Turns out you’re better off without them, because they didn’t actually like you or want to be around you; they just thought you were a whore who accepted “pretends to like you” as payment instead of money. And then realized that it’s better to just buy sex directly if all they want is a whore. And now your time is freed up to find a man who finds your company appealing, instead of an annoyance to be tolerated in exchange for sex.
Ongoing in a long series on Nice Guys®. Thanks to everyone who sent me the link.
Also from Craigslist: A fascinating and darkly funny rant from a high priced prostitute.
225 Responses to “Whatever happened to the Nice Guys®”
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Um, we don’t have to read the entire thing, right? I got through about six paragraphs before my eyes started rolling so hard I could barely see the screen.
Expecting sexual favors as payment for friendship? How is that Nice? “But I’m not a dick to you, therefore you should suck mine!” Yeah, you’re a prince.
Incidentally, I had a male best friend for years. He was an actual nice guy, not A Nice Guy (R), so I married him. He’s still the nicest guy I know.
My husband is an admitted reformed Nice Guy ™, in that he used to hang around girls hoping they would notice him being Nice to them and being disappointed that they never did. Then he grew up and figured out that you should do nice things for people because you want to, not because you’re going to get a cookie for doing it.
Though I have to say, hanging out in a singles bar wondering where the “nice guys” are is like walking into the Apple store and trying to buy a Dell. There’s a very, very, very slight chance that you’ll find Mr. Right, but you’re way more likely to find Mr. Right Now.
I married a nice guy. Mind you he wasn’t trolling after unavailable women by pretending to be their friend. I still have male friends and none of them expect sex from me and sometimes they are the ones crying on my shoulder. So I guess I don’t know any “nice guys” and just real men instead.
Wish I could read that stuff while at work. But then again, maybe it’s for the best, if it’s just some guy whining about how he is to entitled get sex.
“You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.”
The hell?
I have my fair share of nice guy-ness, but that is all kinds of messed-up; does this guy not have any friends?
Pfft.
Let me get this straight. The dude’s disappointed and frustrated that after he spent time hanging out with a woman and doing things for her–without, mind, you, ever telling her about his feelings for her or asking her out on a date or anything–she didn’t say spontaneously grab him one day and say “Oh my god, I’m so lucky to have you in my life, because you’re so NICE, and that makes me so HOT, and I want to make love to you RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW for hours and hours!”
The fact that she didn’t respond this way surprises him?
Amanda, when I saw this in best-of yesterday the first thing that came to mind was Pandagon and your nice guys(tm) series. Looks like others thought the same!
(I have really gotta start proofreading these things before blaspheming.)
You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.
I think this should be the subheading to the Nice Guy Manifesto: I was nice and you wouldn’t give me pussy!
that second rant…
oh.my.god.
/me takes notes on call girl etiquette…
I wonder what “You Must Fuck Me Because I Was Nice To You!” is in Latin, and would it fit onto the scroll at the bottom of the coat of arms?I’ll bite…what do you envision the rest of that coat of arms looking like, seeker6079?
Why “Nice Guys” are often such LOSERS
http://www.heartless-bitches.com/rants/niceguys/niceguys.shtml
The editor’s post:
http://www.heartless-bitches.com/blog/index.php/archives/92
Best Comment:
http://reddit.com/info/62wdt/comments/c02nrel (warning; thread is long and take ages to load)
“Not to mention, women aren’t vending machines in which one pulls particular levers and is therefore entitled to get what one has purchased.” - apok
Rob, without even reading it (Craigslist is blocked at my work… falls under the category of “sexually explicit”, apparently), I can tell you - pretty much, yeah. And the reason she didn’t do that isn’t because she just didn’t realise he was interested, or because he’s a whiny jerk with no personality, or because she senses his hatred for women, or because he’s just not her type for whatever reason, it’s because he’s too nice. And women only like men who treat them like crap. *rolls eyes*
Oooh! A challenge. Okay, I’ll start.
Hmmmm……
The central figure on the crest has to be drawn in a catholic martyr style and can not be shown to have his feet on the ground because that would imply some contact with reality …
Instead of oak leaves or laurels around the crest is should be money arranged like leaves, to represent all the Hard Work Poured Into Bitches Who Won’t Put Out….
