Against Nice Guys
Jun. 24th, 2012 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbySo there have been not one, but two Nice Guy posts on The Face. This is rare for me, because my Face list is pretty small. I don't have a lot of relatives and old friends from high school—you know, the people who normally post right-wing shit and racist forwards—so I get in comparatively few flamewars. Generally speaking, my feed is 40% far-left politics, 20% nerd shit, 10% cute animal pictures, 10% reposts from George Takei (I guess that's nerd shit, but it requires a whole other category owing to its frequency), and 20% pictures of people's kids. (I'm at that age where friends are sprogging, so right now it's like a nursery on there. Don't worry, I'm still not going to reproduce.)
Accordingly, it's surprising to see something irritating enough that I need to say something that I know is going to offend the person who said it, but I'm compelled to do so anyway because they were being Wrong on the Internet. And should know better. Lately, that something has been the revival of Nice Guy Talk.
There's a strong overlap between the people posting nerd shit and Nice Guys. You can draw your own conclusions. I got in a small dust-up a few days ago because someone used the term "friendzone" and I pointed out that if a woman "friendzones" you, it doesn't mean that you're too nice; it means that she doesn't find you attractive but can't find a polite way to tell you that. I mean, I'm sure there are exceptions, and there have been certainly times where I haven't slept with someone because it would ruin a good friendship*, but generally speaking, women who have been conditioned for years to be docile people-pleasers are not going to up and tell a dude that they just don't find him hot. I also mentioned that the guys I've known who refer to themselves as "nice guys" or "good dudes" and complain that women only see them as friends are typically going for conventionally attractive women, and don't see the nice lady who weighs 200 pounds as a potential love interest, regardless of how great a personality she has.
(Weirdly enough, the person who took greatest offense to my comments was a very conventionally attractive woman. At least if her profile picture is to be believed.)
The flipside of Nice Guy whining, of course, is misogyny. Those damn crazy bitches, always falling for assholes and not me. She's just too stupid or evil to know what's good for her. I know what's good for her, and eventually she'll get beat down enough to understand that. In the meantime, I'll be lurking in the background all passive-aggressive like.
Today, though, there was a Nice Guy whine that took the cake:
Dudes. Resentful, sexually frustrated, emotionally stunted dudes and their misguided notions about chivalry. Do they think that women really care about flowers and door-holding if it means that we're going to be treated like second-class citizens? My ideas on historical chivalry and white knights approximate those of Sandor Clegane's on Game of Thrones, and I have even less respect for doughy douchebags in the 21st century who profess those sorts of notions.
The last Cracked.com article on the subject was disappointing, but I did like this line:
My response (after railing for a bit about Nice Guys) was that well-adjusted women find it creepy to be put on a pedestal and prefer partners who treated them to human beings.
And also that some little girls grow up wanting to be dragons.
P.S. Sorry for the heteronormativity of this post. Though I think it really is mostly straight dudes getting on my nerves with this shit.
* But I don't think, in those cases, it could be mistaken for, "I won't sleep with you because you're too nice." It was more, "I won't sleep with you because one or both of us is too immature and it will get weird later."
Accordingly, it's surprising to see something irritating enough that I need to say something that I know is going to offend the person who said it, but I'm compelled to do so anyway because they were being Wrong on the Internet. And should know better. Lately, that something has been the revival of Nice Guy Talk.
There's a strong overlap between the people posting nerd shit and Nice Guys. You can draw your own conclusions. I got in a small dust-up a few days ago because someone used the term "friendzone" and I pointed out that if a woman "friendzones" you, it doesn't mean that you're too nice; it means that she doesn't find you attractive but can't find a polite way to tell you that. I mean, I'm sure there are exceptions, and there have been certainly times where I haven't slept with someone because it would ruin a good friendship*, but generally speaking, women who have been conditioned for years to be docile people-pleasers are not going to up and tell a dude that they just don't find him hot. I also mentioned that the guys I've known who refer to themselves as "nice guys" or "good dudes" and complain that women only see them as friends are typically going for conventionally attractive women, and don't see the nice lady who weighs 200 pounds as a potential love interest, regardless of how great a personality she has.
(Weirdly enough, the person who took greatest offense to my comments was a very conventionally attractive woman. At least if her profile picture is to be believed.)
The flipside of Nice Guy whining, of course, is misogyny. Those damn crazy bitches, always falling for assholes and not me. She's just too stupid or evil to know what's good for her. I know what's good for her, and eventually she'll get beat down enough to understand that. In the meantime, I'll be lurking in the background all passive-aggressive like.
