Tool of the trade
Disclaimer: I am a man, and this post is about me. The intent is that telling my story - which is not, by any means, a heroic story - will provide something of a cautionary tale for other males who are considering what kind of person they would like to be.
I guess it’s “Blog Against Sexism” day, not “Blog For Feminism” day. Still, if you’re tired of straight males talking about themselves, and heteronormativally at that, you may want to move on.
Secondary disclaimer: Also, this post is kind of a synthesis of all the feminism I’ve inhaled over the last two years, so some of it may be rehashes of previous feminist blogosphere posts.
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I was raised to be a kind, caring person, and to treat women with respect. What people forget about that upbringing is that a boychild who takes those lessons to heart will quite often end up as a Nice Guy.
Which I did.
Oh, and I was a textbook case, too. Don’t get me wrong - I was able to escape The Lifestyle before I got all twisted up and became a full-blown misogynist. But in terms of befuddled narcissism, man, I was a pro.
Social awkwardness is not inherently dangerous (nor necessarily controllable), it’s one’s attitude towards one’s awkwardness that’s the important thing. When I was 14, I was just starting to get it together a bit, and then my family moved to a small village in Northern England for a year and I went to school there.
Now let me just say that, in a small English village, That American Bloke is an instant goddamn rock star. It’s not an exaggeration (in hindsight) to say that, had I played my cards right, I could have had one of the most carnal years a 14-year-old has ever had. Unfortunately, I wasn’t playing with a full deck* and rather than reveling in the attention, I was offput by it. What do you do when you go from eight years of “Auguste? Auguste who?” to groups of schoolgirls giggling over who’s going to go talk to the cute, mysterious foreigner? I’ll tell you what you DON’T do: Withdraw into yourself.
Here’s why you don’t, besides simply being a silly thing to do: Because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and a self-perpetuating cycle. My previous perspective was “Women aren’t interested.” When there suddenly were women interested**, my solution was to act cool, because if I didn’t, I was very likely to become a blithering idiot. But since I didn’t have much practice acting cool, it came out “standoffish asshole”, and Nice Guy propaganda aside, standoffish assholes tend to drive women away.
In case you’re starting to worry that I’m here to talk about how wily and confusing women are, don’t. It’s the opposite: What my 14-year-old self was forgetting, subconsciously at least, is that women are people. Not just people, since that was obvious even to awkward me, but non-foreign and completely relatable people. Was my 14-year-old self at fault for this forgetfulness? Of course not - sweaty palms are not something you can will away with conscious effort. At that age. But there’s a funny thing about growing up: Your emotional state is supposed to go along with it.
More on that later. Now, given that “standoffish asshole” was really just a defense mechanism, and an unintentional one at that, my inner self stayed as a kind, caring person. It’s the image I maintained of myself all through high school. And a lot of the time, I even lived up to it. But having seen how women “really felt about me” - that is, when they understandably withdrew in the face of my standoffishness - I began to assume that it was how “they” all felt about me. I sent all interactions with women through that filter and that only made things worse; with hindsight I can see many instances in which the only thing standing between me and an enjoyable dating experience was my own inability to consider a girl as a three-dimensional person.
But I didn’t really get it then. All I saw was women wanting to be my friend, not my Special Friend. And so I became, for a time, a believer in the so-called friend zone. “It’s too late,” I’d say, “she’s already thinking of me as a friend.” (Later, of course, I’d realize the silliness of that particular worry. No sex with friends? Who better to have sex with, dumbass?)
Nice Guy-ism is a cumulative condition. Men don’t just say one day “I’m not going to be an asshole, but I am going to complain about women loving assholes, ignoring the fact that this makes me an asshole.” I firmly believe that it’s a process. There are certain conditions involved in the process, some of which must be completed for a complete Nice Guy to be born. And - here’s the key - none of them are really women’s fault.
- Intent - To be a nice guy, one must have the intent to treat women with respect. A man won’t be too worried about another man “treating a woman like crap” if he doesn’t believe, deep down inside, that he doesn’t treat women like crap.
- Sex - Most nice guys hold one of two views about sex: a) If I was dating her, I wouldn’t be so disrespectful as to ask her to have sex with me or b) Women are totally free to do whatever they want with their bodies, as long as it involves my cock and not his. (Being from a religious upbringing, I was mostly on the side of a) with a little bit of c) Holy shit, what if I do it badly? thrown in for awhile.)
- Communication - A lot of nice guy-ism comes down to not understanding women, and more to the point, not understanding that understanding women is kind of like understanding people, in that it’s exactly like understanding people, just people with vaginas. If a dude is unable to talk to women without choking on his tongue, that makes this understanding very difficult.
- Impotence - Not literally, dammit. No, a Nice Guy often feels that whatever’s happening “out there” - in the dating world, in the world of women, on lovers’ lane - is not really related to him. Again, related to the non-communication issue - it never occurred to me that the reason girls I was interested in usually didn’t want to date me is that I didn’t particularly go out of my way to interact with those girls. What good would it do? She’s going to like who she’s going to like, nothing I can do about it. Certainly not, say, show her my personality and see if she enjoys it like I enjoy hers.
- Narcissism: But why doesn’t she like me? I’m so witty and scruffy and kind-hearted! Never mind that you’re hoping she’ll figure that out by osmosis rather than actual interaction. That’s why I brought up the “image of myself” I had in high school. I was unable to see that said image might not be the first thing a woman sees she she looks at the guy sulking over in the corner because she’s too busy talking to people who are actually interested in contributing to the conversation.
And here’s the thing: All of those factors add up to one word, which you’ve already guessed: Pedestal. And that’s why it drives me crazy when guys say, and they really do, “What’s wrong with being put on a pedestal? Who doesn’t like to be adored?” And, of course, the answer - or one answer, anyway - is along the lines of “adoration is something the adorer does, not something the adoree is expected to do.” But all of the “nice-guy elements” depend on the participation, knowing or not, of the object of the Nice Guy’s affection. Adoration is what Nice Guys hope will stand in for actual emotion.
And, of course, the thing about a pedestal is that one inevitably falls off it. What a healthy person does, after watching this happen every time, is realize that the problem is with the pedestal, not the women on it. And, of course, this is where the responsibility to change oneself really comes into play. And pattern recognition: If ten women in a row fail to live up to your standards, is that a problem with the women, or a problem with your standards?
The thing is, the kind of Nice Guy I was, as I hopefully demonstrate, is reclaimable. (As credential, I offer this quote from Ilyka, when I mentioned that I used to be a Nice Guy: “So you have said. I remain dubious.” It takes a feminist to say that as a compliment.) It does, as I previously suggested, require a certain willingness to mature. The problem, of course, is that emotional maturity requires challenges, and those challenges aren’t forthcoming from the culture. We’ve embraced wholeheartedly the “asshole-hot girl-nice guy” triangle, and this just validates the Nice Guy in his angst.
This archetype isn’t helpful to anyone. It’s obviously not helpful to women, since it’s a two-dimensional and non-agency role, trapped by their gender into destructively desiring the “bad boy” and ignoring the tender mercies of the Nice Guy. It’s not helpful to Nice Guys, because it serves to validate both their self-pitying and their attitude towards women. And it certainly doesn’t help the “assholes”, because they always die in a motorcycle wreck at the end of the second act.
And the way to escape the Nice Guy trap is, like almost everything else in life, psychosexual. It’s very obvious when you meet someone who hasn’t had the right challenges to their worldview, because their psychosexuality is absolutely either/or. Either nice girls don’t, or they only do with you. (Non-nice guy misogynists maintain a sexual duality, too, only it’s more like and/and: Nice girls don’t, so you’re a slut.)
But as you mature psychosexually, you realize there’s a Third Way: Nice girls do whatever the fuck they wanna do, like men. That the society hasn’t caught up to this doesn’t mean that it’s not true, and when you embrace that fact, it’s like the clouds part. First, you slide an important part of fully-humanizing women into place. The phrase “My sexuality is my own” is gender-neutral, and the sooner a man understands that, the sooner he moves HIMSELF closer to being fully human.
