KB, you and I are NEVER going to agree on gender issues (and yet, I'm miles closer to you than to Warlizard, and somehow the both of you are among my favorite Internet people) but I think you missed the point: The genuinely nice guy isn't having less sex, he's spending less time pursuing people who do NOT want to have sex with him. He is off to the races with the next prospect, not pestering a woman who has no urge to fuck him. And maybe, because he IS off to pursue someone who is more interested, he can really be a friend of the woman who said no--because he understands that just because he converses with her does not mean she is his only sexual prospect or even a sexual prospect at all, and if he enjoys the conversing he can keep doing that while pursuing sex elsewhere. The arsehole is the one having less sex, as far as I can tell, because he keeps chasing the "no." Unless we're assuming the arsehole is also a serial rapist, in which case he doesn't even really belong in the comparison because this isn't about rape, it's about guys who overinvest in friendships they don't want and become angry when an unwanted friendship doesn't turn into a wanted sexual liaison. I also disagree that you can't ask for sex from someone without radically altering the relationship. I have multiple male friends who I know are sexually interested and would be up for it if I was, but they're dating people, I'm dating people, and we're friends and that friendship hasn't really changed when it went from "Yeah I know you would fuck me but you haven't said so" to "It's on the table that if we're ever both single at the same time, we could fuck." I have a lot of hangups, like everyone else, but being unable to discuss sex isn't one of them, as you may have noticed. The people I choose for friends have a lot of issues, like everyone else, but being unable to express their feelings about a friendship isn't one of them. I do not think I'm leading on a handful of "nice guys" -- I think we've established boundaries and lines of communication that would allow them to back away from the friendship if they didn't want it in the absence of sex. Not to mention that they, genuinely nice guys, ARE getting sex, from their girlfriends, who are aware that they have female friends who if they were single they wouldn't decline sex with. When people are able to discuss sex like it is--an ideally mutually agreeable activity, which either party has every right to decline--they don't get so freaked out by one refusal or obsessed over one potential partner. There's a lot more I'd like to respond to here, but I have a busted furnace and have to wrap up, so I'll leave it with one more point: The scarcity of sex is not responsible for nice guy syndrome. Even if prostitution were legal and fully available, or if there were a designated everyone-fucker in every bar who would literally fuck anyone, anyone at all, some males would become obsessed with a single, uninterested woman and pursue her while whining about how they're so damn NICE, even as they totally not nicely pester a woman for sex after she's refused time and time again. It's not about sex, even though sex is what makes it so complicated. It's about overinvesting and underdisclosing. It's about maintaining a friendship when you want anything but, and then having too much into that friendship to risk losing it all by being blunt about the fact that you can't keep spending all this time on her if she's never going to be your romantic partner. It's like the homebuyer who buys the gorgeous lemon with the fly-by-night contractor and instead of cutting his losses and moving, pours every dime he has into proving he's really made a GOOD investment by somehow saving the crumbling foundation and the leaky roof and holding the house long enough to turn a profit. A 19th-century southern politician, whose name escapes me at the moment, advised young campaigners that the most important thing to do was to ask for a dime for their campaign from every supporter at every stop on their speaking tour of their district. Not because they needed those dimes, although they did. Because "those hardscrabble farmers who pinch every penny will never, ever admit they made a poor investment, so once you've got a dime you know you have their vote this year, next year, and forever." People hate to admit they've made a poor investment, especially if it was an investment they could ill-afford. So, no matter how much free, easy sex he got, the guy with "nice guy syndrome" would still be chasing the girl he'd spent six months attempting to court while never coming out and saying that he didn't really want to continue the friendship unless it became romantic -- especially if he's one of the guys who doesn't conversate with his male friends, doesn't do "friend" things as women do them. Then the friendship has been an investment he can ill afford, and he starts treating a person who has invested equally in the friendship (but was more easily able to afford it) as a target to acquire no matter what it takes, rather than admitting he's made a poor investment beyond his means.