Today, though, there was a Nice Guy whine that took the cake:
Dudes. Resentful, sexually frustrated, emotionally stunted dudes and their misguided notions about chivalry. Do they think that women really care about flowers and door-holding if it means that we're going to be treated like second-class citizens? My ideas on historical chivalry and white knights approximate those of Sandor Clegane's on Game of Thrones, and I have even less respect for doughy douchebags in the 21st century who profess those sorts of notions.
The last Cracked.com article on the subject was disappointing, but I did like this line:
They mix up a batch of Ideal Mate and pour it into a you-shaped pitcher. It's usually an updated version of the Victorian elegant creature -- noble, graceful and more boring than a box of rocks, which are at least capable of hurting people.
My response (after railing for a bit about Nice Guys) was that well-adjusted women find it creepy to be put on a pedestal and prefer partners who treated them to human beings.
And also that some little girls grow up wanting to be dragons.
P.S. Sorry for the heteronormativity of this post. Though I think it really is mostly straight dudes getting on my nerves with this shit.
* But I don't think, in those cases, it could be mistaken for, "I won't sleep with you because you're too nice." It was more, "I won't sleep with you because one or both of us is too immature and it will get weird later."
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Date: 2012-06-25 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-06-26 01:34 pm (UTC)CANNOT UNSEE WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN!
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Date: 2012-06-26 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-26 02:04 pm (UTC)I hate you so much right now.
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Date: 2012-06-26 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 06:33 pm (UTC)A Toronto icon of non-salubriosity.
Glad to hear that it asn't changed :-)
I haven't been there for post-club food or Sunday brunch in way too long (the restaurant that is, not the washroom :-)
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Date: 2012-06-25 01:44 am (UTC)I used to have a unique (?) variation on this complex which ran something like, 'I am a great guy and have been roundly rejected, therefore rejection is a badge of superiority, therefore I want nothing to do with any club who would have me for a member.' It sounds nuts but I'm probably still living down the ramifications of this bent pretzel of a coping strategy. It's dark with your head up that ass. Can't count the opportunities I missed from it. Score one for being old.
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Date: 2012-06-25 01:47 am (UTC)My social circle is just incestuous enough that I wonder if it's the same friend. Probably not, though. I think all of our mutual friends are too cool for that.
I used to have a unique (?) variation on this complex which ran something like, 'I am a great guy and have been roundly rejected, therefore rejection is a badge of superiority, therefore I want nothing to do with any club who would have me for a member.'
I fall victim to this too, which is maybe why I bristle so much at the Nice Guy shit. I mean, I have been rejected a lot, and at the formative age where this shit matters. Lots of early resentment that I had to work out and sometimes realize is not entirely worked out. Blah blah, nerd pride.
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Date: 2012-06-25 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-25 02:27 am (UTC)I'm kind of torn about the things he posts there. On one hand, they DO get people paying attention to the page. On the other hand, they don't exactly push the books which is kind of the point of making a fan group.
With knights, I tend to point out the rapey aspects of those medieval narratives. Also the fact that the knight is IN WUV with the fair maiden and that's pretty much the only reason why she's supposed to be with him (and the fact that he's the guy with the horse and the money).
Of course, the quintessential "nice guy" is the troubadour in Chaucer's Miller's Tale who pours out his heart and soul to the woman and gets farted on for his troubles. To prove his love he comes back with the hot poker.
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Date: 2012-06-25 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-25 04:47 am (UTC)Didn't go over so well.
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Date: 2012-06-27 01:12 am (UTC)That's why Peter Jackson's take on Arwen pisses me off so much, actually. Because Tolkien was going for this very medieval romantic trope where the lady is loved from afar and inspires all these great deeds, and Aragorn was supposed to have been busting his ass to reunite the two kingdoms and claim his rightful place as king since he was nineteen, when Elrond told him that the only human that was going to be good enough for his little girl would be the king of Gondor and Arnor, so he'd better get his shit together and get cracking.
And Aragorn did.
So to my mind, Jackson's take on the two of them, what with Arwen getting all down and dirty with the guys, and Aragorn being all "But I don't know if I'm ready to be king! *tear*" not only missed the point of the characters, but actually did them a disservice.
Anyways. XD
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Date: 2012-06-25 02:31 am (UTC)I notice that men who identify as Nice Guys think that women never lack for sexual offers (that aren't creepy strangers telling you to smile), that they're bombarded with them every time they step out of the house and just swat them away like so many gnats. Hello, women get ignored or rejected too; we don't just sail through life with everything being handed to us!
