Society Doesn't Want Good Men

We hear a lot about how society puts all kinds of pressure on women to be this or that, thin or fit or good wives or mothers or what have you, and that in about a bajillion ways, it wrecks them and causes them to be all neurotic and to make ridiculous decisions and be filled with self-loathing and unreasonable insecurities. Guys hate those feelings; women hate feeling them; and it's all very sad and very true. That coin of societal wreckage lands hard on both sides, though... guys are under an awful lot of pressure to be what I'd call jerks or douchebags (that will be a technical term on this blog... sorry if it offends you). The reason is similar to what it is for the women: almost all of the images of what is expected of younger guys is just that, and what we learn as youngsters sticks with us.

Guys, younger guys in particular, are under a lot of pressure to be cool (I get the impression that older guys are under a lot of pressure to wear suits and do suit-wearing kinds of things, but I'm not sure about that because I kind of avoid all of what I'm "supposed" to be doing). I've never liked that. Cool means being a selfish jerk, often enough, and so a lot of guys that would be nice or good guys (or both!) turn out having to be kind of jerky in order to fit an image that they're constantly being fed through their music, television, and similarly brainwashed friends. It really sucks, but I see it going on an awful lot when I watch kids between the ages of about twelve and seventeen... one by one a large percentage of them fall increasingly into being self-serving dumbasses because it's what they think is cool, funny, or "how guys are supposed to be." Unfortunately, I don't think many guys that fall into this crap grow out of it. It's like having societally induced dysmorphic image disorder (as opposed to a dysmorphic body image disorder).

This is a big problem. There are a lot of guys out there that are would-be-good guys that are just caught up in being cool, and there are a lot of partners of those guys that wish they'd just grow up or eventually just kind of get sick of that crap. Society keeps reminding the guys, particularly when things get rocky in their relationships, of how they're "supposed" to be, and so things tend not to get better. Worse, I'm not sure there's an awful lot of awareness of the issue or interest in correcting it. In my experience, in fact, lots of women (particularly younger ones that haven't realized that they don't have time for that crap) say that they want a nice guy or a good guy but then repeatedly go for douches that are nice guys turned cool.

How does it get fixed? I'm not sure, but I suspect it's largely like trying to fix the issue with the public image of women (as compared to the reality of women)... a huge change in how men and women are portrayed in the media at large. Somehow there needs to be a portrayal of women that are actually women and men that are actually good guys (and not in some obviously hokey romantic comedy -- the worst genre of "film" -- that no guy really wants to or will take seriously anyway), and it needs to be massive. I don't know that the change will come about anytime soon, but it needs to.

At least women out there that think about it and see this kind of thing will hopefully realize that they might have a better guy than they think if they have one that has most of the makings of a good guy but seems like he just can't grow up... also that, while the guy is responsible for his behavior, in some ways he's been made into the semi-jerk (or full-on jerk) that he is by a society that overtly urges him to be that way while simultaneously condemning him for it. It's tough to be a guy sometimes.