Do you like “manly” men?

I stumbled across what I fear may be an anti-feminist blog. I went ahead and posted a comment anyhow because this particular post didn’t offend me. Hopefully I have not added energy to the dark side. (imagine “dark side” said into a fan for the right effect.)

Here are my edited comments about Research on Female Preferences in Men over at, (yipes!) Feminist Critics:

My experiences:
Whenever I’ve heard a guy say, “Women say they want nice guys, but they don’t really.” or something like that, and the guy saying that is implying that he is nice, but women don’t like him, he never actually is nice. I’ve never heard an actual nice guy say that. I wonder what the men who say that think of as “nice.”

(Maybe they mean superficially polite, begrudgingly following the cultural rules and miffed that she still won’t sleep with him? I don’t know, this is pure conjecture.)

Personally, I do like manly men. (If we are defining “manly” as “probably having a lot of testosterone.”) I once heard a show about the effects of testosterone on mens voices: makes them kind of gruff and deep, and noted that my three favorite boyfriends had voices like that. All of my boyfriends have been athletic, but I don’t think they were all especially “manly.”  Two of my “manly” boyfriends were also popular and confident, which I liked. I don’t know if that has anything to do with testoterone…

So, although I do like manly men, I also like and have dated just regular men. Therefore, the differentiating factor for me is not “manliness.”  I look for niceness, (ie: grounded, at least somewhat emotionally intelligent, kind even to people who won’t benefit him), physical attraction (which I guess must be chemical and has been quite varied for me) and of course, shared humor, interests, values, etc..

What about YOU gentle reader? What do you like?

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