What Do Women Really Want?
...is it really "assholes"? A long story with a trite bit of advice at the end
Chris and I walk into the house after our standing Thursday night hot yoga date, prepared for the usual: cracking open a couple beers, performing various asana poses to impress each other in the living room, eventually settling on the couch together to watch a movie and maybe smoke some weed with Sean and Jacob, his two roommates. We decide to go outside and smoke a cigarette first. We talk about Chris’s brother, William, and how he always gets himself into bar fights when he’s drunk and how Chris is sick of bailing him out of them. I tell him I find that kind of thing completely ridiculous. Obnoxious and unnecessary displays of macho buffoonery. He agrees. We go inside.
Sean is lying on the couch, passed out drunk. Jacob has just finished cleaning the house and is sitting in his recliner, ready to turn on the new Batman movie and we all want to sit and chill and watch it. Unfortunately, Sean is taking up all the extra space with his drunk-ass snoring, limbs everywhere.
Sean will not wake up from his drunken stupor. Jacob starts blasting System of a Down from the stereo in an attempt to get Sean to get up and leave the room. It is in vain. Chris and Jacob decide then that they will simply carry Sean up to his bedroom; together, it should be easy enough — Sean was maybe 140lbs soaking wet while Jacob and Sean combined were like 380lbs of obsessive gym-bro muscle.
That finally wakes him up.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” he screams. “Why the fuck are you touching me? Stop touching me, you fucking cocksuckers!” This goes on for a while, Sean’s insults escalating, and the three of us are growing increasingly frustrated with his confused, loud belligerence.
Chris's next move is a surprise to all three of us: he lunges at Sean and drags him off the couch. They struggle for a while, Chris’s glasses fly off of his face and break on the floor. Sean gets away from Chris's grasp and starts screaming and yelling, picking up the coffee table and flipping it over in his rage, sending everything on it into a broken mess on the floor. He starts pacing around the living room, swatting at everything, knocking things off of every surface, like a cat. Jacob finally starts looking as pissed as Chris. “Dude! Stop trashing the fucking house!” Sean’s glasses also get lost somewhere in the shuffle. No one involved in this fight can see anything properly anymore. Chris and Sean attack each other again. Mostly it's just Chris shoving Sean into the wall and restraining him while Sean is throwing out insults and vulgarities left and right. Jacob is still pleading with Sean to stop breaking stuff, Chris is shaking and ready to lay into him again, and I'm just about ready to punch Sean in the face myself because he's being such a fucking dick.
After Jacob pleads with Sean to stop breaking shit, Sean laser-focuses on my wine glass on the bookshelf and swipes it across the living room, shattering the glass and getting red wine all over the white couch. I finally chime in: "dude, what the fuck?" He freezes, as though he's only suddenly become aware of my presence, and is like, "‘what the fuck?’ Who the fuck are you, bitch?" He literally doesn’t even remember me, he’s that shit-faced, and he’s known me a whole year longer than Chris, my boyfriend, has, not to mention the fact that I’m at their house at least twice a week. I met Chris through Sean and Jacob at their housewarming party a couple months prior. I return the tone and the insults and look over at Chris, who looks like there is about to be nothing holding him back from tossing him easily and directly out of the living room window.
I was fuming. Not just at Sean, but at Chris. What an obnoxious, piggish display. What was he trying to prove? Who was he trying to impress? Me? We literally just talked about this. Physically fighting his scrawny roommate over a spot on the couch was as far from impressive as I could imagine. Even though Sean was being aggressive and annoying and drunker than I’d ever seen maybe anybody ever at that point, I thought attacking a guy who was laying down at the time, someone probably literally half his size in weight alone, was just kind of… pathetic.
Chris and Sean eventually move into the kitchen. Jacob and I stay in the the broken-ass living room and start cleaning it up. We hear Chris and Sean in the kitchen start laughing, then hugging. Jacob and I look at each other, both bemused and relieved, and pack the bowl we’ve been waiting so long for and start laughing at the absurdity of it all. Chris gives Sean a ride to his friend’s house. Even though the fight ended and has become an amusing example of that weird bro thing where a whole physical fight can happen, get hugged out and suddenly they’re cool again, I fully intend to lay into Chris when he gets back, asking him how in the hell he decided to get into such a preposterous fight with Sean literal minutes after telling me he hates that shit.
When he gets back, he barely has a chance to get his shoes off, face still red, no glasses on, looking a little banged up. I start asking questions. I don’t remember how he responded anymore, just that we ended up in his bedroom very shortly after.