Second - and being still someone whats-in-it-for-me about the whole thing, this was the one that first hooked me in - you realize something about yourself. “Ohh! The reason I haven’t been getting laid isn’t because women don’t like sex that much, and it isn’t that they only like sex with assholes! It’s because I haven’t been bothering to ask!!!” Our sexuality is our own, too, which means that it’s no one else’s responsibility to take care of it for us. If we’re looking for partners, we have to learn how to fit our sexuality in with that of someone else.
See, fully individuated people tend to be fully interactive, which is to say, if you want to discover the attitude a particular woman has towards sex, or dating, or whatever, the best way is to ask the following:
So. What’s your attitude towards sex, or dating, or whatever?
And no, that’s not a pickup line. Because before you can believably ask, you have to really care. And that’s the real point. For people of goodwill, dating and sex are not about games. Games are othering. Othering is sexism. And sexism, apart from everything else, is a lousy way to get laid.
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* It occurs to me that I could have chosen this analogy more wisely.
** If Gemma Booth or Nadine Bray from 4GMW are out there anywhere, drop me a line, would you?
Excellent post. I have nothing wonderful to add, I just wanted to say great job. Really interesting. I have this pressing desire to send this to my ex-boyfriend.
Indeed, a good post. I remember back in my early twenties I was all White Knight and stuff. Gad, what a doofus. I’m over it now (took a lot of cash and time and dropping out of college before I realized that I was never going to help that woman… as an aside, I just googled her as a result of a conversation with a coworker and she’s doing better, though I can’t agree with what she named her son).
Fascinating…I’m a recently married, youngish 40-something bride, with two grown step sons that I adore, and no children of my own. I feel very maternal towards them, and try to stay open and available for genuine insight as to what mothering might look like at this stage of their development. I am thrilled to read your post as I find myself frequently engaged with them on this very “nice guy syndrome” topic. Many thanks for nudging along the conversation!
Are we twins? I mean, outside the moving to England bit, that sounds a lot like my story, only it took me a divorce and actually being forced to talk to women in a non-church sense to realize that they’re every bit the individual that the men were (more so, actually, given who I was hanging around with most of the time). And suddenly my own self-image started to improve as well.
So gradually I dropped the Nice Guy bit while keeping the decent human being part of myself, and I found myself in relationships again, some healthier than others. The one I’m in now is over six years old and is looking like I may try to get a vasectomy reversed as a result.
Now, if I can only get a feminist to give me the same kind of compliment…
Although I never was a de facto rock-star, we seem to have been the more or less the same in our youth. Excellent post!
Although one thing I might add as a former Nice Guy myself, another thing which is galling and ends up re-enforcing Nice Guyness is that there are also many Nice Gals out there — but due to ingrained gender roles in dating (the idea that the man should ask out the woman, etc.) as well as socialization in general (Nice Guys are made to feel un-manly and hence develop a complex about this, while Nice Gals are not made to feel un-womanly), Nice Gals still get dates, etc., in ways that Nice Guys do not (consider, for example, Dawn Eden’s former dating life — if anybody is a Nice Gal, it’s Dawn Eden! but that didn’t hurt her).
However, no matter how much of a Nice Guy I was, I always felt (and still feel) that the best prevention for the Nice Guy blues is to eliminate all those sexist double standards …
Nice post.
I’ll admit to having struggled with Nice Guy-ism myself from time to time.
Having been raised by fairly radical feminist parents, I’ve always been very committed to treating women equally and considerately, etc. It’s remarkably difficult, though, to avoid falling into the Nice Guy trap of getting resentful about the fact that this feminist commitment doesn’t help you score chicks. This resentment is absurd and ultimately misogynistic, of course, but it’s remarkably hard to avoid.
Of course being a good male feminist doesn’t in itself help you get laid. Failing to be a murderer doesn’t get you laid either. No one ought to expect to be rewarded for not being an asshole–not being an asshole is something that should be expected, not a heroic act. That’s the first point.
The second point is that it would be misogynistic to be a Nice Guy even if not being an asshole were heroic. This was brought home to me some time ago in conversation with my father. We were watching TV–sadly, I forget the specifics–and I expressed wonderment over the fact that an attractive female character would be attracted to an assholish and idiotic male character. My father asked out: “well, isn’t she a stupid asshole herself?” This made me realize that I was actually dehumanizing the female character in my Nice Guy concern for her poor taste in men. Part of recognizing that women are human beings is recognizing that they can be assholes themselves, and can have bad taste. Women who are attracted to assholes aren’t necessarily making a mistake about their own real preferences, as the Nice Guy assumes–they might simply have preferences that the Nice Guy finds objectionable. And guess what? That’s what it means to be an autonomous human being.
Auguste, I completely identify with this, and I’d like to say thanks. It’s a struggle, and it’s an ongoing one — our culture is full of this sense that being nice to someone earns you something. Which, of course, completely misses the point — not that being nice should or shouldn’t earn you something from people (or women), but that approaching it from that standpoint of what you do or do not deserve denies the personhood of the person you’re dealing with.
For my own personal use, here’s my guideline for trying to figure out if I’m being a Nice Guy or a genuinely nice person: if I don’t respect a woman enough to disagree with her, then I’m not respecting her as a person. If I’m being nice to the point of being inwardly irritated, then I’m not doing her or me any favors.
For the nice guys reading this: buying women who’ve rejected you flowers, being overly affectionate, making romantic gestures to someone who does not want to be in a romantic relationship with you — that isn’t being nice, even though it might superficially look like it. It’s burdening someone else with your view of what the relationship should be. It’s forcing someone who might genuinely care about you as a friend to try to figure out how to tell you to stop without hurting your feelings. It’s transferring the responsibility for dealing with your own feelings onto someone else, and it’s one of the least nice things you can do.
I always liked you, Auguste. You were the best of ‘em!*
Seriously, this is a really great post. I can really identify with what you’ve written here because it reflects my own experiences to a great extent. I was afflicted with Nice Guy-ism when I was younger, and like you, I believe that it’s something a lot of men develop over time - it’s often a combination of shyness, disappointment, and still being in the process of how human beings work. It’s not a scam at all; the Nice Guy actually believes in what he’s doing.
I’m glad to say that I’ve outgrown that outlook and while I still have to check myself for tendencies in the Nice Guy direction, I think I’ve managed to learn the problems with the Nice Guy worldview and overcome them. I do wish I’d gotten wise sooner, but that, my friends, is life.
*With apologies to Jack Nicholson
I want to show this to my two youngest boys. You have written some things here that can only come from a man, and could help many a teenager though those angst ridden years. I just want to say….BRAVO!
Just a few random thoughts to add, as another “former Nice Guy”…
I like to offer the following thought experiment, involving 500 young men, chosen at random:
“First, how many of you have ever loaned money to a girlfriend for rent or bills or to get her out of trouble? Everyone who says yes go to one side of the room, everyone who says no to the other…”
“Now, those of you who have not loaned money, if you would do so if asked, stay where you are. If not, go to the other side of the room.”
“Those of you who have loaned money to girlfriends, if you would do so again, please go to the other side of the room. If you would not, stay where you are.”
It is my widely held contention that once the room seperated after the first question, no one would switch sides from the following questions. Why? Because of another classic “nice guy” trait…
It can be tough figuring out what it means to ‘be a man’, especially when you’re taught to reject the traditional, patriarchal, sexist models. When traditional gender roles are cast as chauvanistic and unfair, that creates an obsticle for identifying “manhood” apart from “childhood”. The classic “Nice Guy” emerges from a terribly flawed solution to this diellma:
a.) I want to join the ranks of MEN.
b.) Women want to be with MEN, not BOYS.
c.) Therefore, if I am everything that a woman tells me she wants, I will be a MAN!
It’s this terrible bit of reasoning that creates the above “two questions” scenario. If a young man believes that “satisfying” a woman (in every possible context) is the key to “being a MAN”, then he becomes incredibly needy of his partners, and will feel insecure in his masculenity if his partner is happy and content without his help. It leads him to pressure his partner for problems to ‘fix’ with her. And it leads men to do things like “loan” their girlfriends’ a month’s worth of rent money.
