Why Do Good Girls Like Bad Guys?

“Hey yo Boo, why do (good girls) like bad guys? / Knowin that bad guys tell mad lies?”

Not just a DMX song anymore (how I even knew it was DMX, I couldn’t tell ya), it’s a topic to be discussed at work, specifically, at length in what amounts to a chat room. Strangely enough, a topic regarding this exact question, was then posted on Jezebel the same day. It made the conversation that much funnier (our conversations are always funny, lasting the entire day and covering on average 10-25 topics).

Basically I don’t think there was any real answer given during the 10 minutes that were spent in this particular topic, though I like my attempts at the beginning (naturally). Suffice to to say we’ll never know. Except! The one that was linked in the Jezz article is one that I think makes a lot of sense, and I didn’t even think about until I read it:

It’s true that the culture socializes some young women to be attracted to disaffected, hostile, and brooding young men. Sometimes, it’s about encouraging girls to buy into the “my love can change him” trope. For women taught to believe that their most valuable asset is their own capacity to love, what better way to prove the depths of one’s devotion than to transform the bad boy into the nice guy? Just as doctors demonstrate their skill by healing the sick rather than keeping the already healthy well, so too some young women may think that their worth is better measured by taming the asshole than by sustaining a relationship with a man who is already kind, present, and emotionally aware.

This makes so much sense it’s not funny. How many movies portray this? He can be an asshole in many different ways, he’s a shitty friend, he’s a player, what have you, but our heroine swoops in and changes him.  In a society where women are supposed to be the caregivers, the lovers, and everything pretty, where a single woman of a certain age is a spinster, and it’s all “What’s wrong with her, that she can’t find a husband?” and the men just stay bachelors, and no one questions what might be wrong with them, a woman’s capacity to be loved is constantly judged. If she can be loved enough to make even the complete scoundrel into a respectable man (the flipside of rum, per Elizabeth Swann), then clearly she’s a far superior woman.

Ugh… I can’t even get jerks to fall for me, just losers. I’m doomed.

For your entertainment, our conversation was as follows:

Defending Dudes

“In defense of men.” What a concept. This is completely bogarting something that my friend Sara said awhile ago, and I just wanted to add my two cents with my own rambling about it.

Not all men are inherent assholes. By the same token, not all women subscribe to this belief. However, in my experience, the woman who harbors negative opinions of the male of the species, does so because there is one (or even two) complete douchebag who really fucked her over in life. Yes, it’s a blanket generalization, and it sucks, but at least she has a reason to feel that way.

The downside is, when she does come across someone who’s not a total dick, she can’t even see him for what he is – a potentially datable gentlemen – and instead sees him as someone she can actually talk to, and be comfortable with. In other words, a girlfriend. Of course, this then leads us to the whole idea that only the jerk gets the girl. But given enough time, even the most heartbroken of women will recover from whatever butt-faced miscreant threw sand in her eyes, and be able to appreciate the guy she can actually get along with.

Furthermore, going off on my own personal tangent.. In defense of my man. If you are someone who believes if it walks, talks, and has a penis is must be the jerk of the century… please don’t make assumptions that my boyfriend falls into that category. Especially if you don’t even know him.

This past week, he and I have both been there for each other in the most important way. I went through a bit of an emotional breakdown last week. Work was stressing me out, I felt like everything I was doing was wrong. My personal life was making me crazy, felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything that I always expected I would have done by now, most notably wondering if a choice I made over four years ago was the right one, and how my life might have been different if I’d picked door number two. Anyway, I had said meltdown in his arms, and he didn’t do the patented male thing and immediately try to find a solution. Instead, he held me until I stopped crying, pointed out all of the things that I am doing right, and once I was calmed down, proceeded to cheer me up. In short, he did everything I needed him to do for me at the time.

A week later, it was my turn to cheer him up. I will not go into detail about what brought him down, because it’s his business. So on Monday, I went to his house, seeing him for the first time since my own breakdown, and pulled him into a hug, and asked how he was. His reply? “Better now.” Just the simple state of my being there was enough to make him start to feel better. But despite all of that, some Judgey Judgementalists feel the need to rain – nay, monsoon – all over this parade. Trying to tell me that he’s not as into me as I am into him, that it’s just biological. Come on. We’ve been through this before. My man is not an asshole. These kind of obnoxious generalizations are getting annoying. The person behind it may simply think that all dudes suck at life, and while there are certainly a large number who do, you need to start accepting that not all of them do. Deal.

A Real Fixer-Upper

“I’m gonna fix you up with my friend!”

