The Vanilla Sex Goddess weighs in on the question of women and their too-common fondness for assholes. Her post serves, perhaps, as anecdotal evidence for something I’ve suspected as a complicating factor in all this: namely, that whatever causes this asshole-seeking behavior may have something to do with a target identification malfunction.

First VSG says:

And I have to say, I have dated assholes, but I didn’t know they were assholes until later and at which point I dumped them.

Look, nobody’s saying women do this deliberately. But I’ll betcha VSG had men in her life who could have told her right up front those guys were assholes, if she had but asked. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that some of those men even tried to tell her when she didn’t ask – although most of us have learned better by now. It takes a true friend to stick his dick in that particular blender.

VSG goes on:

The men who describe themselves as being “nice guys” are rarely nice. They certainly aren’t any nicer than any other man. Instead they are doormats. And as I don’t much like doormats except to walk on, it’s not suprising that I don’t want to date them, nor any other woman.

By the time I hit 25 these men were no longer doormats. They were instead, manipulative, passive aggressive, whiney, or too demanding of my time for my taste. They love to tell stories of how this woman or that woman did them wrong, and what manipulative bitches they were. (This is bad fodder for a first date) and I am still turned off.

No nice guy (the old fashioned word for the man I am talking about used to be “gentleman”) uses a word like “bitch” to describe a woman. Period. End of sentence. Move on to next paragraph. These are not the droids you were looking for.

Having said that, I’ll confess to having spent some time in my twenties in doormat mode. Young men are raised these days, the ones who are raised at all, to be attentive, considerate, emotionally involved, willing to talk about their feelings, and above all, cooperative with the whims of the fairer sex. Which is a very nice way of describing the “door mat” in the above quote.

It turns out that our Betty-Friedan-reading mothers weren’t reliable, when they told us this is what the young ladies would be looking for. I cannot tell a lie — some of us have briefly whined (er, make that, “shared our feelings openly”) about this discovery. But the smarter among us are working on getting over it.

I’m sure women everywhere will understand if cookie deliveries decline as a consequence.