Obviously, each man has his own tolerance for loss, so some men will learn slower than others, but the key turning point between “Nice-Guy-turned-misogynist” and “Adult Man” lies in how we react to the ‘girlfriend-rent’ problem. Adult Men realize that loaning a month’s rent to anyone is probably a bad idea, especially if you expect to see that money again. (in other words, they realize that women are people too and shouldn’t be subjected to special standards for trust or need) Nice-Guy-turned-Misogynists don’t see the false distinction of a loan to a girlfriend versus a loan to a (male) roommate, and instead emphasize that distinction: “Of course she asked me for money; she knew I’d give it to her!” (No she didn’t…) “Women are always willing to take advantage of nice guys like me.” (So are men if you let them)
I like your post, but I think you’re missing the fact that in addition to things like Narcissism & Impotence, a lot of Nice Guys project a lot of Need onto the women they’re with.
Agree: great introspection without falling into bathos. Well, I guess the point is that you’ve evolved beyond the self-pity.
I think your tripartite asshole-hot girl-nice guy archetype is widely held by many men who consider themselves as not-assholes and not-misogynists. The irony, at least how I experienced it, is how the sincerity of my beliefs and my intents in no way prevented misogyny in one form or another from surfacing. I’ve been lucky to be married to a woman who has tolerated me well and has been willing to work together to make our relationship better.
Nice Guy Syndrome in recovery. I do want to point out for the record that women should use their power better. If teen aged girls in a town all decreed that guys must wear pink shirts with polka dots to even get talked to, guys would be trying to figure out what pants co-ordinated with their new shirts.
That being said, we are so repressed in this country. There is a lot of shame and guilt involved in relationships between genders. I think we carry alot of family baggage and hormones into the start of our dating lives and it’s a really screwed up mix.
This is as excellent as I thought it would be, and not because I’m referenced within it.
Do you have any advice as to how to get that idea across to people who think games are fun? I am actually thinking more women than men here. I know women who love old movies not in spite of the nakedly misogynistic attitudes of the male characters to the female ones, but because of that very thing. Because that sets up tension! And tension is exciting! It’s not belittling; it’s banter! Fun, flirty, sexy banter.
And me personally, I don’t react to it that way. I find it obnoxious. So I have a hard time understanding this, and I’m never sure if maybe there’s more to it than internalized misogyny on the part of the women who enjoy this “banter.” I think banter can be fun, the boyfriend and I do a lot of it ourselves, but it’s not used to reinforce stereotypical gender roles like it is in old movies and so on.
Auguste,
Odd post. Sounds a lot like people who came out of the Soviet and Chinese re-education camps.
Sarah,
Maybe you should send it to ALL of your former boyfriends?
Luckily, I never developed the Nice Guy aspect of my personality. As kids, we often are mentally challenged. On the other hand, kids have occassionally amazing insights, and are excellent judges of hypocracy. I consider myself lucky that I figured out, quite early on, that women were people too. In fact, this realization expanded into late high school and university such that I had the reverse NiceGuy… it became difficult for me to see men as people. The fucked up shit that comes out of peoples mouths became gendered for me. And, in a similarly sexist way to Nice Guys, I would laugh off a women’s assholeness because, and by this time I was a card-carrying feminist, well its about time we see some female privilage. But if a guy was an asshole, well… Let’s just say most of my friends since the middle of my university undergrad have been women or gay men. These later patterns still persist with me, and I am still wary of random men–no matter how much I am nice to everyone. And, still, part of me wonders whether the pedestal attitude that women are allowed every kind of agency, even fucked up agency, and men should not might be an interesting experiment of public imagination as a sort of reparation for patriarchy.
Nonetheless, I think that my attitudes have gotten more nuanced, less sexist. I prefer edgy people who are not afraid to think for themselves and not afraid to challenge sociological norms, or even their own norms. And, coincidentally, I find this trait most commonly represented by those who have been othered or those who have not had the wool of privilage covering their eyes. So, I find myself most often drawn to women, POC, and LGBTQ or similar identified individuals and mostly apathetic or combatative with anyone with an uncritical sense of privilage. And finally, since I do not want my life’s work to involve educating stupid men who should know better, I still do not have many male friends who are not feminists or queer. But, I’m happy for that–it is not beause I am sexist, it is because I have standards. Sadly, the contemporary North American discourse about masculinity is making it harder for men to avoid being shaped into two-dimensional baby makers. *sigh*
chris said:
I think most prejudices are extremely sincere. I doubt there are very many half-hearted racists out there.
I disagree with you about old movies. You see to be talking about the screwball romantic comedy, which, with a few exceptions, is almost always a comedy of re-marriage, where the male protagonist usually ends up going through exactly the sort of process that Auguste describes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is something I shall come back to in the near future. My son is 12 tomorrow, and I’m anticipating all the coming joys of adolescence. It’s good to know there’s a source of advice, and different viewpoints, here - be very helpful when the moodies start…
Much props, Auguste - much here echoes my own experience. I’m glad to say that, as far as I’m aware, my misogyny was mostly self-contained; I guess I never got beyond the point where I wondered why I wasn’t any good at playing “the game” (the game where you do stuff and it makes the woman automatically give up Teh Sex) - until, I guess, I figured out that there was no game, there was just two human beings coming to independent conclusions about whether or not they liked each other.
I try to tell my friends that and it’s like a Zen riddle to them. Much work to be done, I guess.
A lot of my re-thinking (no, that’s not true - a lot of the basic groundwork which aided my later re-thinking) occurred in the crucible of a moderately conservative Christian college, which is apparently the location at which a lot of these “We can’t have equality because then men won’t pursue us anymore” thoughts are born. And from that anecdotal experience, I think you’re right: It’s internalization of misogyny; it’s also an inherent need for drama, which is not necessarily gender- or gender-relations-based.
Well said.
Impotence - Not literally, dammit. No, a Nice Guy often feels that whatever’s happening “out there� - in the dating world, in the world of women, on lovers’ lane - is not really related to him. Again, related to the non-communication issue - it never occurred to me that the reason girls I was interested in usually didn’t want to date me is that I didn’t particularly go out of my way to interact with those girls. What good would it do? She’s going to like who she’s going to like, nothing I can do about it. Certainly not, say, show her my personality and see if she enjoys it like I enjoy hers.
This struck a chord with me, but as a socially awkward *female*. …But wait, I can’t exist, because women all have Dating Wiles and all we have to do is show up, etc. At least, that’s what I keep hearing (I’m just thinking out loud, not referring to this post).
Heh.
I like a lot of old movies, and I’m so games-adverse that when I received a bouquet of flowers from a guy who’d been avoiding being specific about his feelings toward me (at my age 16), I phoned him and asked if he was my boyfriend. One can appreciate witty dialogue without thinking unclear communication is good.
The worse case of Nice Guy Syndrome I ever encountered had a Lancelot fixation. He thought that pining over a friend who had rejected him romantically was heroic; of course, he had to remind the friend often that he was pining–cause pining is pointless if no one knows you’re doing it. He reveled in his misery, somehow thinking that this would mak him more appealing to the woman who’d rejected him.
You know what? I had this SAME experience, but as a NICE GUY trapped in a woman’s body. Moved to a new place, didn’t know how to play it cool, came off as standoffish, eventually slid into a “nobody likes me because they’re all jerks” zone. Years later, after college, lighting struck. People don’t like me because I’m not looking at them as people, only as possible sources of rejection. DUH.
Sure, I got hit on, but only by jerks. Now I know why. The REAL worthy men wouldn’t go anywhere near me *because* I was acting like a cold, standoffish bitch!
Yeah, I can really related. Thanks for sharing your story.
p.s. that wasn’t sacrasm. I just reread my post and it seemed sarcastic maybe. It isn’t.
related = relate
sorry.
Nice Gals still get dates, etc., in ways that Nice Guys do not
Not true. You may get more strangers coming up to you to start conversations, but if you don’t talk to them back, you’re not going to get asked out. And it’s very, very easy to convince yourself that just because someone’s trying to talk to you doesn’t make you attractive, and that gives you the generalized Nice Person problem.
Also, there’s that whole issue of wanting to talk to someone who isn’t already talking to you, and worrying that you’ll look desperate and unattractive if you do.
a’Nice Gals still get dates, etc., in ways that Nice Guys do not”
But not usually with who they want to date! Guess who goes for the weakest in the herd?
Hm. What is it called if you’re sort of a Nice Gal, but without the entitlement or the narcissism parts?