Worst phrase ever.

We hear it all the time, “fix you up”, but really, what does that mean? Am I broken, doomed to remain non-functioning until I’ve met your friend, or any other person you thing is going to magically remedy my state of disrepair? I’ve made it to twenty-eight years old and still remained a contributing member of society without breaking down on the side of the road like some old-as-dirt hoopdy. How does one spell hoopdy, anyway?

Same with all the other bullshit terms. Your other half, the one that completes you, whatever other mumblings are out there. Your other half? Really? Are you telling me I’ve been an incomplete, half a person for the past twelve years? Which half? Right, left, upper, lower? *pats self down* Everything seems to be there. Maybe it’s all been a sick delusion. Or I’m half prosthetic. When I meet “the one”, I’ll be put under anesthesia and my real limbs will finally be given to me. Completing me? Am I stumbling around in the dark, trying to find my missing piece? This connotation is even worse, it almost implies that your S.O. is only a piece of you… which would indicate they were even more incomplete than you.

The fact of the matter is, if you’re someone who believes you have to be with someone to reach your full potential in life, that’s fine. But not everyone feels that way. Leave us normal people alone.

We all know the commercials and ads are all about the sex. Sex sex sex. But let’s face it ladies, they cater to us with the love angle. Let’s look at the jewelry commercials. Not only do that pigeon-hole us into diamond-chasing lunatics, but they’ve brainwashed us to believe the only way to get that jewelry is to be in love. There was an ad campaign from De Beers going on awhile ago that women can buy their own damn diamond rings (I am happy to be one of those awesome women!), but it was short-lived. I wish I could find them all. Sadly, some of the ads were a bit patronizing, but I think the idea was awesome. A lot of people cited “feminism” as the driving force behind it, but I think it’s just plain common sense. If I want something sparkly, and I can just march my ass to the store and buy it. And I’ll wear it on whatever damn finger I please!

Let’s move on to the sick twisted standards we hold our celebrities to. Any male celeb goes through an ugly public breakup and he’s a “newly single bachelor” while the females are “brokenhearted” or “lovelorn” despite their smiling faces. I’d like to preface this next by saying I don’t even like Jennifer Aniston, but I wish we would all just leave her the fuck alone. I wrote something about her a long time ago, and everything I’ve said STILL stands. The woman is single, and has a career, and she has said up and down and in as many languages as she knows that she’s pleased with her life. Why do we keep questioning her happiness? Her husband left her for another woman, of course she was going to be pissed and miserable. (Another disclaimer, I’m a big fan of the Jolie-Pitt clan, just further supporting my position on this). Furthermore, why would you expect her to start dating someone new. I repeat. Her husband. LEFT her. Not a boyfriend of five months, not some fling. Her husband. Vows. But nooo, for a year she was pestered on a daily basis trying to find out who she was seeing, when she was going to get married again. Maybe she doesn’t want to ever get married again. Would you?

She was in a February issue of People… it was about her and how she’s still single, and she is completely fine with her life. The following week, in the readers’ little editorial page (or as I like to call it, “ignorant Americans who think their opinions matter”) someone – a woman, I’d like to point out – wrote in, and said that she didn’t give a shit about Jennifer Aniston. It basically said she can’t possibly be happy, and that she only has a lucrative career, and then she said, and I quote, because it made me that angry I committed it to memory, to “write about her when she’s actually done something important with her life, like getting married or having kids.”  I actually started to write in a response, but I was barely finished with the second sentence when I realized it would never make it past the ‘censor’ (I was very creative with skewering I gave her) and gave up. Luckily, someone else – a man – shared my sentiment, and did write in, indicating that a woman having a successful solo career is every bit as important as getting hitched and knocked up. I was happy to see other people so offended by the comment, particularly a gentleman counterpart.

That all being said… I’m not a bitter old spinster. I dated during high school, never really getting into the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing, for the simple fact that I didn’t really know my whole identity yet, so how the heck could I know what I really wanted (I’ll have a whole post about this issue on a later date, largely in reference to two former friends).  I spent almost my whole twenties simply dating around, still never getting serious, because now I was learning what I wanted, and none of the guys I was coming across were it. Even with that, I’ve certainly been hurt, and I done some hurting. Now, I’m two months into a relationship with someone that I like enough to even call my boyfriend, and I’m really loving it. And why are things going so great, you ask? Well, it’s because we were two, individual, already complete people when we met. And while we may easily compliment each other, Melissa & Mark can just as easily be Melissa, and Mark.