Where Nice Guys meet That Guys meet PUAs

Found this gem via Facebook: "A Girl You Should Date," advice, presumably, to the young man who fancies himself an intellectual. To a sort of Nice Guy crossed with That Guy. And the author's a woman (or so the name Rosemarie Urquico implies)! And it's possibly a response to a mildly misogynistic essay! It's intended as kind of... feminist, and has been interpreted that way by various Facebook friends-and-acquaintances, but "girl" is used where "woman" might have sufficed! Where have we seen this before?

"A Girl You Should Date" contains so much wrong that I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll begin with the beginning:

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books."

It is of course mutually exclusive to care about clothes and to read books. That's why students in literature PhD programs, male and female alike, tend to be so badly/carelessly dressed. Except, wait a moment... This is, as WWPD readers know, a case of too-brilliant-to-bathe, but with a slight twist. It's about penalizing women for having stereotypically feminine interests. Meanwhile, is dude going to notice the woman, reading or otherwise, if she's not good-looking? Dude may think he's noticing the Nabokov, but it's really the carefully applied highlighter makeup. Regardless, it gets irritating how "clothes" are this stand-in for materialism, when the same men who take such pride in their indifference to matters sartorial almost inevitably turn out to be interested in something just as pointless (expensive wine, food, electronics, sports...). The problem with "clothes" isn't that they're not books, but that this is a non-book interest associated with women and gay men.

Then there's the fetishization of books-as-objects: 

"You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow." 

I know the love of books' smell is meant to be this great big stand-in for an interest in books' content, but it always strikes me as one step away from being one of those people who buy books by the foot at Strand. I'm like way into texts, and that's the case whether it's a PDF, a microfilm, a crisp new hardcover, or one of those yellowed tomes that Bisou likes to munch on when she runs behind that one chair. (And I do wish she'd leave Les eaux mêlées well enough alone, and not mix them further still with whichever mix of wet and dry feed is passing through her digestive tract.) 

But the main ick factor comes from the premise, which is that until proven otherwise, women are vapid airheads. Vapid, money-grubbing airheads: "It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries." No need to go to Zales!

The whole thing reeks of male entitlement, of this idea too many men have of themselves (like dude on NJ Transit recently who wouldn't shut up from the moment he got on, telling his friends what a great intellectual he is, how he loves curling up with a good book, how he hopes to read "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" sometime soon, and held forth so continuously and at such high volume that those of us trying to, you know, read books on the trip were out of luck.) that they are Great Minds. Minds brought down by the horrid, moronic females they're forced to interact with on account of their sexual orientation being what it is. 

So they look for women who are exceptions or, rather, who give off the vibe of "different." They feel special if they hit on the (conventionally-attractive) brunette, not the blonde, the skinny, flat-chested young woman rather than the D-cup. (Fact: having large breasts makes it physically impossible to read great literature.) The "manic pixie" retort is apt. This is about many things, none of which is finding an intellectually-compatible mate.