This post is fantastic, and it helped me to realize a couple of things. I know people who are like this “nice guy.” A good friend of mine from college would go completely out of his way to do things for his girlfriend to the detriment of his friends and himself. It was tragic to watch. But, also, a nice preventative tale in this whole situation is Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther, where Werther pines after a woman that he can never love because she doesn’t love him. I think that book more than anything reminded me of the fact that you can’t make women love you by opining for them and showering them in praise. Sure, they may like it, but it’s disrespectful to them and you’re cruising for pain once you realize that you and the other person have nothing in comment. I’m still unable to get a date, but that’s because everyone who I’m interested in just wants to be friends. But I’m not going to talk about my personal life on here.
Auguste, having spent years as the girl on the pedestal, I appreciated this. Just crossing that line into asking for the relationship or the sex doesn’t necessarily change a guy from a nice guy into either a bad guy or a real guy. I had the worship from afar, but I also had “boyfriends” that I never really knew how I got. They put some claim on me, not just my body but my affections, that was based on nothing, and I never argued. This line struck me: “adoration is something the adorer does, not something the adoree is expected to do.â€? But the adoree can cooperate by being passive, which I did. I really believed without awareness of the belief that I could not turn away any guy who fell within certain parameters who claimed me as his. I was not so much willing as not-unwilling. If Nice Guy Auguste had approached Sweet Girl me, we would have dated for a couple of months without having known each other at all, like robot love. How sad and fake and unsatisfying for both the “nice guy” and the “sweet girl.”
What is it called if you’re sort of a Nice Gal, but without the entitlement or the narcissism parts?
In girls, it usually comes out as “I can’t get a date because I’m too fat/ugly/stupid/boring” rather than “I can’t get a date because women don’t appreciate nice guys like me.” I don’t think it has a name.
In girls, it usually comes out as “I can’t get a date because I’m too fat/ugly/stupid/boring� rather than “I can’t get a date because women don’t appreciate nice guys like me.� I don’t think it has a name.
…Heh. Well, yeah. But is “I can’t get a date because I’m too fat/ugly/stupid/boringâ€? as misguided as “I can’t get a date because women don’t appreciate nice guys like me.â€?? My sarcasm meter might be broken.
The basic attitude is the same, I think (”I’m unattractive and no one will want me”), but insecure men and women tend to have their negative self-images reinforced in different ways. Not that men with low self-esteem never decide that the problem is them rather than women, but women overwhelmingly seem to decide that the problem is them. I don’t know which attitude is healthier, but they both seem equally good at inducing deep unhappiness.
There should be a pamphlet handed out to every 8th or 9th grade boy to teach them how to avoid being a Nice Guy. Or maybe a seminar for everybody. In high school, I didn’t know how to handle creepy Nice Guys, and it would have been better to hear some real advice rather than my mom’s catchall “ignore it” advice. (Ignoring it made it worse with the “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?? I’LL KILL MYSELF IF YOU DON’T TALK TO ME!!” thing. He was in my homeroom class. At the parent/teacher conferences, we made the teacher aware of this so she at least could sit me across the room from him.)
I don’t know if he’s still pining, but I know he was up until at least a few years ago.
Right now I deal with it much more rarely. Probably because I avoid making friendships with men since they either try to have sex with me or turn Nice Guy on me. Which is unfortunate … for someone. Not sure who, though.
Yeah … mandatory Nice Guy seminars. Not the sort of thing you can get out of, like sex ed, with a parent note. Ohhhh I can dream.
I don’t know, I’m lazy. I’m male, by the way, despite the pseudonym. I do look at everyone as being people….but that’s sometimes the thing, everyone is just a person. So am I, of course, but you know, it turns me off when I talk to someone and find out that they’re just like a thousand other people, generic. Why settle for someone utterly uncreative because of looks?
Anyways, if it comes down to it, I’d just as soon as date the other boys, than make the extra effort to find women. Maybe I run in the wrong social circles.
I’m not a Nice Guy in that I don’t buy into the “girls date jerks” “why don’t they like me?” thing. People who are utterly conventional date others who are utterly conventional, have a lifetime of superficial conversations and retire to a suburb someplace. I have no problem with that, although I don’t think much of it.
To sort of exagerrate, I’d think that someone telling me about their new art opening was one of the sexiest things they could do.
I hate this. This douchebag entitled behavior ruins lives. Who the fuck do these guys think they are? And why have they not yet died in a fire?
A lot of nice guy-ism comes down to not understanding women, and more to the point, not understanding that understanding women is kind of like understanding people, in that it’s exactly like understanding people, just people with vaginas.
Awesome post in general, and I love this in particular. I’m always telling my guy friends who say they don’t know how to talk to girls “but I’M a girl, and you talk to me just fine!”
Girls do this too, though. I have a friend who went to an all-girls high school and now feels really awkward and shy around guys. I keep trying to tell her, they’re just PEOPLE, talk to them about whatever you want to talk about, but it doesn’t sink in…
Hey, stop telling my life story!
It’s eerie how many adolescent boys seem to go through the same phase in our society. This was really, really insightful, and if my younger bro [he’s 12] starts showing any signs of NGS, I might send him to this entry. He seems to be doing a better job at that age than I did at 16, so there’s hope for him yet
Nailed it. 10.0.
As a fellow recovering “nice guy” (three years clean and sober this May), I can only add this: being a “nice guy” is all about terror. Terror that you’re inadequate, terror that you’re disposable, terror that you Are Not Worthy. And this terror is, like so much internal discord, twisted and fired out at the object of one’s affection.
At its heart, it’s fear of inadequacy that drives one to be a nice guy–that deep-seated belief that nobody could really like you. The only solution is to find peace with oneself, and get your own crud together before you start dragging someone else down with you–oh, and recognizing that she doesn’t have to date you, she’s not evil if she doesn’t want to date you, and having the intestinal fortitude to realize that if she doesn’t want you, it’s going to make dating really hard, and maybe you should just move on to someone who actually does want to date you.
I’ve said that, and received the reply “No, no, not you, I mean HOT girls!”
Sort of put me off giving any more advice.
Very nice post Auguste. It is refreshing to hear this kind of story, especially from someone on “the inside”.
“They put some claim on me, not just my body but my affections, that was based on nothing…”
Oh, WORD WORD WORD! I have been in those relationships too. Usually, the guy was TOTALLY hot and I had no idea why they were with me. It usually also devolved into the type of situation when I felt I wasn’t actually heard when speaking, that my desires weren’t heard and neither were my explanations of my life/goals; and also included a bit of that “you don’t really know who the hell I am are you, and I tell you all the time!”
The most recent was an ex who I had a huge pedestal problem with. For one, he always seemed so obsessed with how “white” I was (he was Honduran and fairly swarthy himself), always talking about how “pale” and such I was, how we made a good contrast, etc. He constantly believed he was entitled to sex at any time he wanted, even though I had numerous discussions about consent with him (it was only coerced twice, then I broke it off). He called my emotions “attitudes” and blew off whenever I wanted to discuss how I felt. Cream of the crop: After I broke it off, he called me and pleaded with me to take him back, that he was working so much to “buy [me] an engagement ring”. How many times had I told him that I wasn’t interested in marriage? A whole lot.
As for the “I can’t get a date because I’m too fat/nerdy/whathaveyou” meme among women, I have one explanation for that: It’s because a lot of us have been outrightly TOLD that by our peers. I’ve even been called boring. (Of course, I don’t believe that.) When you are constantly told you are “unfuckable/undateable” by the very peers you have in your social pool to date, you start to believe it. It’s the same old misogyny at work that messes with the body standards in this country. I never believed that someone could find me attractive by my personality AND body, because I have one of those nasty women bodies that’s not a size 2. So, it actually stems from some pretty fucked up internalizing of the misogyny there. I’ve gotten over it, thank cod, and have a pretty awesome relationship right now because of it (after some time in therapy, and lots of time voluntarily out of the dating pool.) It usually does not in the least lead to a kind of Female Nice Guy phenom, just a lot of women with terrible self-esteem.
Auguste, I totally loved you when you wrote the post on consent on your blog, but this- this is just awesome. The Nice Guy posts on Pandagon have always really resonated with me since some friends of mine, alas, are Nice Guys. One of my exes is a Nice Guy too. I sure can pick ‘em.
