On the same list which brought about the fantasies and rape rant, someone asked why sensitive new-age guys didn't get laid. Someone posited that it was because the arrogant assholes were more persistent.
As an ex-SNAG (sensitive new-age guy) I disagree. I used to have female friends who'd invite me over to drink wine and talk about their boyfriend problems but shut me down hard if I ever tried to go beyond that.
Then I had a life-changing experience, and over not much more than a weekend my personality changed drastically and I got an attitude. Waitresses started writing phone numbers on my napkins when they delivered my drinks. I got hit on a lot.
And it wasn't a matter of persistence on my part; I was saying "no". A lot.
Since that time I've taken it upon myself to learn how to write story and, because I'm a computer geek and one of the great untapped computer entertainment markets is women, I've made a study of romance novels.
There are very few heroes in romance who appear to be sensitive new-age guys. Yeah, some of them are at heart, although more often it's a matter of being tamed by the heroine which is why those stories always end at marriage, but that's the clincher that brings them together at the end, the initial attraction is 'cause the hero is the alpha male, the ass-kicking name-taking ruler of the roost.
Love and lust aren't about logic and reason, they're something that happen well below the conscious mind, and we just see the parts that ripple up. I can intellectualize all I want, but when it comes right down to it the facial shapes and body shapes and colors and such that make my knees knock have nothing to do with reason.
What we who are under 40 sometimes forget is that heterosexual sex used to be about procreation. Period. Options for contraception have historically been suppressed when they were available. Sinatra was roundly criticized by the Catholic Church for suggesting that love and marriage had anything to do with each other.
I'm a computer geek, not a sociologist or anthropologist, but I could guess that the sexual urge has evolved over the period before ours to be "how will my offspring fare". And it isn't that much of a stretch to say that the fathers likely to put those offspring in the best position to procreate have been the nastiest most violent self-centered people in the culture. That's what politics is all about.
Or at least it hasn't been the guys who've said "nawww, I'm happy with my life, if we don't try to conquer the world we can hang out in our garden and be happy." The history of European culture has been all about those people getting wiped out and tromped on.
At least that's the only theory I can find that fits my experience.
Sunday, March 14th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com