Source: Men Don’t Like Bitches, but They Do Like Brats Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: February 12, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

No not like this

Again, most people will never engage in this particular type of play, let alone base their relationships around it. But the psychological component of BDSM is just an ultra-intense version of what most people do all the time without thinking about it. Even vanilla relationships are dependent on some kind of power dynamic or push-and-pull, unspoken and subtle. BDSM taps into something fundamental about sexuality and amplifies it. In the case of men who like to dominate even just during courtship, and even in a vanilla way, it’s a lot more gratifying if you feel like you, and only you, could do it. For that to be believable, it needs to be relatively challenging.

To an extent, straight women experience this brat fantasy as well, even though women generally prefer sexually dominant partners. For women, it’s less about the fantasy of exerting sexual dominance and more about the fantasy of taming a playboy or a brooding loner into monogamy and domesticity. Women’s erotica—even something as tame as Bridgerton—usually revolves around relatively experienced, rakish men who enjoy philandering until they meet the One. So far, there hasn’t been a Bridgerton season starring an inexperienced male protagonist who moons over his theoretical future wife all day until she magically appears, and then they get married and everyone lives happily ever. It is not a turnoff if the male love interest has slept with many women, but it is a turnoff if he has showered other women with gifts and marriage proposals that were declined. Who wants a guy who would have proposed to just anyone? To be the one woman good enough for the playboy to propose marriage is one thing—to be the fifth woman the hopeless romantic wanted to marry that year alone is less flattering.

Surely, even for a woman, a romantic storyline (à la Bridgerton) is more thrilling if there is a challenge! Potentially even a challenge on both sides: she is resisting her inner animalistic urges given her proper, aristocratic upbringing, and he is resisting true love in favor of his hedonistic and detached lifestyle, both of them ultimately surrendering to their urges, all to the soundtrack of a Halsey string quartet cover band.

The female fantasy may be of a devoted male partner, but a devoted male partner who would only be so devoted for them. This holds true whether a woman sees herself as sexually submissive or not. You can be sexually submissive and still have the brat-tamer fantasy. The gold standard of normie woman BDSM erotica—*Fifty Shades of Grey—*is all about an explicitly dominant man, a literal owner of a sex dungeon. Christian Grey is a handsome billionaire who could have anyone, who has a long history of sexual experiences, but is so enthralled with the female protagonist that he will dominate her (and only her.) I say this partly in jest, but many women have a “monogamy kink.” It’s not just that they just find monogamy enjoyable and safe, but there is something sexually gratifying about knowing that a guy could choose between lots of casual sex, and sex with you, and has chosen sex with you. See: 30 Rock’s “normaling” kink, where Jenna and her kinky boyfriend break the last taboo by pretending to be a normal married couple.

My critics have contorted and twisted (nay, tied up and chained) my thesis into something we all know isn’t true, which is that your average, red-blooded American man wants to marry a girlboss battle-axe turbo-biotch who yells at him all the time. And there certainly are some men who are into that! There are men who get off on being whipped and being made to lick shoes, and men who want to be diapered while wearing a cartoonish baby bonnet (can a baby bonnet look anything other than cartooninsh on a 45-year-old lawyer?) so you’ll never catch me saying anything about “all” men or “all” women. But of course, preferring an abrasive, rude, nasty woman is more of a niche preference than a standard thing. That was never what I meant when I said that men didn’t like excessively compliant and agreeable women. There is, of course, a secret third thing: a brat.

In my previous piece, I mentioned my own difficulties being “too agreeable.” This is a tendency I’ve had from birth, and I still don’t really know why I’m like this, but I have always been terrified of making the wrong decisions or getting people angry at me, and being in charge of anyone but my own children gives me tremendous anxiety. This has less to do with my ideological beliefs about a “woman’s place” and much more to do with the fact that I feel safer when someone else is making all the decisions for me. So naturally, I married an extremely anal man (to the degree that I suspect he is obfuscating German ancestry) who has onerous rules about when the lights in the house can be turned on.

I was accused of lying when I said that my teenage dating experiences were marked by lots of feedback that I was too compliant. Apparently, it’s impossible for any teenage boy or young man to find an excessively agreeable girl boring. But that was my experience. Boys were often very excited to start dating me, but quickly lost interest. I believed that to keep their interest, I had to be as available, unchallenging, and compliant as possible, even as this strategy repeatedly failed. I dropped friends and hobbies to make time for boyfriends, even abandoned some of my favorite clothing, if the pieces felt too out-there. I had a boyfriend beg me to debate him over something—anything—and I refused, only offering, “I just want to make you happy,” which lowkey was kinda meta-bratty, but he wasn’t into it. I know this is impossible to reconcile if you are part of an Internet subculture that believes relationships only ever break up when the woman becomes “too fat,” but actually, it’s possible for women to be boring too. #WomenInMensFields

To be clear, I don’t think I actually am that boring. In fact, my colorful imagination might be a bit too much for my husband, who recently had to deal with me sending him a screenshot of a spam text for a lawn care quote which referenced our address, while I suggested we call the cops because “this sicko knows where we live.” But my natural tendency to be more compliant has made me boring-coded in previous relationships, even at the beginning of my relationship with my husband. My husband loves to be in charge. And even he found it incredibly irritating and dull that in the early stages of our relationship, I refused to ever counter him on anything. He would try to debate me on low-stakes things, like which of our recent date night spots had the best food, and I would just agree with him. It drove him nuts. I did, however, go out of my way to pretend to be less available (waiting before texting back, for example) during our early courtship days, which to some might be “playing games” but I still believe it worked to make me appear like less of a loser.