You're the one who declared sex transactional -- I'm only trying to describe it in your language. Your first response makes the following statements as if fact: * Men do not want to have intimate, conversational platonic friendships for their own sake, whereas women do. (I would challenge this one on the basis of "individuals vary more than groups vary," but I think you would agree but stipulate that we should discuss the majority when discussing the aggregate, so I skipped it. The guy I'm dating has more close, intimate, conversational platonic friendships than I do, though.) * Sex IS transactional. (I don't necessarily challenge this one in the way you use transactional although I agree that it is NOT transactional in the way the blogger uses it, e.g., there is no amount of friendship-investment that has "paid off" the cost of sex and now you are owed sex.) I accepted your two statements because from past conversations I think we generally agree on most of the premise, although we would frame it differently, and proceeded to discuss the matter from a transactional perspective accepting both these statements as fact even though I could quibble on minor details of both. So your criticism of my transactional analogies is merely criticism of the parameters you set for the conversation and I accepted -- therefore I will discard it in responding to your rebuttal. >This isn't a gender issue. This is a relationship issue. It is a gender issue because it is an issue men bring to the table and place on the shoulders of women in every conversation about relationships, masculinity, patriarchy, and society. Men consistently demand that women solve what they perceive as women's "problem with nice guys" before men will acknowledge that being a bad person isn't a good trait. It is not a matter of opinion that online dating is something an attractive woman literally cannot experience without receiving vitriolic, profane diatribes about what a cunt she is for not liking a nice guy like this SO SO NICE guy calling her a cunt. Men have negative relationship experiences, but in the aggregate, accepting that exceptions exist, nice-guy issues are an issue of men pursuing women in unacceptably aggressive ways and then complaining that they did not get what they wanted because they are so nice. >I fathered a kid with someone who didn't want to have sex with me when we met. And Al Roker caught his wife by stocking her apartment with food while housesitting for her after she'd "friend-zoned" him, but that doesn't mean much other than that there are success stories out there presenting enough variable reinforcement to convince men who are less attractive, less savvy, or simply pursuing a woman less interested that they, too, will eventually marry the woman currently turning them down. >Presumes these activities are mutually exclusive, as if one can't be bummed about being friend-zoned by one girl while also banging another. Negative. He can be bummed--but still valuing the friendship enough to keep up with it without being a jackass about it--while banging someone else. It's much less likely he'll be a non-jackass if he's bummed and sees the person who bummed him out as his only possible sexual prospect. >Then your relationships are shallow. Sorry, I know that sounds harsh. It is nonetheless true. Bullshit. I'd accept if you stated that this indicates that the way I see sex is shallow, because I certainly don't view it as the earthshattering be-all and end-all to human intercourse that some people do. The relationships that do or don't generate sex, on the other hand, aren't. If a heterosexual male and a heterosexual female are platonic friends for a long enough time, there is likely to come a phase of the friendship where one or both are sexually attracted. You either deal with that as a game changer or as something that's just part of choosing to have attractive opposite-sex friends. It's shallow to let something as normal and expected as sexual attraction ruin a friendship. >You keep coming back to this "if you're asking for sex from me you aren't asking for sex from anyone else" canard that has no basis in the discussion at hand. Strawman -- didn't say that, didn't imply it, don't know why you inferred it. >My objection to the article is that it claims to present "hard truths" when in fact it simply obfuscates the problem further while also conveniently absolving the author in particular (and - the root of my objection - women in general) of any mis-steps or wrongdoing. The audience is men. One could suggest the author write a follow-up post giving advice to women or talking about her own relationship mistakes. This post is intended to give advice specifically to men who are unhappy because they believe they are "friend-zoned" for being "nice guys." This is not a problem for which women are at fault. Individual women can and do behave badly, but in the aggregate, this is a massive issue with dating today and is the fault of men who are unable to be clear about their desires and expectations, unable to evaluate their own appeal, and unable to moderate their emotional investments appropriately. > I can't be the only guy in the world to have friend-zoned women. I don't pretend for a moment I'm doing anything but. I also don't act as if the women I've friendzoned could do anything about it, and I don't pretend they're idiots or unworthy for being upset over the outcome. Sure, I've been so-called-friend-zoned, and my guy friends have been on that side of it, too. But you notice how women get upset over this individual guy who won't fuck me, while men end up believing that all women just hate "nice guys" and love "assholes." There's a female equivalent to this, too: The woman who doesn't hold up her end of the relationship other than being attractive, and then goes "men are shallow and just want a dumb blonde with fake tits!" when her boyfriend dumps her after she ages or otherwise becomes less attractive. Because she 1) chose a guy who didn't expect anything of her besides being attractive and 2) then proceeded to become less attractive without adding anything to what she offered to the relationship, she draws the conclusion that all men are shallow, not the conclusion, "If I want a relationship based on more than looks, I can't expect my looks to be a get out of jail free card for any and all bad relationship behavior." I could write thousands of words on that one, too, but that isn't the topic at hand. The topic at hand is male responses to female rejection, which are often uniquely vitriolic and generalized toward all women, and on the specific, incorrect theme that women just