There are no great guys. This is an important fact that every woman needs to know. Chances are, at some point in your life, you will have to deal with a man. If you are ever going to consider dating a man, marrying a man, or coming within twenty feet of a man, this is really important stuff.
I tell my daughters this fact every day, and I truly believe it. There are no great guys. Good guys, sure. There are good guys, really good guys who are trying to be great. But there are no great guys.
American men are probably as good as you’re going to get. We’re trying. We really are. We’re wearing diaper bags and fighting for equality and telling you we want equal pay, but you have to keep in mind that it’s an act. It is a role we are trying to play because we know it will make you happy. We are trying to become a soft, cuddly, understanding version of ourselves, but you must realize that inside all of us is a barbarian who wants to burn the village to the ground.
Men are ruthless and aggressive and powerful. That’s how we kept wild animals from eating the children, and built dams and roads and villages. It’s how steel got made and bent into skyscrapers. How tunnels were dug underneath rivers and through the sides of mountains.
We are beasts who, since the beginning, did whatever we had to do to get the planet and the universe to submit to our will. It may have given us global warming, strip malls, and turned the earth into concrete, but it also made the place pretty livable.
This is in us. It is in our blood. It is how we are made. This is why putting this animal instinct aside and acting like a “great guy” is a fraud.
My wife was happy that her friend was getting married to a “great guy.”
“He’s a great guy, she’s so lucky he’s really, really great.”
No, he’s not. I haven’t even met him and I know he’s not. He might be great at hiding his evil ways, but he’s not great.
So keep that in mind. If you have a man, if you are married to a man, you are with a wild animal. A man is a wild animal. He may look like a gentleman, but he is just a gorilla who knows how to dress.
So use him wisely. Don’t be stupid with your man. Don’t ask us to do certain things. Don’t ask us to watch the children. Would you ask a bear to watch your children? You should know that we don’t really watch the children. Not the way that you watch the children. We watch them eat bottle caps and fall down stairs, and we laugh and high-five our friends.
Don’t ask me to shop for clothes with my thirteen-year-old daughter. I shouldn’t be in Forever 21 waiting for my daughter to come out of the dressing room. No one in the store knows that I have a daughter in the dressing room! They just see a sweaty, uncomfortable man breathing heavily by himself next to the underwear section.
And I shouldn’t pick the young one up from gymnastics. I shouldn’t be with all the moms waiting for class to be over. They’re all chatting away about playdates and schedules, and all I’m doing is wondering which one of these moms would I have sex with first. I apologize, but that’s where our head goes. And this isn’t a matter of which mom, because I would have sex with all of them—the weird one, the one with the thing on her eye—but which one first, while I have the energy.
I know, we’re not the best.
In the cartoons of yesteryear, men were often depicted as wolves. A wolf in a suit and tie, with his giant tongue hanging out, drooling on the sidewalk, and the minute a woman walked by, his eyes would pop out of his head, and he’d start stomping his feet, panting, and punching himself in the face. It is a ridiculous, insulting assumption that this is how all men act deep inside, but one that could not be more accurate if God had sketched it out herself. We are wolves. Drooling, cunning wolves.
We have to spend an entire lifetime trying to get that hellhound to behave and act less wolflike. Any place where a man has to behave with manners and civility, such as business trips, dance recitals, and parent-teacher conferences, is a struggle. It takes practice. It is not something that comes naturally to us.
What does come naturally is trying to write our name in the snow by peeing on it and scratching ourselves in and around our testicles. We also like spitting through the air to see how far it can go, and if it can go as far as what we just shot out of our nose.
You should also know that men lie, not always about big things with major consequences, although men do that, but consistently about little things. I’d say it’s just for fun but it’s not even fun. That’s not why we do it, we just do it. To say that I understand it or have a good reason for it would be lying and yet as I write this, I think that might be a lie too.
This is really important for young women to know, especially my daughters. Because they will be interacting with the worst type of guys: young ones. These are the raw, unwieldy makings of a man. They are the awful ingredients that have to be tamed and controlled and beat into submission. They are the wild dogs that have yet to be domesticated. When it comes to girls, and trying to be with a girl, and trying to get a girl to like them back, they will stop at nothing.
Before a young man is taught to be a respectful gentleman, who puts the needs of others before himself, and is sensitive to the needs of others, he is a mere vessel for some pretty potent DNA that is struggling for survival. The DNA wants to procreate in order to survive. DNA will do whatever it has to, to get you to sleep with him. DNA will text you lies, pretend to be someone else, and tell you, “It’s okay, we’ll just cuddle.” DNA is a con man in a cheap suit, who makes for a horrible date.
A young guy is like a dog that sees an unattended steak, just sitting on the floor. I don’t care if this is a well-trained show dog with a master’s degree from obedience school, the minute he sees that meat, ancient instincts from his wolf past kick in and before his owner can get the n out in no, the dog will be pooping it out in the yard.
You think you know your man, but you don’t. I see them when they’re free. When they aren’t being watched. When they have nothing to lose and no one to correct them. It’s not pretty. It’s crude and disgusting behavior and apparently it can get you elected president.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Men are fun. Men are a blast. Men come up with fun ideas like tying an inner tube to the back of a boat and dragging your friend across the lake. Men came up with the polar bear challenge, chugging beer through a funnel, and hot-dog-eating contests. I don’t have the scientific evidence or research to back this up, but I will go out on a limb and declare with total confidence that it was a man who first lit his farts on fire.
Men will also look out for you, and protect you. When my wife was pregnant and we walked through the streets of New York, I was shoving people out of the way. Men, women, policeman, I didn’t care and I didn’t think. I just acted on instinct. If you came within twenty feet of my wife, I was going to knock you out.
When the baby was born it only got worse. My wife would put the baby in the stroller and I would literally walk ahead of them, leading them through the crowded streets, like a bodyguard fending off the paparazzi.
We are hardwired to protect those around us, and not with intellect, but with strength and fists and biting. Think about your man for a minute. Where does he keep his weapon? Yes. His weapon. Oh, he has one. I don’t care if he’s the type who spends a lot of his time listening to NPR and baking brownies in a cozy sweater, preaching against the NRA, I guarantee you he has a bat or a golf club, and he knows where it is, and has fantasies about how he would, or rather, how he will use it when the bad guys show up.
I’m not going to tell you what weapons I have because if you come over I don’t want you to have any advantage. But, trust me, there are many, and they are strategically placed around the house, just waiting for you to show up uninvited. We all have fantasies about how it all goes down when the stuff hits the fan and I see myself clearly grabbing my weapon, doing an impressive spin move, and taking you out before you even know I’m in the room. I’m not sure why I have to spin, but you might as well look good when you’re kicking some major ass.
This built-in bodyguard that you get when you are with a man is great, but it doesn’t make him a great guy. It’s really just part of his job. The fact that we all have weapons and really, really want to use them definitely drops us from the “great” category back down to “kind of good.”
Look, the reality is, we are all flawed. Nobody is perfect, and, really, the guys are just a little worse than the women (but a whole lot more destructive). If I can let my daughters know that the person they will one day fall in love with isn’t that great, then I will have done my job. And it will be better for everyone because I won’t have to break out my hidden lead pipe and Japanese throwing stars to defend them.