Somewhere we have to work in a beautiful woman callously turning her back on Our Noble Hero, probably with her starting to joyously open her garment for The Asshole That Is Just Using Her.
And the field is open for further suggestions!
Um, why do Nice Guys(TM) expect to be treated any different from my emotionally intimate female friends? A friend’s a friend, gender bedamned, and if they expect to get sexual favours in return for friendship simply on the grounds that they have a cock…yeah, I wonder why I don’t know any guys like that?
I’m marrying the asshole. Well, not asshole, just the nice guy who could convincingly fake asshole, but not quite convincingly enough to fool me. Plus he’s funny and makes great omelettes.
Wow - the call girl rant is something else. Her comment that “I SCRUB myself every night with sugar and anything else I can find that is abrasive enough to make my skin raw. This is to get your distgusting skin cells and germs off me”, kinda makes me want to talk to her about a new career. She seems to hate this one. I’m not intending to rag on sex workers, for those who enjoy the work - but she really, really doesn’t appear to.
I know, it’s incredibly stupid. Although if she really felt he was annoying or had no personality, or if she got the sense that he hated women, my guess would be she wouldn’t want to spend any time with him at all. I guess he was being nice to her and being a good friend because he was attracted to her and figured that, sooner or later, something would happen. When nothing did, he got frustrated and walked away, because he realized he wasn’t ever gonna be anything more than a friend to her.
Thing is, he should consider himself lucky that she thinks enough of him to have as a friend. If he (or somebody like him) is interested, then he should make his move. It won’t necessarily ruin the friendship to make that move, and he can’t count on anything happening if he doesn’t take the plunge. The worst case scenario is that he still has a friend who will do all the same things for him that he did for her; get him something for his birthday, lend a sympathetic ear when he’s going through something difficult, etc. If you have people like that in your life and you don’t happen to be dating anybody or getting laid, you’re still lucky. Best case, of course, is that she says yes.
But instead he decided to walk away. Maybe these guys are still too scared to ask people out at their age, which I guess is kinda sad, and so they just hang around with the woman they like and hope she’ll make the first move. If that doesn’t work like they hoped (and I’m guessing that it usually doesn’t), blaming the woman is really uncalled for. She probably never even knew how he felt.
“You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.”
this, along with the little threat later in the speil
the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.
is NiceGuy in a nutshell
It won’t necessarily ruin the friendship to make that move
Except that they didn’t have a friendship. He was only pretending to be her friend so that she would sleep with him/date him. If he’d made the move and she’d rejected him, we’d be hearing exactly the same rant about how he was so nice to her and she wouldn’t even sleep with him/date him, even when he asked nicely!
(And if you ask how I could know all that without even having read that… first of all, I’ve heard it a million times already, secondly, that quote from Jack Ketch up there pretty much tells how much this guy valued their “friendship”)
I think what gives the Nice Guy(tm) bullshit legs is the same thing that gives the “men are only interested in sex!” bullshit legs. These two views are opposite sides of the same coin: there are some real jerks out there who will dangle the false hope of sexual intimacy to keep the emotional intimacy coming to suit their own selfish needs and there are some real jerks out there who will dangle the false hope of emotional intimacy to keep the sexual intimacy coming to suit their own selfish needs.
No surprises there. It’s just that the metaculture has assigned them gender identities: women do the former, men do the latter, goes the line. And there are enough shitbags enough out there to keep the meme going. What makes Nice Guys(tm) especially repellent is the seething rage and loathing in which they cloak their wilful ignorance.
Hmmm….
If we’re working under the assumption that this “Nice Guy” would be designing it, he’d probably look like an Adonis and the other guy would look like Gollum or something…
Eww… that Nice Guy rant was awful. Not says “nice guy” like being a victim and obsessing over someone that doesn’t want you. I just don’t get why some many of these guys think that they’ve been victimized by not getting what they think they’re entitled to. There’s nothing nice about it.
That first rant should be the default link whenever a newbie walks in asking what “Nice Guys®” refers to.
And I think I needed that second rant. One story I was fleshing out for a detective concept of mine was the murder of a prostitute’s husband. After reading the call girl’s rant, I realize just how badly I’d romanticized some aspects of the profession in the story line.
