Posted by Sappho on March 11th, 2011 filed in Sexuality

Possible mechanisms that might lead to the perception that other men than yourself are benefiting in the dating arena by being “jerks” (different ones, or combinations, might apply for different guys):

1) The “bitter” hypothesis: You’re failing, and some other guy is getting what you want, so you see all his “jerk” qualities. Evidence in favor of this one: Women, too, have their version of “bitter,” when they lose out in the dating world. (See, “men don’t want women with any brains,” and “men only want women who manipulate them and play games.”)

2) The “jerks stand out” hypothesis: There are plenty of genuinely nice guys who are getting laid, but you’re noticing the ones who don’t seem to deserve what they’re getting. They really are jerks, but they’re not as common as you think.

3) The “Jack Spratt would eat no fat” hypothesis: The “jerk” isn’t a jerk to his girl friend, because she doesn’t actually want the thing he’s failing to deliver. That guy who’s openly playing the field seems like a jerk to you, but not to the woman who’s not ready to settle down yet herself. Or that guy who has to be the center of conversation at every party seems like a jerk to you, but not to his gorgeous but shy and introverted girl friend, who is happy to have anyone other than her be the life of that party.

4) The “you’re actually more of a jerk yourself than you realize” hypothesis: Women are actually rejecting you because you’re something of a jerk yourself, but you don’t recognize it and point the finger elsewhere.

5) The “regression toward the mean” hypothesis: Actually, you’re not a jerk. In fact, you go so overboard to be nice that anyone who gets the woman you failed to get (for unrelated reasons – maybe you’re a stand up guy, but not all that physically attractive, or don’t seem all that sensual, or something else) will be further along the “jerk” line than you are.

6) The “like attracts like” hypothesis (plus a touch of selective perception): The women you see going for “jerks” are actually simply picking men who share their own problems (e.g. people who abuse alcohol and drugs hanging with people who share that pastime), and you’re noticing the men’s pathology more than the women’s. Especially if the women are really, really cute. The men may be cute, too, but you don’t care about that as much.

7) The “who hears whose confidences” hypothesis: Perhaps men who think their girl friends are treating them badly mostly confide in women, while women in that situation confide in both sexes. Or perhaps men are less likely than women to listen for long to the gory details of someone else’s bad relationship – unless that someone else is a hot woman the guy would like to bed. Either way, it would explain women’s perception that men are just as likely to choose someone who treats them badly as women, and men’s perception that this is a peculiarly feminine trait.

8) The “everyone’s shallow, but women are expected to be selecting for personality” hypothesis: She’s not dating him because he’s an asshole, but because she likes his ass. If she were a man dating a really cute woman, you’d figure that out, but since she’s a woman, she has to be picking him for his awful personality.

9) The “some women like to pick men who dominate other men” hypothesis: She doesn’t want a guy who pushes her around, but she wants a guy who’s a leader among men. In other men’s eyes, he’s a jerk. In her eyes, as long as his social dominance is directed more toward other men than toward her, he isn’t.

10) The “she doesn’t welcome that guy’s advances as much as you think” hypothesis: Some women, particularly when young, have trouble getting up the nerve to tell certain men to get lost. Possibly, if you yourself are both too shy to flirt, and too slow on picking up social cues to realize when a woman is trying to subtly lose a guy, you may watch the pair together and wonder why he gets to flirt so long with her while she pays no attention to you.

11) The “men are expected to make the first move” hypothesis: If women believe that men who aren’t making an overt move can’t possibly be interested, then they’ll always pick a man who makes some sort of move over one who doesn’t. Most of those men are probably just as nice as you are (having the nerve to make the move in itself makes you neither more nor less nice than the person who doesn’t dare make a move), but at least some of them will be bigger jerks than at least some of the guys who were too shy to act.

Possible mechanisms that might lead to the perception that you started getting better success when you became more of a “jerk”:

1) The “doormat” hypothesis: On the TV show “House,” House is an utter jerk, and Wilson bends over so far backward to please others that on one occasion he donates part of his own liver to save someone who totally doesn’t deserve it. Suppose a woman wants someone in between those extremes, such as, oh, Chase. Actually, you’d probably be better off with Chase. At least as long as you can accept his part in the death of a certain genocidal dictator. Anyway, if you’re way over at the giving away pieces of your own liver end of the continuum, getting a bit more of a backbone may, in your eyes, be turning into a jerk to get laid, while in the eyes of the woman you’re dating, you’re still nice, but not such a doormat that she has to keep guessing at what you really want.

2) Recall’s “you really didn’t change much, but trying to be more of a jerk was the last thing you happened to do”: Actually, you would eventually have found a woman anyway. But trying to be more of a jerk was the last thing you tried. Since you didn’t change that much, and really aren’t a jerk, she doesn’t see it the same way you do. Somewhere, there’s probably a guy who’s your mirror image, and believes he got his woman by learning to be nicer, but (see the “jerks stand out” hypothesis above) people don’t notice his story as much as yours.

A possible mechanism that might apply in both cases:

Misperceptions of where the “jerk” line is, when it comes to making sexual advances: Women complain a lot about getting rude sexual advances, being treated as a sex object, etc. But these things are in fact very situational. What’s an unacceptable sexual advance in the work environment may be just fine at a party. What’s rude from someone you’ve just met may be fine after you’ve been flirting a while. Etc. If “not being a jerk,” to some men, means an excessively broad interpretation of when women don’t want to be hit on, then it could both be the case that those men see other men getting women by being what they consider “jerks,” and find that they themselves get more women when they become more of “jerks.”

(Transferred from a comment at Hugo’s blog, at the request of La Lubu, who says I should preserve this for posterity.)