Hugo Schwzyer wrote a great piece for Jezebel recently called No One is Entitled to Sex: Why We Should Mock the Nice Guys of OkCupid. It is fantastic. You should read it. You read it? Great.

Now, take a look at this brilliant and depressing piece that David Wong wrote for Cracked.com: 5 Ways Modern Men are Trained to Hate Women. It’s from almost a year ago. Notice any similarities?

Holyshit, they’re right! Too many men feel entitled to women/sex! Too many men see what they’re entitled to as one thing: women/sex. No wonder we have a rape problem.

As massive a cultural issue as this is, I’m thrilled that people are writing about it. I’m thrilled that men are writing about it. Maybe this is the beginning of a trend of helpful self-awareness on the part of men? And then they could learn how to be actual nice guys and everything would be fixed?

Oh, no, wait. No it wouldn’t.

Remember this? I wrote a little satire of it. Sarah wrote a more helpful response. We all agreed that the Millennial Woman was ridiculous, but clearly her complaint resonated with our understanding of women’s desires today. Women think they’re entitled to Prince Charming the same way men think they’re entitled to pussy.

That’s fucked up.

Sure, Prince Charming is a more benign desire, but that’s a product of the gender roles and power structure that created it. I hate to say it, but I’m guessing it’s easier for a man to physically force himself on a woman than for a woman to force a man into elocution lessons. Even if that weren’t the case, women are not taught to just take what they want. We can try, but we risk becoming ball-busting, unfeminine harpies. Whereas a man — you know the dichotomy — better take what he wants or he’s at risk of growing a vagina.

First you get an unrealistic expectation. Then your reaction to it can actually negate your gender. God forbid.

So here we are, stuck. Resenting the opposite sex – the whole opposite sex! — for not being the over-simplified, narrowly-defined, readily available thing we want.

How did this come to be? How can we fix it? I have some thoughts:

1. Edit your input. The media can be a real bitch, and you know it. Most outlets just want to sell you stuff and will use any mythology they can get their hands on to succeed. Who told you that one day your prince would come? What suggested to you that a “nice guy” front and not your character was the key to getting laid? If you don’t know, think of what you turn to for reassurance. Rom-coms? Reddit? Edit

2. Open your mind up and go meet some real people! This is – coincidence! – one of the central messages of Dating & Hookup, The Book, and it’s a good one. If you’re not looking at everyone you meet as a potential mate, but merely a potentially interesting person, you’ll find that many of them are. Slowly but surely your list of desirable traits will expand until you see that a three-dimensional person you get along with is better than a two dimensional Prince Charming/fembot who doesn’t exist.

3. Regardless of what you think of her, I find two Ani DiFranco lyrics have stuck with me as I get further and further away from college. One is “I use my dress to wipe up my drink/I care less and less what people think.” The other, more relevant to this post is: “The world owes us nothing/and we owe each other the world.” Put another way, I was recently told of a wedding ceremony where the officiant informed both parties that they should expect to put in 90% and receive 10%.*

The principles of selflessness and lowered expectations are immensely tricky for women. While we aren’t owed a prince, we are owed human rights and respect, and since the world doesn’t have a great track record on giving us the latter, we are correct, in many, many cases to be uppity as shit. It’s hard not to confuse the right to autonomy and equality with the right to a romantic partner, and it’s hard not to confuse an emphasis on giving (vs. taking) with being pigeonholed into a 1950s housewife role.

But I’m guessing that men come up against similar, if opposite, blinding gender-role bullshit. Why, for instance, would any guy think that niceness needs to be more than a front? That only happens – and not often enough — in the movies that are marketed towards women. And then those movies serve as the butt of an ongoing joke in our culture about how much men hate them. Hollywood doesn’t need your $12.00 for Going the Distance, men. They’ll get you on Jackass: 3D. So you can just keep on having a nice and completely confused idea of what you’re supposed to be in this world.

I’m very interested to see if any of you also see this excessive sense of entitlement as two sides of the same (gender-role-exacerbating, misery-inducing) coin, have thoughts about where it comes from, or ideas on the small things we can do in our daily lives to avoid it. Cue the comments, please!

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one more song quote: “C’mon people now. Smile on your brother. Everybody get together, try to love one another right fucking now already!”

*I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of this principle. My guy and I were once challenged to do three nice things for each other in one week. It proved embarrassingly difficult and was one of the best weeks of our entire relationship. Since then I’ve noticed that we are always at our best when we’re caring more about the other person than ourselves, and at our worst when we’re being selfish. These are contagious behaviors.