Does the “oh, you’ll be sorry!” tone of the first bit remind anyone else of the fundie “we’ll see who’s laughing from the fires of hell!” trope? Or perhaps the hawkish “we’ll see how your multiculturalism plays when islamofascists behead your children!”, for that matter.
In any case, I hereby award that essay the Golden Nipple, for unsurpassed Whiny-Ass Titty Baby behavior. It is diamondoid in its density of wankerosity.
It’s too bad that the second rant contained that paragraph about “the normal guys”, as any possible target of the essay who might think that it was talking about, heaven forfend, him, will most certainly believe that he is “normal”, “very attractive”, and “could literally get any younger female [he] wanted”.
Are there any other job that involve anywhere near as much lying to the customer and stroking their tiny, tiny ego?
But isn’t a key component of these rants the assertion that Those Bitches can’t see the Inner Worth and Beauty of the ranter and fall easy victim (those fools!) to the surface charm and good looks of the seducer asshole?You’re right, if he’d asked and got rejected he probably would react like that. *sigh*
The thing is that he could’ve had a friendship like that if he had wanted one, and unless he sees this woman as just one more place to stick his dick then that should have some appeal for him.
Guys like this, or any guys, shouldn’t take it personally if somebody tells them that they just aren’t interested. Sometimes girls just won’t be interested, guys. It’s not necessarily because they think there’s something wrong with you. Unless you are utterly repulsive in some way then you will eventually meet a woman who would like to be more than your friend.
You know, if you bake the Nice Guy for a decade or two, his sense of entitlement and wangsty woe-is-me will eventually metastasize into full-blown “Damn those American women and their feminism!” MRAness.
What happened to all the nice guys?
Please, if only there were any kind of shortage of them.
Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.
See above. The internets in particular are fucking swarming with the nasty head lice.
Fact is, now, he’s probably getting laid
And guess what? He hasn’t learned a damn thing from his experiences. He’s still the whiny, resentful, boring, self-absorbed douchebag he always was. He’s just learned that taking showers, combing his hair, and shutting the fuck up will get him laid more often than seething with poorly-suppressed rage and frustration at every hot woman he meets.
I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don’t really want a nice guy
You probably don’t want the flesh-eating bacteria either. What the hell is wrong with you women?
A valid point. The answer: we are seeing physical representations of those inner selves (as our Nice protagonist sees them, anyway) on the coat of arms.
Curious now. Elaborate please?
The Nice Guy (R) Motto:
In Pussy Veritas
Sure, you SAY you’re friends, but why should he believe you unless you pay him off with sex?
I wonder what makes him think he’s so unique and special. If he were really special, he’d be there for her out of genuine empathy instead of part of a scheme to get into her pants.
The first rant gets damn close to a parody of itself. What is he, like 15?
After a little research I came up with “Bonus fui sed sexus deficit”, which would translate to “I was good but had no sex”. It comes close, I guess.
There maybe be some truth to this (no pun intended), as I have never, ever, heard a pussy tell a lie.
The fact that they say they are only there to please me really really annoys the shit out of me. They are there to masturbate into me
Goddamn that makes me sad. It’s striking how much misogyny and ill-treatment of women is based in a genuine desire to be loved by a woman and make her happy. Too many men would like to make a woman happy but simply have no idea how, and won’t admit that to themselves.
Okay, now that I have finished laughing I can be polite and say Gratias tibi ago quod es.
(Thinks: Wait a minute. If our Nice Guy hasn’t had sex, then how on earth would he know if he was any good?)
Allie- my thoughts, exactly. I usually wonder how prostitutes (let’s be real, here- that’s what they are) have healthy primary relationships. If I were involved with a prostitute, I would (I think) always be wondering if that was all just an act, too.
I was surprised about the prostitute’s mentioning of male clients who have prostitute girlfriends/wives. WHAT? Oh, man…
Yeah, she needs some career counseling. Other jobs may not pay $500 a shift, but they won’t leave her scrubbing with sugar in places that may increase her risk of infections.
I’m trying to muster up some sympathy for her; but I just can’t. She seems all too well-aware of the “outs” of her job.
If he were really special, he’d be there for her out of genuine empathy instead of part of a scheme to get into her pants.
