Mean Girls

It's pretty much become a ritual of mine to cuddle on my couch stealing kisses from my dog after a night of being out. Night after night I come home in the mindset that all guys are inherently evil due to things that happened (or didn't happen), objectifying texts I received (or didn't receive), or Facebook relationship statuses making people "off limits" (these are above all the worst to not be a part of); after the days' disappointing events, I can't help but lie there while my sleeps on my chest and arrive at the conclusion that he's the only guy in my life who will always be happy to see me when I come home, lick my face and no one elses, and always stay for breakfast after sleeping in my bed. Dogs, unlike guys, are inherently good.
After doing this for numerous nights, I grew more and more desensitized to the fact that the only "good" guy I'd ever love was one that I kept on a leash when we left the house. At least, I thought I was getting over it until I had a very candid conversation with a guy friend of mine. We were sitting in my backyard talking about past, present, and what we hoped would be future romances. I was sprawled out on the grass absorbing the sunlight while my friend hid under the shade of a tree, but the spotlight was on him as the conversation turned to his ex-girlfriend.
"You can't even call that a relationship, though" he said while he tugged at a blade of grass, "I was so mean to her. I didn't even like her, really."
"You're mean to all girls," even though he's my friend, it's still true. In fact, by being his friend he tells me a lot of things about girls that give me evidence to support my claim.
"I mean, yeah, but like, I used to be nice to girls. I just got sick of getting played out."
"When were you ever nice to girls?"
"Like, freshman year. But every girl I liked would friend zone me and only hook up with older guys who could drive and shit. So I stopped trying to get girls by being nice."
His honesty hit me hard, "Are you serious?"
"Yeah. Happens to every guy."
The myth that I'd dedicated my entire life to ciphering had just been debunked: guys are inherently good, but in every boy's life there are girls who sees them and their niceness exclusively as "friend" qualities and thus deny the boys sexual existence. It is because these girls are mean to them that they stop being nice boys and turn into asshole guys. Like proverbial balls dropping, this is something every boy has to go through before he becomes a guy.
I couldn't believe it. I'd spent my nineteen years of living wondering why guys were such assholes only to realize it was my fault. While I wasn't the one to play out this specific guy, I was one of those girls who swooned over older guys because they had cars and fake IDs. And even more reprehensibly, I was one of those girls who completely rejected the boys my age because they didn't have the bad boy allure of being an older guy. In my youthful stupidity, I'd separated "nice" from "hot," while all I wanted in the present was for those two qualities to mix. Instead of doing the illegal thing of finding one of these young boys who hadn't been turned mean yet, I took a vow to teach my future daughter that, no matter how hot she may grow to be, she must be nice to all boys. If she wants to be a bitch to other girls then that's fine.