Dorothy: WORD. My Nice Guy ex still texts me as if I care for his, emo, emo pain.
Good post. There’s actually some real compassion for the NG in it (sorely lacking in most posts on the issue). I’ve resisted validating the concept for a long time. I can’t. It describes me as an adolescent too well.
Two things: 1) Surprised no one’s yet jumped on Trifecta for quietly insisting that girls (and women) still do bear some accountability for whom they decide to find attractive. (I’m with you, Trifecta, but I take it that’s heresy here — assholery, even.)
2) Chuckling a bit at the *seriousness* with which this issue is treated on Pandagon. It seems like the NG is being placed on a par with the Abusive Prick. I can see cases where NG=AP, i.e., that one is a subtler or covert version of the other. But I think there are distinctions — there is a Nicer Nice Guy, one who hasn’t tried to dissolve his poor self-esteem with pedestal misogyny, but who doesn’t quite understand that women are people (some will never sleep with you no matter what, and some just not worth pining for, no matter how hard up you are).
Awesome post in general, and I love this in particular. I’m always telling my guy friends who say they don’t know how to talk to girls “but I’M a girl, and you talk to me just fine!�
Girls do this too, though. I have a friend who went to an all-girls high school and now feels really awkward and shy around guys. I keep trying to tell her, they’re just PEOPLE, talk to them about whatever you want to talk about, but it doesn’t sink in…
There’s a difference between just talking with people and flirting though. I say this as someone who can talk fine to men and women, but who can’t flirt at all. When people say “I can’t talk to girls”, I think that’s partly what they mean.
junk science: Not that men with low self-esteem never decide that the problem is them rather than women, but women overwhelmingly seem to decide that the problem is them.
Subgrrl8: As for the “I can’t get a date because I’m too fat/nerdy/whathaveyou� meme among women, I have one explanation for that: It’s because a lot of us have been outrightly TOLD that by our peers. I’ve even been called boring. (Of course, I don’t believe that.) When you are constantly told you are “unfuckable/undateable� by the very peers you have in your social pool to date, you start to believe it.
*nods* It’s not something we pull out of thin air. But for me, I don’t get told so much as almost totally ignored, which is unsettling in a different way. Considering how common sexual harassment is, it’s weird to go around just basically not showing up on men’s radar at all to begin with. When this becomes a pattern, well, it’s pretty hard not to conclude that something about you is just inherently unnoticeable and ignorable.
There’s actually some real compassion for the NG in it (sorely lacking in most posts on the issue).
Best part is that Auguste’s not even a woman, so being sweet to the Nice Guys isn’t even mandatory for him.
It seems like the NG is being placed on a par with the Abusive Prick.
Nice Guys are or will turn into Abusive Pricks if not stopped. Think about it—a guy who has been openly rejected by you thinks he has some ownership and can tell you who to date, etc.? What do you think happens when such men get any power at all?
The Pedestal is one of the top three motivator for domestic violence or even just emotional abuse. Once you reveal yourself to a guy who has put you on a pedestal as a human being, rest assured, you will never be able to do a single thing right again. I’ve been harangued and criticized so much by men who once thought I was a goddess that I literally have problems performing small tasks in front of men because I’ve grown so accustomed to another lesson in how AMAZING it is that I can’t do ANYTHING right. Which tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you can imagine. Clumsiness escalates rapidly when someone is hovering, waiting for you to do something clumsy so he can bitch you out for it.
Why does this lead to beating? What do you think happens on that one day you flip around on your heel and say, “You know what? I’m not as bad as you tell me.”
Excellent post. Thanks for the explanation!
Nice Guys are or will turn into Abusive Pricks if not stopped.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
It shouldn’t be a huge shock when the sweet, sensitive loner guy who discovers you are the glorious goddess who will save him from himself, wants you to explore why you don’t love him and how this can be changed, responds to rejection by hanging around pining and pestering until you give in and then angsts about your inconsistency and mixed signals, and knows you will be happy if you just learn to share his Pure Love ends up holding you down against his bed (and if you stop struggling halfway through, there you go with those damn mixed signals again). It should actually be predictable from several miles off, if you aren’t a dumbass of a 17-year-old with serious issues of your own.
Not that I, um, know anything about that or anything. Just, y’know, theorizing.
Auguste, that was completely awesome. Honesty is so sexy; I wish more guys knew that!
Ilyka, your comment made me think a lot, and cringe a bit, because there is a guy that I totally play out that sexist-sexual-tension dynamic with in real life. With a guy who is seen by many other guys as an asshole, no less. (he isn’t an asshole, just aberrationally self confident) I love the banter, even though it has definite “put her in her place” overtones, because I am “winning”– he’s come a long way down the “women are people” path, while I have decidedly not morphed into the “D4 bird” (it is a stereotype of fake tan and designer clothes and shallowness) that he once declared, in a hubristic Henry Higgins moment, that he was going to make me into.
Anyway, the banter is great. But the GAMES. Jesus. He is his own worst enemy in that respect; when I directly asked him for sex, he just mumbled something and ran away, and it’s not because he isn’t attracted to me (I know that sounds odd but it’s really true); it turns out he just couldn’t handle the idea that he doesn’t have to manipulate and mess around to get somebody into bed. He’s extremely attractive and charismatic and girls approach him all the time in bars, and it’s like he just doesn’t see them. It’s not at all that he doesn’t want casual sex; he does. He just is so invested in his game playing that he completely misses all his opportunities to get it. So yeah, for guys the disadvantages of game playing are obvious. To girls I’d just point out that a guy who plays games doesn’t see you as another player; he sees you as the prize. And if that degree of objectification doesn’t put them off then I don’t know what would. And the advantage of propositioning him directly, even though it was all embarrassing when he ran off, is that I am now in the “not like other women” category for him. I’ve got hopes that eventually he’ll realise that other women are also not like other women.
Surprised no one’s yet jumped on Trifecta for quietly insisting that girls (and women) still do bear some accountability for whom they decide to find attractive.
Um. That was kind of one of the points of my post. After all, if our sexuality is our own, then isn’t it the case that we ALL bear ALL accountability for who we “decide” to find attractive? It’s the very concept that a third party has any real say over who someone else finds attractive that does turn Nice Guys into misogynists.
Wow. The entire time I was reading this post, I just kept nodding. “Yep, yep, exactly.” I have a really good friend with a chronic case of NG. I was once on the pedestal and tore myself down to the near demise of our friendship.
I am printing this out. This is spot on. And I love when you talk about there being a THIRD WAY. My thesis director recently told me a lot of my stuff had an “angry young feminist tone” to it, to which I responded, “I was a little lite on the feminism.” But I do have to say, this really opened up something for me. We can open up new spaces that allow us to say, “as you mature psychosexually, you realize there’s a Third Way: Nice girls do whatever the fuck they wanna do, like men.” I struggle with these prescribed roles. You’re a good girl so you can’t [whatever randomly ungood thing you’d like to insert]. If you do [whatever randomly ungood thing you’d like to insert], you’re evil/whore/bad. Why can’t we get past this completely restrictive binary?
Thanks for the post. And props on the title.
Or to put it another way: Why does there need to be “accountability” at all?
I tried to explain this to a friend recently, complete with an explanation of exactly why and how it is disrespectful to women to assume that they all think alike. An argument resulted in which his friends insulted me by accusing me of being angry and mentally ill, and finally he defriended me from his livejournal. O NOES. THE TRADEGY!
Ace mentioned The Sorrows of Young Werther: I was assigned to read that book my sophomore year of college and had one of my first key insights about human relationships. In class discussion I pointed out that Werther probably obsessed over this girl, not because of any quality she had, but because he couldn’t have her! Therefore her rejection of him was because of external circumstances (that she was already engaged) and not a PERSONAL judgment of HIM. He got all the fun of being “in love” without the possibility of a “real” rejection. A bunch of girls in the class objected strongly when I made this argument! They thought he was sweet and a tragic figure and he couldn’t help who he fell in love will. Bullshit… he made his choice on purpose not to accept that she was engaged and behave in an appropriate way.