I will tell you that I was very conflicted over that for some time. In fact, I still am sometimes when I remember it, 12 years later. I think fighting culture among men and women both is immature and animalistic behavior in most cases.
And yet.
Why?
Nice Guys™ have claimed for eons now that “women only want assholes.” Is that really true? And what’s an asshole, anyway? Do women in general really want aggressive bros who pick on people half their size, regardless of how offensive and disruptive and genuinely destructive they're being? Well, I couldn't tell you for sure, but I do personally know a not-insignificant number of women who will tell you that their “type” is usually someone with a prison record or gang tattoos (usually from prison), so that's not nothing. (I’ve also heard and seen plenty of men say they like only the “craziest” of women, so.) But it was certainly a shock to me to react the way that I eventually did, as he was, and still is, the only guy I’ve ever dated who I’ve known to — or actually seen — fight anyone after, like, 6th grade.
That wasn’t usually the type of guy I was attracted to. The type I generally went for were more like me in values and temperament: artsy, alternative/hipster-looking, a little nerdy and sensitive, conflict-avoidant, politically aligned with me. Chris was not that guy, at least not on the outside. He was a phenomenal writer and photographer and very well-read, but he held tightly to his outward image of an imposing tough guy, albeit in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, for reasons I knew to be related to insecurity from his younger years. He was opposite me politically, too, which was new. He was also one of the few guys I fell for pretty much instantly rather than after getting to know him for a while, first: he was the one who answered the door when I got to the aforementioned party, and I’m pretty sure I just gaped at him for a minute, because I did not expect such a gorgeous unfamiliar face in front of me when the door opened. He let me in and I sat down, joining the political conversation already happening in the living room. He mentioned something favorable about capitalism, and I started arguing with him until he actually started to look hurt, at which point I started to feel bad, and we went outside to smoke a cigarette together. We stayed out there together talking for hours.
We were dating less than a week later.
The relationship did not work out. We broke up and got back together again more times than I can count over the next three years, and I eventually finally ended it for good when I met my now-husband in late 2015. At one point in 2013, I wrote in my old online journal that I suspected that the only thing keeping me in that relationship was how attracted to him I continued to be, despite all of our ongoing issues:
Funny thing, but not really funny, is when I told him I didn't want to go to New York. The subject shifted somehow and Chris started talking about Afghanistan. And he went on. And on. And on. I gave up trying to steer the conversation back to what we were talking about and just accepted that I was now sitting in on a surprise lecture on the Afghanistan war, whether I liked it or not. And, you know, I'm glad for it, I guess. In a way. It was interesting, Chris did keep me engaged during his frequent monologues on foreign policy, which I largely didn’t pay attention to on my own, but I didn't want to talk about it or hear a monologue about it just then, at all.
So I let my mind wander. I thought about us inevitably breaking up when I didn't go with him to New York. And I looked at him, and I thought, "but he is so damned handsome." And that thought stayed with me a bit longer, and I realized I was trying to justify staying with him, even going to New York with him, because I was so attracted to him physically, and I didn't want to give that up. And I shook it out of my head, and I reminded myself that being physically attracted to someone is not the reason the stay in a relationship with them.
My husband is another of the rare guys I ended up with who I was attracted to immediately when I first saw him. I really didn’t know anything about him at all, as we were Facebook friends first due to having mutuals that wanted to plan an event together that never actually happened, but I actually unfollowed him at some point early on and didn’t really dig into his profile or pay attention to his posts. He didn’t unfollow me, though, so when I posted on Facebook some time later that I was downtown and wanted to see if any friends were nearby and wanted to grab a beer with me, I didn’t expect him to answer and tell me he’d be right there.
He later told me that before he got to the bar to meet me, he didn’t even really think, based on my Facebook photos, that I was all that cute1; he just thought he was going to hang out with some random like-minded chick and have a couple beers.
But, like with Chris, when Wil2 came into the bar where I was waiting, I was taken aback. He walked briskly into the bar with such cool confidence, spotting me immediately and swiftly heading toward me, practically marching, with perfect posture. He was wearing faded baggy jeans that were so torn up that they practically didn’t exist paired with a black motorcycle jacket and nice black, suede shoes (referred to now as “The England Shoes,” because that’s where he got them), and a beanie. He was clean-shaven, which I had, until that exact moment, kind of hated as an aesthetic. I liked beards. I maintain that most men look good with one. (He has his requisite Freedom Beard now that he’s out of the military, and I constantly pester him to shave it because I like his face so much.) But oh boy, was he a babe. His whole presence was just so self-assured, and I can’t stress enough just how attractive that was. We sat and talked easily for a long time.