“I am there for you.” Why? What is the bond between them?
I agree that the whiny boring self-absorbed (does she like me? are we HITTING it OFF? maybe I should have not eaten the RED ONIONS) nice guy should be sent to reeducation camp, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most guys have fairly shallow friendships. These are based on doing common activities: camping, golfing, fishing, drinking, writing their names in the snow, etc. Guys can muster up genuine empathy for you, but it pretty much takes a death in your family. So, why wouldn’t a guy who suggests “Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops” to a male friend not also suggest, “Hey, let’s fuck” to a female friend? It will help the both of you relax and get to know each other better. But, the WBSANG actually expects the female friend to propose the bout of nekkidness, because, apparently, suggesting sexual activity turns a nice guy into a cad and a bounder.
I just ask because I’m really suspicious of the whole “taming the bad boy” myth. Generally, if everybody but you thinks someone is an asshole, it’s not them that’s wrong (having experienced this myself, in both romantic and platonic relationships).
Self-pity comes in a lot of forms, but self-pity over sex is the worst.
Guys can muster up genuine empathy for you, but it pretty much takes a death in your family.
The guys I’m friends with are pretty good at pretending to care about my problems, then. Maybe they’re just the extremely rare exceptions to the rule.
So, why wouldn’t a guy who suggests “Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops” to a male friend not also suggest, “Hey, let’s fuck” to a female friend? It will help the both of you relax and get to know each other better.
The Nice Guys I know are never just interested in sex with the Woman On The Pedestal. They want her to love them like they love her. They want to be the emotional center of her life the way she’s the emotional center of theirs. Many of them will explicitly say they’re not interested in sex the way those other “assholes” are. They could be lying because they think women don’t like sex, but I think they honestly try to suppress their own sexual desire for the Woman so it can’t sully their pure and timeless love for her.
“So, why wouldn’t a guy who suggests “Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops” to a male friend not also suggest, “Hey, let’s fuck” to a female friend? It will help the both of you relax and get to know each other better. ”
Because he’s not looking for some fun between (supposed) friends. He’s looking for something to own & undying gratitude & devotion for being (fake) Nice. Like the douchenozzle he is.
Correction: like the douchenozzle he wishes he was.
I haven’t read it yet, but from the snippets I’ve seen so far, I’m hoping that it’s fake.
I might see if my female friend was interested in shooting hoops and if some of my male friends were interested in fucking (depending on my familiarity with their sexual history).
Anyway, it occurs to me that if you’re friends first, you might have trouble figuring out how to ask to be more. If you haven’t known somebody for a long time, saying “Hey, would you like to get a cup of coffee later?” works fine for letting them know you’d be interested in more than just drinking coffee together. However, if you’ve been friends with somebody and have sat down over coffee many times before and done nothing more than discuss current events and joke around, it’s a little different.
There was one woman I knew with whom I was first friends and then became “friends with benefits.” Which was kinda what I was hoping for from the beginning, to be honest, because I thought she was cute and I enjoyed spending time with her. But I wouldn’t resent her if she’d decided she’d rather stay just friends, as this guy does.
Anyway, I forget exactly how we made the transition, what I said (I’m fairly sure I was the one who took the initiative there). Maybe I didn’t say anything–maybe I just tentatively moved to kiss her and waited to see how she’d react. But I guess it can be tricky.
I don’t know. I guess if I were going to suggest it to a female friend, I would say “I really like you, and sometimes I’ve wondered what it would be like if we were together. Is that something you might want to try? If not, it’s no big deal.” Maybe if I took more time to think I could come up with a better way to ask.
I don’t know about you, Hector, but I don’t consider my male friendships (or my friendships with women that follow this pattern) to be “shallow” because they’re based more on doing things together than long conversations about the state of our relationship. Something that’s lasted since high school can’t be. Nor do I think that the fact that they respond to bad situations by making a wisecrack and jumping in to do something to take the pressure off me instead of offering a sympathetic hug means they lack empathy.
Well, there’s no reason he couldn’t suggest that he and his female friend go shoot hoops. I got to know my wife over games of D&D in college. It’s not like sex is the only thing a man and woman can do together.
