How To Avoid Going Home With a Douchebag

By Erin Gloria Ryan | August 12, 2013 | 5:30pm

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Recently an Irish website geared toward the collegiate demographic featured a One Night Stand Guide FOR MEN (because if ladies look at it, they’ll get chest hair and suddenly feel the need to sit with their legs splayed wide open on the train). The bad news is that, as you might have predicted, the piece was a date rapey trashpile that would appeal to the worst sort of person.

Here’s the quick version of what happened, for those of us on the side of the pond where the alphabet doesn’t end in “zed.” After the College Times piece ran, response from the public was swift and disapproving. Turns out, people don’t really think it’s that funny to advise men to prey on women who have low self esteem, “daddy issues,” or who feel bad about their bodies. It’s not actually that funny to imagine that the human mating ritual is analogous to large cats preying on injured “baby gazelles.”And people don’t really like it when a piece compares choosing a woman to flirt with to “betting on dogs.” Women are not “prey” to be “cornered” and “pounce[d] on.” Sex, after all, isn’t a contest that women automatically lose by playing. That’s just silly.

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Anyway, the piece really took a turn when it implied that the women having sex with the men who were taking the article’s advice might possibly be so impaired that they wouldn’t remember. A man has sex with a woman who is unable to consent to sex? Round these parts we call that “rape.”

College Times’ advertisers caught wind of the piece and became (understandably) upset, and then College Times took the piece down and was like, Whoa guys we’re so sorry! The piece was supposed to be SATIRE and it was written by a WOMAN and oh my god please continue to give us money in exchange for us running your company’s ads on our site pretty please without grey rape on top?

But we’ll always have the memories (and the screenshots). Anyway, here are some tips, based off this article and the poop army of similar articles that have already run and will run again, for how to recognize the biggest dickhole in the bar before you go home with him. There are signs!

Avoid fedoras.
If you haven’t learned that the hard way (“The Hard Way: being roped into a conversation —or date — that devolves into oddly vitriolic personal attacks from a fedora-wearing atheist libertarian man who appears to still be mad at his mom for making him go to church instead of play video games), you should have learned from Breaking Bad that fedora-like hats are a sign of douchebaggery at best, drug kingpin sociopathy at worst. Heisenberg has never heard of the clitoris. Heisenberg doesn’t make love.

Further, who else besides a guy in a fedora would follow the advice of the original post that suggested men seek out girls with self esteem issues or daddy issues? You can’t see those traits without the added brain power added by a fedora.

Don’t Go Home With a Guy Who Is Clearly Just Out to Get Laid
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, don’t belong to a club that would have you as a member. And don’t let any guy’s member get into your clubhouse if he seems like he’s just indiscriminately out joining clubs like some kind of club-joining fiend. In this analogy, “clubhouse” is a euphemism for “vagina.”

The cool thing about being a woman who wants to go have sex with a relative stranger is that men tend to be more willing, population-wise, to go home with a stranger than women. That’s not to say that no woman could ever possibly want a one night stand, just that bullshit social norms have created an environment where generally speaking, more men in bars seem DTF than women. Don’t yell at me because you want women to be more sexually liberated; I’m just observing.

So that being said, if you want to go out and have yourself some single serving fun, don’t reward the most aggressive guy by giving into his advances — you’ll just teach him that the next time he wants to have sex, the best way to do it is to lurk around like some kind of Disney henchman. In all likelihood, Captain Creepy is but one of many men at that bar, or party, or square dance, or whatever who would be willing to take his pants off in front of you. Look past the guy circling the edge of the dance floor looking for a woman to pounce on “like a baby gazelle.” That’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Don’t Go Home With a Guy Who Assumes You Want To, Like, Marry Him
What is it with awful straight guys and thinking every gay guy wants to fuck them and every straight woman wants to marry them? It speaks to an impassable disconnect between how the world sees them and how douchebags think the world sees them. Sort of like how my 8 pound cat thinks she’s a lion.

From the deleted piece,

When she’s in your house, don’t waste time with the nonsense of house tours or making her feel comfortable. This is an ‘in and out’ job, pun intended. Again, to ensure you don’t get a clinger make sure the sex implies as little relationship qualities as possible. Pull her hair, rip her shirt but by all means- don’t look in her eyes!

Yeah bro. Because ladies who go home from bars with men are ALWAYS trying to wife them up. Dealing with a person who is convinced that you are in love with them when you are in fact not in love with them is maddening. Avoid the elevated blood pressure by refusing indulge these people’s fantasies about themselves. They have to learn. Teach them.

Don’t Go Home With a Guy Who Won’t Give You His Last Name or Phone Number
The banished piece advised one night standing men to get their fuck partner out the door before numbers or names are exchanged. Not that every guy a lady sleeps with should be stenciled on her hope chest or that sex should be preceded by full background checks, but from a practical level, knowing a guy’s last name and/or phone number is just a good idea. What if he gave you an Ess Tee Dee? What by some Christmas miracle, you become pregnant? What if you leave your grandmother’s diamond earring in his leopard sateen sheets?

Of course, the only way to be 100% sure that you’re not going home with a douchebag is to not go home with anyone at all. But what’s the fun in that?

[Irish Times]