Why do women like bad boys instead of nice guys?

[Ray711]

I think it's important to distinguish the different kinds of "niceness".

One is the people pleasing kind that at its root is not true STO, because it's based on a need to be liked by others, even if that entails being untrue to oneself or insincere towards others. This entails a high lack of self-confidence, as has been pointed out.

Then there's true pro-social STO behavior which is sincerely and freely given. A person like this may or may not have self-confidence.

In this particular situation that we're talking about I would also add the notion of the feminine man. Both Ra and Q'uo have stated that the sexual polarity of the body does not necessarily go hand in hand with the polarity of the personality. In fact, I remember a mystical experience of a man's, at a different forum, after using DMT, in which the spirits told him very explicitly: "You are female". He said that he had never really thought about the subject, but after the experience he sat down, processed it, and arrived to the conclusion that indeed, his personality was more female than male.

As others have stated above, at an instinctual level, women tend to seek out men who are self-confident. An unbalanced woman will settle for the bad boy kind of self-confidence, whereas a well balanced woman will see past that, and seek out a self-confident man of true pro-social STO behavior who has self-confidence. The other kinds, as a general rule, tend to have trouble attracting women. The people pleasing kind of niceness, the true STO but lacking in self-confidence, and the feminine (yet heterosexual) man, these three types tend to have more difficulties with women.

It's a tricky subject, because one would be tempted to claim if someone has trouble attracting women, that then this fact means that this person needs to improve in one way or another. This is a trap, because to do this is to give absolute power to the instinctual, and even worse, to use the lowest common denominator as the measure for one's sense of self-worth. If someone is only nice in the people pleasing sense and in the kind of niceness that goes away when he gets rejected, then this person would probably benefit from improving his self-confidence and reorienting himself, perhaps moving towards a more pro-social true STO kind of niceness. But in the case of the feminine man there's a problem, because on one hand it's understandable that women, being of the feminine polarity, wouldn't want a relationship with someone of their own polarity. On the other hand, the feminine man could be tempted to look at those aspects within himself that are feminine and positive, and arrive to the conclusion that his lack of success with women is due to those aspects, thus falling into repression and a negation of those gifts that he came into this incarnation with.

Each case is different, and as always, discrimination is the key. The mirrors that others offer might give valuable insight into those aspects of the self that one could work upon, or it just might happen that the best choice one can make is to cast out all opinions of other-selves and stand firm in what one believes is the right way to be for oneself.