The following is a response to last Friday’s column “Nice guys don’t get girls:”

Sometimes I’ll read an opinion column that causes my face and palm to collide at unsafe speeds. So it was with Kyle Lindemann’s shockingly sexist “Nice guys don’t get girls.” Journalistically, it is a disjointed collection of numb-skulled “dude-bro” truisms and weird football metaphors. I think of the famous critic of Warren G. Harding who described his speeches as “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”

Lindemann doesn’t waste any time in delivering his first jaw-dropper: “Like sharks with blood, women can sniff out weakness in a guy faster than Parking Services can find a car to put a ticket on.” How can we avoid being picked off like a sickly baby gazelle? “Don’t be emotional,” he advises, perhaps because the woman, much like the timber wolf, can smell your fear.

Crucially, make sure to carefully ration your kindness like a Skinner box rat pushing the lever for food pellets: “Give her compliments, but let them be rare.” Intermittent reinforcement — the same principles one would use to train a misbehaving child or a pet dog applied to adult human beings.

Who you are, if you follow the prescriptions of the article, is a manipulative, disingenuous prick, approaching women with the cold-bloodedness of a con artist. We should loudly and clearly make it known that this attitude, from anyone, is worthy only of the utmost scorn and contempt. This is not how you behave toward someone whom you value and respect as a fellow human; this is vile.

By the end, Lindemann mansplains and simply shatters brain cells: “ … She will find fulfillment in trying to break you down and turn you into a nice guy.” I guess it’s like a housecat with a scratching post — you have to give her an outlet for her natural ball-busting harpy urge to manipulate and ruin.

Fear not, you shining knights of rape culture, you throwbacks to times when women were property in law and not merely in imagination. Should one of those nasty, evil females plunge her talons into you to dig for the nice guy beneath, chances are, she won’t find anything.

Aaron Rockhold is a senior psychology major and president of the Kent State Freethinkers. Contact him at [email protected].