OWN YOUR DESIRE! Dating advice expert, Harris O’Malley, a/k/a. Dr. NerdLove, chimes in on solutions, struggles and pitfalls of the nice guy. TOPICS: Pickup Artists, Erotic Masquerade Drama, Kino Escalating, Rejection, Cognitive Dissonance, Transactional Friendships, “Pretty in Pink,” Duckie, One-Sided Affection, Is Nice Good Enough?, Confirmation Bias, The Dark Triad of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism & Narcissism, Douchebags, Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who & Torchwood, Halo Effect, Social Engineering, Letting it Go, and When to Make Your Move!
Dr. NerdLove isn’t very good at writing mini-bios about himself. He’s also not entirely sure about this whole “writing about himself in the third person†thing.
Dr. NerdLove is the not-really-a-secret identity for Harris O’Malley. He is an artist, raconteur, part-time messiah, and known man about town. In no particular order, he is an author, photographer, a digital artist and illustrator, a podcaster and the dispenser of valuable love and relationship advice to nerds, geeks and neo-maxie-zoom-dweebies. He was born in ’77, lived most of his life in Texas and got to Austin as soon as was humanly possible; sadly this was after the Liberty Lunch closed down, which means that technically, he is officially Part of the Problem.
Dr. NerdLove got started as part of the League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen as part the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World episode, where he answered fan’s relationship questions. He made a return during the Valentine’s Day 2011 episode, and started the Paging Dr. NerdLove thread to answer questions that nobody had time to respond to during the podcast.
Things, as they say, went out of control from there.
Since then, he has been giving advice to nerds and geeks from his little corner of the Internet, making geeks just a little more sexy and women a little more nerd-curious.
No, no, don’t thank him. It’s all part of the job.
Follow him on TwitterÂ
Join his Facebook fan page
*Dr. NerdLove is not a real doctor. Then again, neither is Dr. Doom. And nobody questions him.
Follow @SexNerdSandra on Twitter and Facebook! And visit Sex Nerd Sandra’s calendar of live events!
Hmmm. This episode seems to exacerbate the very confusion it sets out to clarify. Namely: the double-bind that well intentioned, progressive-minded (nice?) straight guys often find themselves in.
On the one hand, we have Sandra’s cautionary tale, about a guy who was incredibly forward/aggressive in terms of communication his attraction. That’s obvious enough. Groping is all sorts of creepy. She shouldn’t have had to put up with that.
But then the ENTIRE REST OF THE EPISODE is spent lambasting guys who AREN’T forward/aggressive in communicating their attraction, who instead introduce their attraction subtly through acts of kindness and support. Ya know, by being nice.
And somehow these evil nice guys are more devious/nefarious than Handsy McGroper?
Look, I don’t want to gender bait. And I’m brand new to Sandra and Nerd Love, so maybe I’m missing something. But it’s basically sounding like we’re damned if we grope—but even more damned if we don’t.
I’m generally confused. Where’s the actual “advice” here?
His Wife is a 3
Pack that 1-10 bullshit in son.
There’ve been interviewees on Sex Nerd Sandra whom I haven’t related to much, of course. The woman who said she used dance moves to assess the anatomies of her male partners, for example, was both steadily mean and badly out-of-touch with some basic truths about human physiology. I’m not going to run an orgy tent at Burning Man any time soon, either, or becoming a “hypno-dom.” Sandra plays the “straight person” (no pun intended) to her guests a lot of the time, the dynamic of which works fine for me. I’d like her to prepare her questions a bit more, maybe, so as to control the direction of the conversation and make it advance, but her persona works and I listen to the show.
Dr. Nerdlove, though, floored me by being such a repulsively open sociopath.
I’m pretty sure Sandra was looking for someone to address a problem lots less disturbing than the sort of Machiavellian behavior he admitted to in his own life. His past relationships — again, as he described them — were choked with passive-aggressive garbage that made me wince. That’s *without* his delving into the phase when he apparently was part of “pick-up culture,” complete with various jargon to do with “kino escalation” and so on.
This wasn’t the face you wanted across the table for a discussion of “nice guys,” Sandra. It was pretty gross hearing him run down “Nice Guys,” with or without capitals, in that disparaging way, projecting his own toxic levels of aggression and hostility toward both men and women throughout. Ew.
There are lots and lots of nice people, of all sorts of flavors, who find it difficult to be vulnerable enough to admit their sexual interest to others. *That* is the basic “nice guy” problem. It’s something both men and woman can relate to — unless they’re conscience-impaired, smug jackasses who’ve spent their lives learning to “own their desire” by being honestly, sincerely *sociopathic.*
I only listened to the first half an hour – does it get this bad afterwards? I’m new to podcasts, actually.
It really doesn’t; I have no idea where this dude is coming from but ‘projection’ keeps rattling around in my head for some reason.
Let the guy talk, please…
Schumer had a great sketch on her show about just this sort of “nice guy” problem:
http://youtu.be/e8teRxOSNH
And Justin, if you were on the -receiving- end of the attention of these “nice guys”, I think you’d understand that yes, this is a social concern. The guys in the video are towards the relatively benign end of the Dark Triad spectrum — surely you can see how the other end of the spectrum can lead to harassment or worse.
http://youtu.be/e8teRxOSNHs
The problem with the “nice guys” isn’t that they’re unwilling to get rejected. It’s that rejection is their only possible outcome. Some people are just not appealing to the opposite sex, and die alone. It’s how humanity has always worked. But somehow we’ve managed to turn unfuckable people into a social concern? I don’t really understand it.
It certainly is a “concern” to those of us who are “just not appealing to the opposite sex”. But the social concern should be about helping us, not about vilifying us like most of the culture is doing or insulting us like you are doing. At least the PUA community is trying to help. Not my cup of tea necessarily but I see the appeal.
This guy is so terrible at pick-up in real life. Plus he’s married and out of the game already.
And wouldn’t the fact that he’s married and out of the dating pool be an indicator of how well he was able to take his own advice?
The my.spill.comlinks redirect to Hollywood.com
Unfortunately, Spill.com shut down at the end of 2013. Hollywood.com was the parent company, so that’s why the link redirects. They removed the site and its contents after the site closed.
check out Oneofus.net and doubletoasted.com and rageselect.com and thetvdudes.com it’s where they all went
Don’t really listen to Sexnerd Sandra but I saw Harris was on, so I had to check it out. Long live the League!
Didn’t know about oneofus.net, thanks for the heads up.