That being said…
Mostly in his own mind. Part of a Nice Guy’s problem is that he divides all men into “Nice Guys” and “Assholes”. Assholes are just out to use women sexually - so if he propositions a woman, even (especially?) a friend, he might be slipping into Asshole behavior! So he has to wait until she recognizes how wonderful he is and makes the first move - and becomes deeply bitter if she never does.
As you point out above, it might be better if the Nice Guy would just go ahead and ask - hopefully a bit more diplomatically than “Hey, let’s fuck” - but as others have pointed out, if she said no (for any one of a million reasons), he would respond the same way he has in his column. And if, may all the benevolent gods help her, she said yes, she’d better be prepared for a relationship built on “you owe me ‘cause I’m so nice”!
If your sarcasm was directed at us, remember that none of us here condemn men for approaching women, nor do we condemn even the most casual of fuck-buddy relationships. It’s the Nice Guy’s sense of entitlement that rankles.
Is this anything like the Slut/Madonna thing?
I don’t believe the nice guy wanted to fuck. He came with resentment and wanted the resentment. That was the real desire, the self-confirming gesture in which he gets to set himself up as nice - with that self image, completely shutting down the possibility of self reflection and, well, possible change - while maintaining his sexuality as a damaged and damaging enemy within.
I’d say that was the psychopathology of niceness in general.
The nice guy rant seems to be made by a guy who is jealous of guys who have what it takes to get a girl. Yes, girls are going to prefer goodlooking, fit guys all other things being equal. Yes, sometimes personalities connect and love blosssoms, but no one wants to date a total douchenozzle like that guy.
A thought popped into my head. I might be wrong, or horribly off-base on this. (I don’t MEAN to be offensive ‘tho).
I guess my personality, you could consider me a “nice guy”. I’m rather emotionally sensitive, I’m not comfortable with taking charge, all that stuff. That’s my point of view. I don’t use it to be manipulative or anything like that. I’m happily married, and to be honest, she wanted my personality type and that was that. In terms of sexual contact, it’s something I was rather uncomfortable with for a long time.
I felt I wasn’t worthy of it, to be honest.
I’m a Beta Male.
That post made it pretty clear, to be honest. This guy is someone who left behind Betadom to go to Alphadom because he thought that was the only way to go. And to be honest, it’s true. That IS what society promotes. But that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face, to be honest. Especially the anti-feminist “Nice Guys”.
Because the superiority of Alpha Male-dom is pretty much the purpose of the goddamn patriarchy. Yes.
I blame the fucking patriarchy.
Because you know what? I LIKE BEING BETA. I like being sensitive. I like cooperation rather than conflict. It makes me happy. And it pisses me off when society doesn’t prioritize it, makes fun of it, whatever. I just don’t blame women for it, when it’s our own bloody fault.
Seraph - oh, he just plays the role for laughs, to take the piss out of other guys, etc, but takes it off as soon as we get back home. He was my friend first, too, and I loved both sides of that, the asshole that made me laugh and the nice boy who came out when other guys weren’t around. I’d guess most of the people Nice Guys think are Assholes are pretty much like that. Nice Guys are just a bit inept, really.
I agree that this first rant is just a perfect gem of Nice-Guy-ism. It could almost be a parody. Every Nice Guy ™ cliche was right in there. “Bonus fui sed sexus deficit” is a perfect motto for him (and made me roffles).
As for the call girl - sheesh, girlfriend, FIND A NEW JOB! Save up your ill-gotten gains, go back to school and get a degree or get a master’s in something. It won’t be an easy $500 a pop but it won’t leave you scrubbing your skin off either. Somehow I don’t think that this woman is one of those “prostitutes who love their jobs!”
I’m trying to muster up some sympathy for her; but I just can’t. She seems all too well-aware of the “outs” of her job.
Some former sex workers I’ve seen essays by refer to it in terms of an addiction: you’re basically getting paid really good money to continue to have major psychological issues, and it’s hard to give it up when you know that there’s no way, no how, that you can possibly make that kind of money ever again. So there tends to be a cycle of working/leaving/slipping back, like there is with a drug addiction.
Ding ding ding! The Nice Guy ™ is going to be the most likely type to have a Madonna/Whore complex if you are so unfortunate as to end up dating him.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that “Chasing Amy” is a portrait of a Nice Guy ™. And it ends pretty much the way you’d expect (hint: not well for the relationship) though he does at least seem to have learned what an asshole he’s been by the end.
