by Sandra Lowen

Created on: October 11, 2009

JERKS VS. NICE GUYS

It's simple: Who does TV portray as more exciting, the guy who will make girlfriends gasp with envy and provide the hottest time or the gentleman who takes her to the movies and doesn't even try to put his arm around her? Who do the gossip mags in the supermarket extol? Mister Nice Guy never makes it in the news unless he 'cracks' one day and takes out his office with a sub-machine gun. Has a nice guy ever commandeered his father's Midlife Crisis hot car and rolled languidly up to the hair salon, gold chains rattling, toothpick dangling from his luscious lips and said, Hop in, Baby; I'm taking you for a ride! while girlfriends tore out their weaves with jealousy?

Women equate bad boys with hot sex. No two ways about it, the badder the boy, the more fantasies girls weave around their prowess in the bedroom. No matter that the guy is so busy planning his next conquest that he is in reality only a mediocre lover. No relevance, in the moment, that the bad boy is more likely to be the one who says, Oh yeah? Who's the father? if the Unthinkable occurs. He's bad. He's hot. Gotta have him!

The Nice Guy was in all probability raised with the dictum that a woman is more than just her body. He looks on the woman he courts - what a romantic word 'court' is, and how seldom used these days He looks on her as a potential marriage partner, the future mother of his children, the caretaker of his parents, his eternal companion to skip, crawl, or be trundled off into the sunset with. He seeks a life mate, and he will be there when bosoms sag and even L'Oreal cannot undo the ravages of time. He is the guy who hums Stephen Foster's 'Endearing Young Charms' under his breath when his woman abandons Victoria's Secret for underwear that fits her gravity-phillic figure.

Who pushed Nice Guys to the stockroom of the dating market? A lot of the onus this writer would place at the nice guy-kicking feet of James Dean. This 'Rebel Without a Cause' wasn't putt-putting downriver in remotest Africa to sink a German U-boat or trying to get his lady fair away from the Vichy devils (with the Nice Guy, by the way!). Dean had no particular reason for rebelling, and very few long-term attributes of character. But didn't women love him! The Beatles, bad boys who wore their hair long and in the face of establishmentarians, filled the street with screaming 'good girls', who dropped the more appropriately coifed heartthrobs of their day. Woodstock provided bad boys with the opportunity

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