I recognize myself in much of your description. In particular your first three lines after the disclaimer struck a chord with me. I too was raised in a similar way. And also raised with a highly romanticized (sp?) notion about love and marriage. Love was something magical that happened between two persons and sex was something special that happens between two married people who loved each other. Jeez, how I took that literally!
As a kid I was a nerd and not into sports. I had friends, but wasn’t popular. I was a shy kid and somehow I had no enemies and noone picked on me. Mostly because I was more or less invisible I suspect.
I always had a crush on a girl. But I would always keep it for myself and pine away. Because, as I had learned: Love just happened magically. She would of course realize she was in love with me by herself and then (looking back it is unclear how I thought this should happen) we would end up being a couple. I was disdainful of the way my classmates went about it, because if the girl had to be convinced by me courting and flirting with her - then it wasn’t true love, but something she was being cajouled(sp?) into. Needless to say I went through grammar and high school without any girlfriends nor dates. When I started college I changed my looks (grew long hair and got contacts), but I was still shy and insecure around girls - and still waiting for the “perfect love”. But now I seemed dark and mysterious to some girls and I was being picked up a few times. Most of the time my shyness would discourage them enough to give up, but a couple of times they were more persistent and I finally got laid for the first time at 21. Around this time I had a huge serious crush on a girl for about two years. Which I of course kept completely for myself - waiting for her to fall in love with me. Over 10 years later I got confirmation that she back then had no idea I was into her - even though we spent quite some time together. Actually she was slightly interested/curious about me back then. So we can add a total failure to read “signals” into the mix. Well, we moved to different part of the country and lost more or less touch and my crush slowly subsided.
I served a year in the armed forces and then I spent a couple of years at the university studying computer science. Both places had a low female to male ratio. Which in many ways was a good thing as I went some years without a new woman to latch my romantic notions about love onto.
My friends and I “prowled” the town on the weekends. Once in a while one of us would score a one night stand. Mots of the time it was not me as I was still shy and introvert. When my friends would diss a woman for being to promiscuous I would defend the woman and point out the double standard.In hindsight probably because a few of these were the only ones who had sex with me. All the other women read my shyness as cold aloofness or arrogance.
I was so lucky to earn about 100,000 GBP on .com stock options at a start-up company I worked at. A friend of mine used to have fun with that when we were on the town. Girls who would ignore me would suddenly be very interested after he dropped the fact in a conversation with them. After a couple of such episodes I told him to stop doing it. The animosity I felt towards those girls when I felt they took an interest in me just for the fact that I had earned a lot of money in a short time surprised and scared me. I brushed them off and despised them.
Then I started to be suspicious and resentful against women. While I at the same time was defending and believing in equality and their right to equal pay for equal work, and being just as promiscuous as men. I tried to hold onto an ideal while at the same time the opposite was simmering deep inside a baser part of me.
One could say that at 32 I finally got saved by a woman who chatted me up and gave me the chance to love her and learn that women are just people. And that love isn’t just magically - one has to work a bit at it too.
When I get kids I hope I’ll learn the boy that although one should never pressure a girl one shouldn’t be afraid to ask (whether it’s for a date or a fuck). But always respect the answer. And to ignore peer-pressure as to whether one should or shouldn’t have sex, but to follow what is right for one self. And (so help me God) I will learn the girl exactly the same.
Now, if only I had a time machine I could travel back with and kick some sense into my sorry ass!
I am sorry for any grammatically and syntax errors above. English is not my first language.
Heh. My abusive ex didn’t have to lay a finger on me to inflict physical suffering. The emotional abuse was so bad I ended up harming myself.
The “I can’t get a date because I’m too fat/nerdy/whathaveyou� meme among women, I have one explanation for that: It’s because a lot of us have been outrightly TOLD that by our peers. I’ve even been called boring. (Of course, I don’t believe that.) When you are constantly told you are “unfuckable/undateable� by the very peers you have in your social pool to date, you start to believe it.
*nods* It’s not something we pull out of thin air. But for me, I don’t get told so much as almost totally ignored, which is unsettling in a different way. Considering how common sexual harassment is, it’s weird to go around just basically not showing up on men’s radar at all to begin with. When this becomes a pattern, well, it’s pretty hard not to conclude that something about you is just inherently unnoticeable and ignorable.
As a woman in the process of reforming her Nice Gal ways, I agree and with the above, but I also think it’s not all that different for dudes. If they are not tall, handsome, successful, etc and women don’t respond to them, they make the Nice Guy connection. But correlation is not the same as causation (I always wanted to use that phrase in a comment!). As wildstarryskies said
People don’t like me because I’m not looking at them as people, only as possible sources of rejection. DUH.
Sure, I got hit on, but only by jerks. Now I know why. The REAL worthy men wouldn’t go anywhere near me *because* I was acting like a cold, standoffish bitch!
Once I started to change my attitude, I *magically* became less invisible and less defensive and I got approached more. And as I got approached more, I felt more attractive. And as I felt more attractive, I felt more comfortable approaching. Keep in mind I still look the same, with the possible exception of putting a little more effort into my appearance because I finally believe that people are looking for reasons other than ridicule.
I am almost 30 now and oh, how I wish I could have figured some of this out when I was younger instead of buying into the bs that only the 90th percentile of people have any shot at happiness. Truly the only reason I want to have kids so I can attempt to raise some non-fucked up human beings on this godforsaken planet (tall order, I know).
Also, I don’t know how to use quote tags.
Not “accountability.” Bad choice of words on my part. You’re right, it implies some imaginary Sex Police or something. Responsibility, then. Sexual decisions are moral decisions. We are all responsible for them.
Amanda: Sweet, of course, is not required (nor, strictly speaking, implied by the term “compassion”.) But neither is a dripping, searing, impatient acidity. What Auguste expressed was a certain understanding, a charity, absent from your posts (for all the credit you deserve in defining the issue).
It could just be a matter of taste, I suppose.
Later comments to the effect that NG *becomes* AP tend to convince me that there really are distinctions or levels of NGism. All cases are sad and invite contempt, not all are dangerous.
I could have been that, if with me the self-loathing wasn’t (or still isn’t I guess) so real. It’s all the same results, except that I didn’t blame the women, I blamed myself, and that never changed.
It’s much the same thing, I never meant to hurt people. But my distance has hurt some people And I’m really sorry about that. (And I’ve told the person I think that hurt the most that) That I just didn’t think I was honestly worthy enough of her at the time. I’m still not sure about that.
My wife was someone who I thought that I REALLY wasn’t worthy of her. Again, I still don’t. But she made it clear that was her decision, not mine, very quickly. She reccgnized it, let me know what’s going on, and that was that. I’m still somewhat in “Nice Guy” syndrome I guess, in that I don’t want to take advantage of her. (Her response, of course, with a wink is to take advantage..by all means)
I think the point that makes the difference here is the ego, and the narcissm.
But neither is a dripping, searing, impatient acidity.
I hope that’s not required, because god knows not everyone can do with with panache. My acidity is based in charity towards the female victims of Nice Guyness. Women are all too often trained to be understanding to a fault, which is why I personally have failed to protect my soul and my body from Nice Guys. See, I understand them. They are victims of the patriarchy. All they need is my sympathy, etc. Next thing you know, you defend yourself for once and you get a beating for your trouble.
I little contempt is a necessary cure for understanding-to-the-point-of-self-erasure.
FWIW, I read this post of Auguste’s before it went up and told him that I was glad he was going there, because someone needed to and it wasn’t going to be me.
That said, waspie, there’s a huge difference between accountability and responsibility. Women need to be thoughtful about who they partner with for their own protection, not for the feelings of Nice Guys.
Add me to the list of recovering Nice Guys.
It’s so natural to fall into the Nice Guy mold, particularly as a post-adolescent. Everyone’s insecure, and no one knows how real adults go about things (of course, some of the adults don’t know, either), leaving everyone fumbling around trying to establish an identity with respect to the other gender.
And because our perceptions are shaped by what I can now identify as the patriarchy, we (guys) mainly choose between two identities: the Misogynist, whose disdain for women is clear, or the Nice Guy, who is merely relates to women as an incomprehensible, objectified Other. From that perspective, Nice Guy is certainly the lesser of two evils; the tragedy comes when the man gets older, but never re-examines the patriarchy-influenced attitudes acquired before his voice stopped breaking.
