair), I’ve kept that attitude, and women seem more attracted to me than ever.
So no, it’s not been a long history of rejections (I’ve tended to have only a few long-lasting relationships, anyway) that has made me think the way I do now. It was my own two years of lonliness and seing other very good (one would think) catches flop similarly that has impressed these truths about womankind on my soul.
For a person who wants to reject cases and statistics before even looking at them, you shore do speculate much. I think the reason I was rejected a few times in high school and college was, simply, that I didn’t have an appealing place in the social system. But I scored a major coup in high school when I got an awesome girlfriend: a fairly high-caste senior when I was a junior. And in grad school I walked in, picked the girl I wanted (Chinese 
), and got her (with the help of Buddy Love tactics). So I’ve had this mixed bag of success and failure that I think gives me a valuable perspective in the matter.
Ah, but remember what I said? I said we need to go below the surface to the psychosocial realities that lie beneat. And now you’re telling me I need to go back up.
OK, before I get slapped for this:
Really what I mean is that it would be hard to find two hetero guy friends who did not talk this way to each other, and many will talk to each other this way even if they are not good friends.
Actually, that’ll only tell you about the men and women who use personals sites. There are huge numbers of people who don’t use personals ads; further, I suspect there are types of people who don’t use personals ads. (They’re certainly alien to my culture, completely aside from being completely useless to me.)
Dating sites are, arguably, their own culture, with their own norms and social codes; people who are using them are likely to conform to those norms, because if they don’t, they won’t get what they want out of the interaction. I know (from other discussions about the things) that many of the online ones have pull-down menus for height/weight preferences; I also know that a number of women feel a need to put additional filters on their advertisements to keep the responses they receive manageable. Both of those might be relevant; just looking at the ads doesn’t say anything about how important they are to the distribution.
And that still limits the selected group to, first of all, those people who are looking for a relationship, and further to that subset of those people who find personals ads to be a useful tool for doing so. It eliminates those people who don’t consider strangers to be romantic prospects, who find partners among their friends or as friends-of-friends, who meet people at work, through religious organisations, or through hobby groups or shared activities, and, for that matter, those people who don’t look for relationships at all (but pursue attractions when the people they meet in their normal life are interesting to them).
Each of those patterns (not to mention all the ones I’m not coming up with because it’s far too late for me to be awake) introduces a different set of biases to the process of finding partners than the one that’s starting cold with strangers and no context except for ‘all involved use personals ads’. The sorts of preferences that manifest and are considered acceptable will be different, and the cultural expressions will vary.
Honestly, I’d expect personals ads to be more likely to focus on aspects of a person that are comparatively trivial, because those are easy to categorise. Height, weight, hair colour; those can be noted down and expressed easily. I can’t imagine how I’d write a useful personals ad, even setting aside the fact that I don’t find strangers attractive. “I appreciate bilateral symmetry and am, as far as I can tell, exclusively attracted to engineers (FSVO engineers)”? I suppose someone who found that appealing might have a positive match for potential compatibility on sheer whimsy, so I wouldn’t need to fluff it out with trivia, but it does seem rather prone to introducing error that can be eliminated entirely by spending time hanging out with geeks and asking out the attractive ones.
Yup. Only my husband’s a doper, though.
How about the fact that women usually want taller, hotter, more educated, better paying job, older than them men?
It’s not solely men’s responsibility to turn themselves into exactly what women want out of them. Women have got to understand that men are not Play Doh.
Maybe you need to change your requirements and start looking at other pools of availability.
Yup, I did. I see a lot of bitching and moaning about how men have to turn themselves into exactly what a woman wants if they want a second date. This ‘Nice Guy’ thing is a red herring. If someone’s track record is that they’re finding so many so-called ‘Nice Guys’ when they date, maybe they should change their habits in picking men.
I know *exactly *what you are talking about, Guin. My best friend’s roomate/ex-girlfriend is like this. She baits him into arguments or jumps to conclusions. When she wants his opinion, she always deliberately misinterprets it to one extreme or the other, to try to force my friend to backpedal on what he said before. I don’t quite understand why she does this beyond feeling insecure, but it pisses my friend off and pissess ME off even more because my friend keeps falling into this trap. :mad:
Sometimes bad behaviors feed off each other. For a while I was in a relationship with a girl who was a total emotional vampire and went out of her way to drain me of any sense of self-worth. After that, I was the hated ‘nice guy’ for a while, but only because I was kind of screwed up about relationships. It took be a while to come to my senses.
PEOPLE NEED TO HAVE AN OPEN MIND! Okay, maybe that came out of nowhere… but what I’m saying is that if people just thought about the other side of things for maybe five minutes, at least try to rationalize how the other person feels and acts, they might see their own flaws. I wasn’t able to change until I saw how I was putting other girls in an unfair situation- they weren’t attracted to me, but felt guilty I was upset about it. Had I been more mature, it wouldn’t have even come down to that. But I guess some people (like me, unfortunately) have to make some hard mistakes before they really learn. 
Convince him he’s gay!!
We pitchers could always use more catchers!!
I have. I don’t date Nice Guys anymore.
And now I’m getting bitched out for “not giving them a chance.” :rolleyes:
I’ve kept an eye on this issue when I see it in the news or magazines, and I’ve never seen a study supporting that. In fact, it is just the oppostite. According to this source, there is no significant correlation between EQ and IQ
That isn’t a behavior, that is a preference. Even if it were a behavior, it isn’t one likely to drive away the man that a woman wants. Unless she complains about short men to a short man, in which case she is too stupid to date and potentially breed anyway.
Honey, if you want him you can have him.
(sorry for the triple post!)