Anyway, that not-date turned into one as soon as we went outside to smoke a cigarette an hour or so later and I impulsively decided to kiss him on the cheek. He responded by kissing me on the lips. I broke up with Chris shortly after, and Wil and I have been together ever since. Sometimes, acting on that first attraction is a silly idea and it doesn’t work out. Other times, it does.
I think that if I had to come up with an answer on the spot for my original question (what do women want?) I’d boil it down to confidence and capability. Chris fighting Sean wasn’t really about the fact that he fought him; it was more about the self-assuredness he had in his ability do so, and the responsibility he felt for taking care of a situation that was irritating the hell out of everyone. And, looking back, the fact that Chris never really hit Sean and instead used his considerable strength to restrain, instead, probably allowed me to more easily justify the aggression I witnessed and my bewildered and heightened attraction after the fact.
Capability is next. If you have a thing you’re good at, that’s, well, very sexy. And it really doesn’t matter much what that thing is, just that you have one. Being good at beating people up is… certainly a thing… but consider “groupies” for a minute: they get a bad rap, but the reason they follow these dudes around all over the place is because there is something magical and deeply alluring about watching someone be good at something, especially something as emotionally evocative as a musical instrument or singing voice. When I was a teenager, this thing was driving. It sounds silly, but driving was still a novelty when you’re a teenager, and I was far from the only girl I knew who felt that way, and I still see women say this online. Watching guys drive cars well can be sexy. Anything can, if you do it capably and confidently. Ladies really like when dudes are good at stuff.
Either way, that’s what I’m going with: confidence. It’s tired advice at this point, but it is what it is. Confidence is what women really want. Unfortunately, men with confidence come in all shapes and sizes and flavors, some with prison records and domestic assault habits, and some are actually not at all confident but are actually bullies in disguise, so discernment is obviously important here for the women, but you get my point.
I’ve been on this beat for a while now. I wrote about it on my old MySpace blog, and again later in a back-and-forth between several other feminist or feminist-adjacent bloggers in 2011:
"Nice Guys," sex, and self-confidence
A few feminists have weighed in on Miguel's recent post about "nice guys," and the social roadblocks standing in the way of the Nice Guy and a satisfying sex life with women, who apparently only like assholes "socially dominant" men. He begins by saying that
Please, you really don’t need to literally fight people or be an asshole to women in order to attract them, but it would probably help to be proud of what you’re good at, and if (you think) you’re not good at anything (you probably are), find some time to get better at something! Then be proud of it. She’ll notice.
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The above voiceover is not a reading of this essay, but additional commentary to it. In this one I talk more about what it means to be “cute.” I recommend reading the post before listening so that it makes the most sense!
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It was November of 2004. John Kerry was running against George W. Bush in the first presidential election that, at 21, I was finally old enough to vote in, and as a burgeoning liberal, I was anxious to see Bush out of office and a hopeful end to what I was first beginning to think of as American authoritarianism and fascism as I understood…
He was not the first guy to tell me that I was much more attractive in person than I was on Facebook. Maybe I’m just not a photogenic person, or maybe I have no idea which pictures of me actually make me look good. But I think it’s pretty funny, regardless.
Don’t let your spouse pick their own pseudonyms. You have no idea how many absurd Finnish names I didn’t even know how to pronounce I had to shoot down before we settled on Wilhelm (Wil for short and from now on). Ironically, “Wilhelm” was the first one I told him he was not allowed to pick. Figures. He probably won’t even read this, anyway, but if he does, HI, WIL. I’m changing your pseudonym back to Simon if you don’t respond within a week.
What you said about Nice Guys not really "doing anything" is an interesting theory.
Also, I'm never more grateful for being a woman than when I hear stories about boys not being able to avoid fighting as kids and sometimes adults. I barely managed to not have to get into any real ones as a kid (not because I was mean, but because other kids were) and that was terrifying enough.
You're right but I think there are some subtle points worth bringing up.
Confidence is internalized social status. If you take ecstasy then your effective serotonin rises... and you're way better at flirting. Same thing when you win a contest (like a fight) or get a lot of positive attention.
I know that's not what it feels like. I assume it feels like a man knows what he's doing, knows how to solve or prevent problems, and can defend what's his. He feels solid in a sublime way.
And... the word "confidence" doesn't really help young men understand what women want in men. I think there are a few words that don't translate well between the sexes because our experiences are too different. I would say something like "women want dominant men but dislike domineering men".