I think it ties into their view of women as creatures that aren't real people with real feelings, but forbidding ice queens that have to be appeased before they grant The Almighty Sex.
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Date: 2012-06-25 03:16 am (UTC)The thing is, the dudes who go on about this stuff just don't consider non-conventionally attractive women to be women. Women are the hot, thin chicks in beer commercials.
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Date: 2012-06-25 03:50 am (UTC)Ha! Yes.
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Date: 2012-06-25 03:50 am (UTC)I never wanted to be a princess (well, not until I had a book about princess who ran away to become a kitchen maid because she was no good at princessy things). I mostly wanted to be a sailor or an explorer.
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Date: 2012-06-25 04:38 am (UTC)Which is probably why the meme persists; when a girl enters the dating scene with her only model of healthy relationships being TV, their superficial niceness and undercurrent of expectations seems normal. And since a lack of decent male role models frequently leads to low self-esteem enough of those girls assume the problem is with them rather than the Nice Guy.
Not that I have any evidence for the above, but it at least makes sense. To me. At one in the morning.
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Date: 2012-06-27 12:34 pm (UTC)(He reads Maxim, which I suspect has a large percentage of Nice Guy readers. They probably read those stupid articles on how to get into women's pants by trickery deceit -- none of which would work outside of an Adam Sandler movie -- and use them to fortify their belief that women are dumb creatures who need a Nice Guy to save them from assholes.)
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Date: 2012-06-25 05:18 am (UTC)And the "friendzone" thing even more. The idea behind that one seems to be that being sexually attracted to someone or not is somehow a thing women are in full conscious control over, so if a women for some unfathomable reason fails to be attracted to them, it's something she's doing on purpose because she's stupid/shallow/an evil bitch/etc. As opposed to just, you know, not attracted to them.
Although I suppose an alternative explanation would be that women's attraction or lack thereof to any particular man is irrelevant - that we're supposed to decide who to date and/or sleep with purely on the basis of whether they have earned access to us through some mysterious set of criteria we're not even privy to, but which apparently include a combination of self-proclaimed "niceness", passive-aggressive behaviour, and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. Whether we actually want to have sex with them or not doesn't matter - we're prizes, not people.
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Date: 2012-06-25 07:42 pm (UTC)ANYWAYS, has anyone ever explained to these dudes that Occam's razor suggests that if "women" are indeed choosing "assholes" over them, the simplest conclusion is that they are less attractive than "assholes"? That "women are psycho ho-bitches" is perhaps a sweeping conclusion requiring substantial evidence?
That heartless-bitches.com link really gets at the problem, which is that "niceness" is too often a cover for insecurity and martyred submissiveness. Someone who defers to you is someone you have to take care of, and someone who always defers to you is someone you always have to take care of. In a mature relationship, there's a give and take of care, and for that to happen, you have be willing and able to assert your needs and desires without being a jerk, and without being passive-aggressive. You have to be able to manage that conflict.
So now I'm wondering to what extent these so-called nice guys are overinterpreting the healthy conflict they see as assholery. Sometimes relationships have conflict; you vent to your friends and then get on with living. That's not to say assholes don't exist, but I can easily imagine someone insecure and avoidant seeing any conflict at all as an intolerable failure state. (This could also explain the fierce rejection of any criticism from certain quarters of fandom, gamers, etc.)
But conflict is part of life, because we're not all identical automatons, and working through conflict is a major part of building connection, cooperation, and intimacy. A majorly sucky part of being a bullied adolescent nerd is being deprived of opportunities to learn how to do that, since 19 times out of 20, if someone's engaging you with anything less than total warm fuzziness, it's because they're looking to humiliate you in some way. That's not fair, and it's wrong, but once you've healed from the damage, you still have to create opportunities to learn how to handle conflict.
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Date: 2012-06-25 05:46 pm (UTC)exactly! ....because these guys know we AREN'T attracted to them. They've not attractive under any criteria that any person would actually use.
So they've made up a point system based on criteria they CAN meet (e.g. passive-aggressive Nice Guy actions), and get mad at women when that made-up system does not correlate to reality (i.e., when women aren't in fact attracted to people based on the made-up points system.)
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Date: 2012-06-25 10:57 am (UTC)(Sorry for the delete/repost but I shouldn't swear on a public post logged-in)
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Date: 2012-06-25 01:24 pm (UTC)Really?!
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Date: 2012-06-25 09:26 pm (UTC)NewsFlash, Knight Guy: if women really wanted to date assholes, they'd be lining up for you.