As Auguste says, maturation is the key. For me, it wasn’t a slow, gradual process–it was a leap of faith, aided by my feminist mom and by the writing at Pandagon and Feministe. It’s neither flattery nor hyperbole to say that I learn something important about myself almost every time I browse here.
Thanks for the post, Auguste.
The difference is there are very different cultural narratives for men and women when it comes to this.
The cultural narrative for men is that romantic happiness is a result of being good (as opposed to doing good), and single-mindedly devoted to the object of one’s affection (who is always the Most Beautiful Girl in the World) against all obstacles, including her lack of interest. It doesn’t matter if we’re not handsome, successful, etc. - the narrative typically assigns those qualities to the romantic rival, while the romantic lead is simply a “lovable loser” whose persistence pays off, because eventually she will see that she’s an object who belongs to the man who wants her most.
I’m not as sure what the narrative is for women, because as a man I don’t internalize it, but the impression I get is that it’s the “someday my prince will come” narrative, and that doesn’t really focus on a woman’s agency, but on her being sufficiently attractive. If the guy you like doesn’t like you back, the idea isn’t that you should pursue him, but that you should endure until one who does comes along.
I am Spartacus.
I am in the process of moving on from being a “Nice Guy” into being an ordinary human being.
Partly due to the feminist blogosphere and a very special friend I made last year.
So thanks to everybody on the feminst blogs. Thanks.
A post about being a “Nice Guy”…
There is a wonderful post over at Pandagon about being a “Nice Guy”.
It’s well thought out, well written and has plenty of food for thought about the interactions between men and women.
This archetype isnÂ’t helpful to anyone. ItÂ’s obviously no…
Another former Nice Guy here. I tend to put a lot of the blame on the mixed messages I got about sexuality as a kid - one part “Better To Ask Forgiveness Than Permission” and one part “Just Say No Means No” - both of treated sex as something done by men, to women.
I think my epiphany came when I started taking part in online forums where the vast majority of the participants were female, and didn’t seem to bother acting differently around me because I wasn’t - and realizing that hey, they were people too, with their own individual preferences and agency!
Now that I’ve started dating again, my mantra is “don’t be stupid.” I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating way, that I’m inherently stupid - rather, because of nature or nurture or both, I still have a lot of self-destructive Nice Guy tendencies when it comes to dating, and if I stop and mentally ask myself “Am I being stupid here?” I can curtail most of them. So far, it’s worked reasonably well.
jfpbookworm -
I love your don’t be stupid mantra. Love it. I had an ex who was a recovering Nice Guy and that was his manta. Although we broke up, it had nothing to do with Nice Guy tendencies, and I can vouch that don’t be stupid aka don’t just go on past patterns of behavior without taking a moment to think them out is a great way to recover from Nice Guy Syndrome. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.
Reading all this makes me wish that I knew Html because I think someone needs to make a recovering Nice Guys website with all these testimonials.
When you are constantly told you are “unfuckable/undateable� by the very peers you have in your social pool to date, you start to believe it.
Well, no, of course we don’t make it all up. And if we were constantly told that men owed it to us to sleep with us if we wanted it enough, then many more of us would become entitled assholes as well. I’m just saying that’s how this kind of self-hatred manifests itself for women. I’m not saying the self-hatred is somehow all self-inflicted.
For people of goodwill, dating and sex are not about games. Games are othering. Othering is sexism.
This is very nicely said, and I think would be an interesting avenue to explore in future posts.
It’s just sad when humans do not see each other as individual people.
WOW! I am very impressed with how many former Nice Guysâ„¢ read Pandagon!!
As a woman who has had her share of Nice Guyâ„¢ attention, this post is WORD. I spent much of my twenties struggling with “Why don’t I love Nice Guy? Why don’t I want to go out with him? I SHOULD want to, because he is nice!” and Auguste has hit the ball out of the park (as far as my understanding Nice Guy goes) when I see that I didn’t want to date Nice Guy because I wasn’t real to Nice Guy.
Of course one doesn’t want to date a person to whom one is not a real person!
THank you Auguste!
And even though the illustrious Amanda Marcotte has passed on that one, I’ll bite.
Trouble is, guys have power too, because girls also want to get laid. And the only way for girls to exercise that kind of collective power is for us all to do it at once - which, let’s face it, is an impossible co-ordination exercise. In the mean time, well, there are limits to what we can demand.
More to the point, does ‘demanding’ even make sense here? We want to be seen as human beings. Either you understand that we are human beings like you or you do not. If the former, then, well, you would have to be an arsehole to exploit us, and the number of such arseholes is pretty small. If the latter, it doesn’t matter how much we demand if you’re still thinking of “treating her like a human being” as the magical What Women Want that will get you laid, rather than as something that follows naturally from the facts.
It isn’t possible to force someone to understand, no matter how much power you have. You can only try to explain, and hope the idea comes across.
Fernmonkey:
(commiserating chuckle). What guys probably (not always) mean when they say that is “I don’t know how to talk to women to get them to think I’m a wonderful guy”.
You know, there’s a cultural icon that I think illustrates (and possibly caused) some of the problem. Am I, like, totally old if I mention the Fonz from Happy Days?
He was cool, and the world’s biggest babe magnet; he snapped his fingers and women just melted into his arms.
(And thinking back on it, I wonder if I’d ever be able to watch a Happy Days episode ever again.)
I was a kid watching that, and I knew it was fiction, but it still symbolized an idea that, if you were the right kind of guy, women would fall in love with you, and if you weren’t, they wouldn’t. And, there was also the idea that, if you were a hot commodity, you could get a randomly picked woman to fall in love with you.
It seems awfully ridiculous now, in retrospect. I mean, why would you *want* a randomly picked woman to be in love with you? (Yes, I just said that like there wasn’t a time in my life when I wanted “a girlfriend” without any thought about what that actually meant.)
Actually, that reminds me of the second part of my epiphany - that once you recognize that women have sexual agency and desire as well, all of the flaws in those Nice Guy-isms about how women have all the power in relationships becoming glaringly obvious, because the math simply won’t work.
I don’t think the Nice Guys really do think about what that means. I know I didn’t; I too just thought I wanted “a girlfriend” because
Crap. Stupid Firefox.
…because that would mean I was cool, and people (not necessarily the girlfriend) would like me and invite me to parties and such. But when I was asked out by someone I wasn’t particularly attracted to, I was an asshole about it, first agreeing to a date and then putting it off until she lost interest.
WOW! I am very impressed with how many former Nice Guysâ„¢ read Pandagon!!
For my own part, resources like Pandagon were crucial to developing the language to describe what I was already beginning to intuit. Invaluable, in my opinion.
I do want to point out for the record that women should use their power better. If teen aged girls in a town all decreed that guys must wear pink shirts with polka dots to even get talked to, guys would be trying to figure out what pants co-ordinated with their new shirts.
I missed this before, but I would implore the writer to consider that women already feel that they must be thin, have perfect skin, wear makeup (but not look as though they’re wearing it), be completely free of body hair, and be effortlessly beautiful in order to get talked to. Perhaps that will give them a bit of perspective on the “power” issue.
I do not think women should be “demanding” much of anything from men I just think women should be more clear about what it is they really need. (They should also be ready to walk from someone who cannot meet those very basic needs.)
I think they have to know that for themselves first and that also requires some personal growth. The reason why some of the former Nice Guys on this board say they were changed through their experiences with women is probably because while you were slowly descending deeper into Nice Guyness those women were clawing their way out of making poor personal choices.
You got lucky to meet them when they were ready to take you on and you were open to it too.
The Nice Guy thing gets really weird when you throw gender identity issues into the mix. As a young’un in high school, I was still trying desperately hard to be the boy everybody kept telling me I should be. Somewhere along the way — probably from John Hughes movies, where the Nice Guy did get the pretty girl in the end — I’d picked up on some of the Nice Guy traits. Because the only other guy option was the asshole jock type, and who wanted to be that?
On the other hand, I had a pretty good idea that the reason I didn’t get dates or girlfriends or anything like that was largely because I didn’t talk to girls. And I thought I was funny-looking and unattractive, though I’ve been told I was terribly cute in a skinny androgynous way. Looking back at the pictures, I can sort of see that now.