“Thing is, he should consider himself lucky that she thinks enough of him to have as a friend.”
When I went through this phase when I was 15ish, 16ish, my mentality was always that I had enough “just friends” as it was.
It’s BS; you can usually never have enough just friends…people who are successful beyond friendships are generally the ones who have the most “just friendships” to begin with.
So, why wouldn’t a guy who suggests “Hey, let’s go shoot some hoops” to a male friend not also suggest, “Hey, let’s fuck” to a female friend? It will help the both of you relax and get to know each other better.
And when his male friend says, “No thanks–basketball’s not really my thing,” what does the guy do? Does he say, “Oh well, your loss” or does he get hateful and bitter, and resent his male friend for the rest of his life?
Cause that’s what the “Nice Guy” on Craigs List did: “Stupid bitch won’t play basketball with me! Serves her right–I hope she’s miserable from now on!”
So I suspect he’s not thinking of her as a “friend”…
I think I know this guy.
The “Nice Guy”:
I had one hang around me from the time I was 14(!) to the time I was eighteen and he came clean about wanting to boff me. I was… terribly creeped out. Terribly - he was in his thirties.
It is rare that I pick up on subtext, and if someone won’t come out and say something, I will never, ever know.
Fortunately, the Boys both were adult enough to let me know in no uncertain terms that they were attracted to me, and that while they had no expectations one way or another, they’d be perfectly happy to dally with me at my leisure.
As for the prostitute - prostitution wouldn’t be nearly as horrible as it is if not for the clients. And yes, scrubbing yourself with anything you can find that is abrasive and not caustic does become very appealing, OCD or no…
“because they didn’t actually like you or want to be around you”
Oh good; that means I can go out tonight without any of them bothering me, right?
I had to laugh at parts of that second rant — why in heaven’s name would a John tell a prostitute he’s there to make her happy? If he doesn’t just hand her money and leave, he’s obviously lying, since it’s quite clear from the very nature of the transaction that the money is why she’s there.
To Mr. Former Nice Guy: All of us know women we want to fuck who are not interested in fucking us. Most of us get over it.
grendelkhan–good link and dovetails nicely into the Dr. Helen discussion we were having recently.
I think “Men Going Their Own Way” is a euphemism for “Men going the only way they can,” since they’re generally selected out of the available men pool by their own failings rather than vice versa.
It especially bothers me to see mgtow’ers complain about the “endless list of expectations women have;” even the times you might see a long “list” on craigslist or something, most of them are common sense, and they certainly tend not to be any more demanding than a reasonably challenging job’s boss. Only ones that bother me are ones that would require changing how I look (beyond the taking care of myself and exercising I like to do, i.e. I’ve seen “no one of a certain natural hair color” before.)
Grendelkahn:
Are there any other job that involve anywhere near as much lying to the customer and stroking their tiny, tiny ego?
Yeah- sales. Of pretty much anything.
Shoring up the ego of the customer is absolutely standard procedure when you want them to spend their money on your product. It is in no way limited to or (to my knowledge) excessively demonstrated in prostitution.
Prostitution is different from other jobs in many, many ways, but let’s not pretend that this is one of them. Huge quantities of the jobs provided by capitalism are based on requiring the employee to practise bald-faced lying & ego-manipulation.
Guys can muster up genuine empathy for you, but it pretty much takes a death in your family.
I don’t know who these “guys” are you’re referring to, but they sound like real assholes; men are told they’re not supposed to be empathetic, but that’s the patriarchy in action.
That post made it pretty clear, to be honest. This guy is someone who left behind Betadom to go to Alphadom because he thought that was the only way to go. And to be honest, it’s true.
No, it isn’t. But I can understand why you think that way.
Look, the Alpha/Beta dichotomy is bunk. Hokum. Lies piled upon lies. Confidence is confidence, my friend, and there’s no reason a sensitive guy should lack it, any more than there’s a reason an insensitive guy should possess it.