I think it's really appropriate that this guy is holding himself out as a "knight of old" because the reality is that "knights of old" were pretty horrific. Also I love the cut-off bit where he's all "you shouldn't reject me just cause I'm ugly". because you know, I'm sure he's interested in finding a "princess" who isn't conventionally gorgeous.
As an aside, I don't actually think that the Heartless Bitches piece is very accurate w/r/t Nice Guys. I don't think Nice Guys are necessarily insecure, nor do I think there is only one set of Nice Guy actions. I don't think they often are as sincere as the author suggests - that they really worship the particular woman they're pursuing. I think they resent the woman for having something they want.
To me, the hallmark of a Nice Guy is acting "nice" because he thinks it's some kind of quid pro quo that entitles him to a girl (as opposed to because he's actually a nice person, or wants to do the right thing). And then gets pissy and hostile if it does not win over the girl in question. General whining about women a la Knight Guy above is also the hallmark of the Nice Guy. But what his psychological problem is that causes him to act this way - insecurity, sociopathy, general assholeness - is irrelevant.
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Date: 2012-06-25 09:30 pm (UTC)I don't think they often are as sincere as the author suggests - that they really worship the particular woman they're pursuing. I think they resent the woman for having something they want.
I agree. They tend to go from 0 to MRA pretty fast, at least online. There's more than simple insecurity at work.
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Date: 2012-06-27 01:56 am (UTC)Sex is not a commodity. It is something that two people who are mutually (that is a key word) attracted to each other do together. And as soon as you decide that it is something your friend "who is only attracted to assholes" owes you for all the wonderful things you have done for her-- being there for her, etc etc-- then you've just turned her into a prostitute who is willing to barter.
As soon as you decide that sex is "owed" to you then you go from being a friend who is helping her out and hanging out with her because you like her and enjoy her company, to a john who is hoping he won't have to actually pay cash.
Now, imagine how attractive that makes you in her eyes.
Now, think of your best guy friend. You know, the one you hang out with and drink beers and play video games and shit. Hey, if he needed help with something you'd totally be there, right? And if you were stuck he'd totally have your back. He's the guy who comes over and gets drunk with you and listens to you bitch when you get dumped.
Now, imagine that he was being so awesome and "there" for you because actually, he wanted to fuck you. And dammit, you pretty much owed it to him by now, right? I mean, he's put up with listening to you go on and on about how women were all ball-breaking bitches, right? I mean, fuck, why did you think he was always there for you? God, what kind of an asshole are you being that you won't just fucking bend over for him?
Well? Fucking bend over!!
What's that? You aren't into him "that way"? He's just an awesome friend, don't be gross?
Exactly.
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Date: 2012-07-03 11:43 pm (UTC)It was Sabotabby's post and the excellent comments here that finally allowed my long-term irritation with the Nice Guy Syndrome to finally gel enough to be articulated. :-)
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Date: 2012-06-27 12:51 pm (UTC)Well, let's see. Immediately after sex, he kept asking me what I was thinking, telling me he wanted to know everything I was thinking, ever. Hours later, he began texting me incessantly. Not witty, engaging things. Things like :) and hi, which was short for "Hi, vagina-bearing person, I am a man. Please entertain me! In return you will get additional demands for entertainment, several of which will involve my penis."
After one text too many, I decided to make it clear that this wasn't what I wanted. Keep in mind we were still 24 hours of breaching the so-called friendzone. He told me, "Well, I should've told you that I have trust issues!"
At which point I said, "Oh my god, you do? In that case, I owe a life-debt to you! I know the rules -- if you're a chick who sleeps with a dude with trust issues, you can't dump him!"
Oh wait, that wasn't what happened. I didn't talk to him again. And he didn't talk to me.
But a couple months later, he did post, in a public forum, where I would see it, a post about our tryst and how he really wanted to be my boyfriend. From his point of view, the emotional connection was too intense and I obviously got scared off. He was getting some sympathetic responses -- you poor victim of a heartless bitch! So I had to post and explain what REALLY happened, which was that he suffocated me, not giving me more than a few hours without contacting him or even the right to privacy of my own thoughts, while not really offering anything of interest to me apart from an orgasm. One person followed up with "Gee, I felt sorry for the guy, until I saw her reply!" Because publicly shaming me -- oh, and really classy move posting about what we did in bed on the internet, Nice Guy -- into paying him my debt of sex and mental stimulation isn't something an asshole would do.
I'm now with someone who treats me like a human being. Sometimes he even finds me boring or frustrating, like he would with another real person! And he starts conversations, too, with complete sentences. I was so blown away, I married him.
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Date: 2012-06-27 02:33 pm (UTC)Your husband sounds like he rocks.
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