When I got to college, I relaxed a lot. Not enough to come out as transgendered (that came later, but the process started then), but enough that I was actually able to talk to women without suffering a panic attack. More of my friends were women than men, I had girlfriends, a boyfriend or two, and had a damned good time. I didn’t have to be a Nice Guy or an asshole jock type, I could just be me*, and it turned out that me was actually fairly attractive.
And it turned out that a lot of jocks weren’t assholes or types, and were fun people to get drunk with. Who knew?
*More of me than I’d let people see in high school, at least. I was very deliberately hiding behind various masks then.
First: Excellent post. Sent it ’round, I did.
Thank you for explaining why one of the most abusive men I know considers himself not only a Nice Guy™, but also very pro-woman - nigh a feminist. Or at least he did. Post-divorce *gasp* he decided to come out as a Republican. He’d been a flaming Liberal before that.
(Mind you, this was at least initially done to limit gay rights, because his ex-wife is gay - something he made an issue of, not her, if he’d been a decent human being she’d have stayed - and of course, the solution to gay people marrying straight people is to limit gay people’s options… but I digress.)
And this is the root of all the evil that humans inflict on one another… Empathy requires respect, real respect, the kind that comes with real consideration. You can’t to horrid things to people you actually identify with on a human level.
I feel slightly lost because I sense that the term “Nice Guy” has a specific meaning here I’m unfamiliar with. But I probably was one way back in day (you’re considered “former” if you’ve been married ~18 years, right?).
I’m not sure I’ve seen it put this way, but the issue I had was really about objectification of women after being raised in a strongly feminist household. Having a typically strong adolescent sex drive, I was paralyzed by the feeling that thinking of women as sex partners was treating them as objects in an unfair way. It seemed wrong somehow to be so concerned with their bodies and not minds.
In my case this didn’t lead to treating women as an unidentifiable “other.” I had many very close female friends (often closer than my male friends). I just didn’t see these women as potential hook-up partners.
Eventually, I’ve come to realize that in the right context, women do not mind being desired physically (duh). Obviously, the trick is to identify the context properly.
The consequences of this “fear of objectifying” attitude are fairly mild, I think. I continue not to be very good about telling women “you look nice today,” (even my wife) as kind of a hangover of feeling that discussing physical characteristics seems unfair. Not being able to tell women you find them physically attractive also means you’re unlikely to have a lot of recreational sexual interactions. I don’t think it necessarily inhibits falling in love with the right person. Somehow desire was always ok if you were serious about the relationship.
Awesome post in general, and I love this in particular. I’m always telling my guy friends who say they don’t know how to talk to girls “but I’M a girl, and you talk to me just fine!� - Isabel
The counter-response I always thought but I never would have had the gonads to give (which says something about the passive-aggressiveness that is part and parcel of being a Nice Guy) in my Nice Guy days was “do you wanna be my girlfriend? ‘cause if not, then that proves me point: I know how to talk to people but not to ‘girls’ per se suc that they’ll like me as, in particular, an object of desire”. Of course, other than the raw passive-aggressiveness of thinking something like this and moreove not even coming close to saying it, there is the objectification that the only reason to “talk to a girl” is with a specific goal in mind of having a romantic entanglement with her.
Nice Guy capitalized, as opposed to just a nice guy, is a guy who alternates between insisting that he loves and adores women and insisting that women are shallow stupid bitches because they are not lining up to have sex with him and only him.
In the Nice Guy context niceness is not just something you do to be nice it is an rare, precious, unparalleled quality that should earn you as much sex and adoration as you can handle. Imagine the poster for Star Wars with Luke Skywalker holding his lightsaber aloft while Princess Leia clings to his leg, that is the response they imagine they deserve. They get really bitter when it does not happen that way.
A Nice Guy in college complained (emphases mine): Why do They talk to me about the jerks They’re dating, tell me They wish They could just find a Nice Guy, and then thank me for listening, without noticing me as a Nice - and Datable - Guy?
20 years later? He still sees women as Them. He’s still single. We don’t talk much anymore.
“do you wanna be my girlfriend? ’cause if not, then that proves me point: I know how to talk to people but not to ‘girls’ per se suc that they’ll like me as, in particular, an object of desire�.
It’s not just that such a response is passive-aggressive (although it certainly is), but that it’s weird and false. It’s really astonishing how many people (including me, for far too long) believe that dating is about getting someone to like you, with no consideration of whether or not you like them, as a person, as a potential sex partner, as anything other than a self-esteem boost. It would really be startling to hear someone say that out loud, though, and probably very unlikely.
Your five step plan for the development of “nice-guyism” rang true to me. So does your thesis that it’s a cumulative effect over time.
The comments in this thread have been excellent. I particularly liked John Palmer’s invocation of the Fonz as the unspoken ideal– I suspect there’s a lot of truth in there.
I don’t think it’s feminism that causes this so much as a strange cross between feminist and patriarchal ideas. From the feminist side, there are the concepts that objectification is bad and unwanted sexual advances are worse; from the patriarchal side, there are the concepts that sex is dirty and women don’t actually desire it. What happens is that the patriarchal ideas, which are very entrenched and almost invisible as “ideas” rather than “how things are,” co-opt the feminist ones into a variation where objectification and sexuality are indistinguishable, and what’s wrong about unwanted sexual advances isn’t the “unwanted” part but the “sexual advances” part.
It’s what I call “Just Say No Means No.”
I think a lot of the Nice Guy/Jerk dichotomy comes from men who are aware that the feminist ideas exist as ideas, but don’t have the same awareness about the patriarchal ones. The Nice Guys see themselves as doing what the feminists want, and the Jerks as rejecting this, when really they’re just being patriarchal in a different way.
ok i’m really late to the party but i noticed nobody had recommended “in the company of men”, which i think does a good job of setting up and then totally smashing the supposed asshole/nice-guy dichotomy. it co-stars aaron eckhart from before he became semi-famous with “thank you for smoking”. be careful, he’s a lot scarier of a dick in this one than in the latter.
Oh, definitely a Nice Guy can become an abuser. I know. I did.
I’m using a proxy and a different handle. If you administrators can still figure out who I am, please don’t reveal me.
In the first place, I had an abusive childhood. Both parents and my sibling were violent assholes, but since I idolized my mother, her abuse, both emotional and physical, hurt worst. My mom, who had big-time issues, adultified my older sister and made her responsible for me. Meanwhile, I was getting my male privilege regarding chores, plus that youngest-child extra tolerance. Naturally my sister resented hell out of me (though that wasn’t my fault) and expressed it quite violently. Basically, I was a cringing victim at home and school, the kid even other nerds picked on. Around 15 I became strong enough to fight off my sister, and learned “Wow, sometimes I might have to hit a woman.”
The self-excusing in this comment WILL end, I assure you. But up to that point, I still can’t see what I could have done differently. My parents knew the sister was abusing me, and absolutely failed to intervene: “KIDS, QUIT FIGHTING!” was about the extent of it. And when one kid’s four years older than the other, that’s some fucking bullshit right there.
High school was pretty much as Auguste perfectly described. I escaped my nerd/victim status by marrying drugs, becoming a long-haired weirdo, and retreating further.
This comment’s getting long, so I will stop here and continue…..
Continuing (if the first half never makes it out of moderation, this will make NO sense, and I apologize.)
Naturally, the first woman I hooked up with, at 19, had issues of her own. If I told you she outright encouraged me to be an arrogant, possessive prick, you wouldn’t believe me. So I’m not telling you that. It still wouldn’t make her responsible. We were two sick people who found each other, is all.
It was a long slow slide. She dumped me while I was still in the Nice Guy phase, at which point I learned to be the best friend she’d ever had. I was a damn good Nice Guy; I learned everything about her former relationships (abusive), and what made her tick. This made it possible to manipulate her back into a relationship with me.
There was a brief period, if I had known what I know now, when we could have been a happy and healthy couple. I still wish I could go back to that and restart. (And for the record, at some point I DID know her as a real person.)
But she was a serial cheater, and if ANYTHING makes a Nice Guy feel entitled to get violent, it’s cheating. So I did. The first time, I hated myself. But then, af