Another great non-CHH example of the type of compliance that most men don’t want is what Florida governor Ron DeSantis specifically sought out in his wife. He purposefully pronounced “Thai food” as “thigh food” to see if his dates would correct him. If they did, he would find an excuse to end the date because he wanted a woman who wouldn’t correct him, even if she knew he was wrong.

So yes, some men do want mindlessly compliant women. But most people clowned on Meatball Ron for this, including men. To test to see if this was a common preference (although I was already very confident it wasn’t) I posted a Twitter poll to my straight male followers around a hypothetical thigh-food-adjacent scenario. Almost all of them (95% last I checked) said they would prefer their girlfriend correct them if they said something obviously wrong. And according to one of my more in-depth surveys that included over 1,700 straight men, 88% of them said they would prefer a female partner who could get into spirited debates with them.

Obviously, there are nuances here. Nobody likes a pedant. My mom reported getting into a heated, if not very unpleasant debate with her ex-boyfriend about whether or not Napoleon’s shortness was exaggerated in media (there is a reason they aren’t together anymore, although the main reason is that he owes her a lot of money.) Some people enjoy debates more than others. If anything, men seem to enjoy debating for sport (or as a form of flirtation) more than women do. One man’s friendly debate is a woman’s “mansplaining.” But to make a safe, broad generalization, most men would not purposefully say “thigh food” to filter for someone who was too afraid to ever correct them.

This is because even if men like to be dominant, whether sexually, romantically or just conversationally, they want to feel like they are unique in their ability to dominate. A woman who shows up from the get-go, pre-dominated, saying, “Yes sir, it’s thigh food” is incredibly dull. She is one step up from a Sim—and not just a Sim, but a Sim with willpower toggled off. (On the bright side, she will never get up from her seat at a wedding ceremony to perform push ups. iykyk.) Regardless of gender, everyone wants to feel special. Someone who has no backbone, who complies with every demand and who never disagrees, doesn’t make you feel special (unless you’re stupid enough to delude yourself into thinking this person had a backbone with everyone else but magically lost it the minute they met you).

Take men’s romantic-oriented media, separate from porn. Almost every romantic story with a male protagonist features various trials and gauntlets a man must pass before he obtains the woman. Sometimes, these tasks have nothing to do with the woman’s interest and have more to do with rescuing her. Other times, the woman must be won over or otherwise subdued. Famously, William Shakespeare’s play, The Taming of the Shrew centered around the more literal taming of an obstinate and headstrong woman. Robin Hood eventually wins over Maid Marian, but in some versions of the story, she is presented as a haughty noblewoman who initially looks down on Robin Hood as a common outlaw.

What separates a brat from a bitch is that a brat will eventually melt. A brat can be tamed. A brat submits only for you, and you can verify this because of how difficult it was to tame her.

I want to put a little disclaimer here and say that brat-adjacent behavior (challenging a man, debating, or playful resistance) is different than complete indifference or rejection. A woman who says she’s not interested is probably, actually, not interested. A woman who completely ignores you is also not interested. I’m talking about deliberate push-and-pull within the context of flirtation. These women are not afraid to disagree, they’re not afraid to debate, and they’d never in a million years pretend that “thigh food” was the correct pronunciation. If you asked them to get dinner on Saturday, and they already had plans with friends, they wouldn’t cancel on their friends, they’d ask you to do dinner another day. Just wanted to clear this all up, because I don’t want any man believing that Dua Lipa is engaging in “playful resistance” because she keeps filing restraining orders.

Some of my critics are arguing in bad faith. Others are, of course, just stupid. But setting them aside for a moment, I think there are a lot of men who don’t have a great deal of experience with women outside of being ignored or rejected. If no woman has ever been agreeable or compliant with you, it’s easy to believe that a spineless woman who makes everything incredibly easy and unchallenging would be a breath of fresh air. Perhaps, at first, she would be. I believe when some men say this, they genuinely mean it.

But it’s often not how things would play out in real life, if they ever really met such a woman. And while I may get crap for declaring things about male sexuality despite not being a man myself, male writers declare things about female sexuality constantly, often derisively and with the explicit reasoning being that people can’t be trusted to be honest about, or even aware of, their own gender’s sexual preferences.

I actually somewhat agree with this belief system. How many women have claimed they don’t care about looks and just want a guy who’s nice to them? This is also why I don’t like to give men dating advice. But it’s also why I’d never trust a man to be completely accurate about what he’s into. It’s not that I think everyone is lying, but I do think people are notoriously bad at identifying what turns them on, especially if what turns them on also gives them less relative power and makes things kind of a pain. But ultimately, that pain is why you’re into it.