Nice Guys® aren’t “beta males” in the way you’re suggesting; they aren’t sensitive, they don’t hold back out of respect, and they don’t prefer cooperation to conflict. They’re just insensitive jerks with bad self-images. They can’t handle being rejected by their One True Love, so they instead don a hairshirt and become their One True Love’s Best Friend, except they don’t actually value the friendship with their One True Love; they’re just too weak to tell their One True Love that, well, they’re interested in bedding them.
The true Nice Guy® hates himself. And he believes, deep down, that everyone else hates him, too. Eventually, he turns this rage outward, blaming the woman who “couldn’t see” his wonderfulness, rather than himself. Now, if he’d had the confidence to ask his One And Only on a date, she might have turned him down, or she might have accepted; it might have worked out, or it might not have. But if he’d had that kind of confidence, he would have been able to shake it off and move on, rather than exploding in a fit of pique.
Moreover, if the Nice Guy® was really a nice guy, he’d be friends with the woman in question whether or not she wanted to move it away from platonic. Indeed, he himself might realize at some point that while he has a spark of attraction for her, that he values her friendship more than a quick bedding, because he values her, as a person, not as an object to be won.
In the end, this letter is the perfect distillation of Nice Guy®; and I’m hoping that someone saves this. It’s perfect because, in the end, the guy outs himself for who he is, and always was: a self-centered, shallow jerk. His One True Love may have ended up with an asshole boyfriend (more likely, she ended up with an actual nice guy, or on her own, wev), but she still avoided the Nice Guy®, so she’s doing just fine.
You know, I have a thought, and my thought is that a lot of these Nice Guys™ seem to be devotees of EvoPsych. What’s more, they seem to accept EvoPsych not as a rather limited (though not wholly inaccurate) and programmatic description of how a specific branch of gender relations works right now, but as the revealed, final, scriptural and inerrant truth about what men and women look for in each other. (And will always look for in one another.)
EvoPsych maintains that the basic male/female bargain is sex for companionship—with the woman providing the sex and the man providing the companionship. A man who treats this notion with great seriousness might well imagine that when/if a woman accepts a man’s offer of companionship she’s entering into an unofficial transaction in which she’s implicitly promising to provide him with sex as long as he continues to provide her with company. If, as time goes by, the man continues not be compensated with sex, he’ll naturally conclude that the woman he’s angling after is, in essence, defrauding him: taking what he offers without making any return. He believes he’s been had, and he reacts with disgust.
The thing is that when I put it to myself in those terms I kind of agree with the Nice Guy™’s reading of his situation. I think that in a way the poor schmuck has been had, though not by the woman on whom he’s been crushing, nor by any individual or set of individuals. He’s been had by a group of ideas whose real danger is that they aren’t 100% false—there’s just enough truth in them to render them workable as a creed. So the Nice Guy™ has entered into an agreement that has no existence, let alone validity, outside his own head, but he’s done it on the strength of some pretty persistent sociocultural lore. Viewed in that context, he starts to look less like an exponent of the patriarchy and more like someone who’s been suckered in by it.
Bekabot, I think you have a very good point. It’s true, IME a lot of Nice Guys ™ are into evo-psych. (A lot of nerds are too, and sometimes the categories overlap.) Now I believe that ev-psych is 90% bunk, with maybe a few rubies in the vast cowpat, but none of those gems are the sexist, neo-50’s ones that Nice Guys ™ seem to wish were true.
And yes, there is a lot of impotent (hur hur) rage from the Nice Guy ™ when his little ev-psych imaginings don’t pan out in real life. If Mr. Nice Guy had half a brain he’d maybe rethink his philosophy of life rather than lash out at women for not coming across with the nookie in exchange for his peerless companionship.
Bekabot, I don’t know how universal that is, but I know a guy who is a shoe-in for a Nice Guy and an evo psych nut. He stood up in a debate in a 3rd year psych class I had, and tried to convince everyone that life came down to nothing more than men getting to have sex with women. This in a course where 90% of the students are female. Everyone was getting increasingly amused / disconcerted but managed to stay composed until he came out with “Women can release a pheromone that makes it impossible for men not to sleep with them”. At that point there was uncontrolled giggling from various parts of the audience.
The actual implications of his beliefs are rather chilling though. “She said no, but she’d released a pheromone that made it impossible for me to stop.”