don't want a nice partner and would prefer an asshole. >I'm not sure what your point is but it's pretty clear we've struck a nerve. Recognize that you're essentially saying "even in a world where you can buy cars on Craigslist for $100 some asshole is still going to want to drive a Ferrari." I'm not sure what's so clear about that? You know me, you know that I use colorful rhetoric on pretty much every subject. I have no issue related to this in my life right now, and the last similar situation I was involved in was a long time ago and I was the one being rejected. I woke up, browsed the Web in bed, noticed my furnace was broken, typed some stuff on Hubski, tried the furnace guy again, yadda yadda. I mean, I can't convince you with words on a screen not to make assumptions about my emotional state, but if my word counts for anything with you, you're incorrect. I am passionate about relationship issues, as you know. I work with victims of domestic violence and other crimes, as you know. I am interested in gender and sexuality in general, as you know. Of course this topic elicits a high word count and colorful metaphors from me. The rest of your rebuttal is based on my transactional analogies, which, as stated, are made to work within your framework established in your statement that sex IS transactional, so I'll leave that alone except for this one piece: >The issue at hand is not "I've invested 70% of my available free time in you, I deserve a shag" the issue at hand is "I am more emotionally invested in our relationship than you are and resent that you cannot adequately explain why." I think you're making two erroneous assumptions here: 1) That so-called-nice-guys DON'T think that way. They do, and I've heard them complain exactly in those terms: "It wouldn't cost her anything to just have sex with me once in a while, and I've spent hours listening to her problems in the last week alone. She has sex with guys she meets at the bar, why wouldn't she just have sex with me now and then?" If that sounds a bit pathetic, it's because it is, but I assure you, there are literally millions of men in the US alone who think exactly that way. 2) That emotional investment requires sexual attraction. He's emotionally invested and sexually attracted. She's just emotionally invested. The friendship might be important enough to her that she'd turn down sex with an attractive crush if she knew it would hurt the friend, so her emotional investment in the platonic friend is GREATER than her emotional investment in a sexual attraction.
You seem remarkably unwilling to admit that men can be at fault in their own problems. I don't think I'm the one whose nerves were touched here... And yes, in the situation of being "friend-zoned," women--who typically have more readily available sexual options than men--tend to blame the individual, while men blame the entire gender. This isn't because men are bad people, it's because that's what happens in the real world for a whole variety of reasons that you're not willing to accept as remotely valid unless they're "because women are at fault for men being angry at them."
Strawman again, you know perfectly well that I like men just fine, including you, despite our massive areas of contention on gender and relationships. Humans are pigs and men are human, and in this particular situation, some men behave piggishly. There are other situations where men, in the aggregate, tend to behave well and women behave piggishly; I mentioned one. The fact of the matter is that enough people who are involved in dating of the "social media generation" are assholes that it has become impossible to be female and use any online dating site without encountering profanity, vitriol, and even threats simply for not being interested in someone--often someone you've never met--sexually. If you don't believe me, make a female profile, ignore all incoming messages, and count how long it takes for no response whatsoever to make someone so angry they blast you and call you a stuck-up bitch or something of that sort for not replying to them. You don't have to take any positive action whatsoever to engage the wrath of a "Nice Guy." You just have to NOT be lining up to have sex with him. These are a small number of men and a small percentage of men. Most men are not like them. Unfortunately, these few men, who are NOT nice at all but are convinced that they are, are so extremely vocal about how nice they are and what bitches women are for hating them for their alleged niceness that they are dominating the discourse about online dating. Not because there are so many of them, but because those there are happen to be incredibly prolific, vocal, and entitled, to such a degree that they put people off platonic opposite-sex friendships entirely and put people off online dating entirely. I genuinely do understand that it is obnoxious as fuck to keep hearing the same criticisms over and over of your gender. I feel that way about some legitimate complaints about groups I'm a part of, specifically women and white people. To that extent, I sympathize with your feelings, and I'm even getting a little sick of the thing where every feminist blogger and every sex blogger has to have a "nice guys aren't nice" post. I like this one because it's balanced. It's neither apologizing for creepy douchebags nor stating that they're bad people--you're inferring that. It states that they're at fault for their problems, because they are. Being at fault in one's own problems does not a bad person make, it makes an at-fault person who has the capacity to change their behavior and thereby solve their own problem. ETA: I suppose this discussion is over considering that KB chose to respond with a two-word email: "Fuck Off."
Honestly I'm disapointed because i felt kleinbloo was THE person to debate you, when you two debated i felt like i learned something, both of you are intelligent, with good points respectively. Now that the posts are deleted i feel like something is lost in the discussion really. And although you counter-pointed his points, i don't feel like he was wrong per se, but i can respect that it takes a lot of time to dissect part by part when discussing such things. It was highly interesting, and thought provoking, and all around awesome, but alas, i respect his decision to withdraw, but I can't help but feel discussions like these add to my intelligence nonetheless. Anyways good debate. Cheers on that, because thats what i came to hubski for (thought provoking debates) discussions such as this one. Either way i'm subscribed to both of you and hope to see more debate in the future etc etc. :D