The same guy held everyone in the class in contempt because he had already done a degree before psychology and was getting the psych degree basically for its employment value. In a discussion on gender inequality he tried to pull the reverse discrimination card and got shot down, and tried to deny that sexism was still a major social problem and got heavily shot down.
I think Sting must be the ultimate NiceGuy(tm). With songs like:
Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light
Those days are over
You don’t have to sell your body through the night …
and “I can’t stand losing you” with it’s “you’ll be sorry when I’m dead and all the guilt will be on your head”.
“she might have turned him down, or she might have accepted; it might have worked out, or it might not have. But if he’d had that kind of confidence, he would have been able to shake it off and move on,”
I have to admit, when I went through that phase, my fear always used to not be her, as much as that another guy in the picture would threaten me or worse.
Jeez, Ben, how much do you want to bet that Mr. Nice Guy ™ still won’t be able to get a job even with his shiny new degree? The whining about “reverse discrimination” is a dead giveaway. Employers don’t like dealing with whiny, entitled assholes.
Oh, Ms. Kate, you break my heart. Sting, a nice guy? Dripping with sarcasm, I think–in “Love is the Seventh Wave” on his first solo album he ends the song with “every breath you take/every move you make/every cake you bake/every leg you break.” Another line from “I can’t stand losing you” is “And your brother’s gonna kill me and he’s six feet ten. I guess you’d call it suicide/but I’m too full/to swallow my pride.”
He did write what I consider to be an apology for Roxanne, called “Tomorrow We’ll See.” It is one of the few songs I have ever heard sung by a man from a woman’s perspective.
“The streets are wet/the moon has yet/to shed her tawdry luster on the scene./My skirt’s too short/my tight’s’ve run/these new heels are killing me./A second pack of cigarettes/it’s a slow night but there’s time yet/here come’s John from his other life/he may be going to his wife/he slows down to take a look/I’ve learned to read them just like books/it’s already half past ten/but he’ll be back again.
Headlights on the lonely street/I stop make sure it’s not the heat/I walk I smile I wave my hand/he stops and seems to understand/the small transaction we must make/I tell him that my heart will break/if he’s not a generous man/I step into his van.
They say the first’s the hardest trick/after that it’s just a matter of logic/they have the money I have the time/being pretty’s my only crime/you ask what future do I see/I say it’s really up to me. I don’t need forgiving. I’m just making a living.
(Chorus)
Don’t judge me. It could be you, in another life, in another set of circumstances. Don’t judge me, just one more night I’ll just have to take my chances. And tomorrow we’ll see.
A friend of mine he wound up dead/his dress was stained the color red/no next of kin, no fixed abode/another victim of this road/the police just carted him away/someone took his place next day/he was home by thanksgiving/but not with the living.
(Repeat chorus)
You know it’s just not in my plan/for someone to care who I am. I’m walking the streets for money/It’s the business of love, hey honey/don’t leave me lonely don’t leave me sad/it’s the sweetest five minutes you’ve ever had.
(Repeat chorus)
In short, I love Sting.
Here’s a Nice Guy Hall of Fame Nominee!
@junkscience
ding ding ding. you win the door prize.
i actually feel sorry for the Nice Guys™ because they bought into the patriarchy. it’s not sex that they’re after. it’s being on the same pedestal that they put women on. i speak as a woman who frequently said yes to the Nice Guys™, before she understood their game.
@A Nice Guy Bought Me An Igloo For Christmas Once.
awww snap!
That prostitute’s letter made me cry. Is that for real?
Speaking of Sting, Ms. Kate, Recently I was reading at Wiki about REM’s song “Losing My Religion” that said “The song itself was described by singer and lyricist Michael Stipe as covering similar thematic ground to “Every Breath You Take” by The Police, and is, despite the title and the video, entirely irreligious in its subject matter.” So, I clicked on the link to “Every Breath You Take” and discovered Sting trying to back peddle from looking like a stalker. “Originally thought to be about either angels, the government, or parents, the track was in fact written during the collapse of Sting’s marriage to Frances Tomelty; the lyrics are the words of a sinister, controlling character, who is watching ‘every breath you take / every move you make’”. He attempts to back peddle (in my opinion) with this rubbish:
“I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour. The tune itself is generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realise at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.”
A worthy little tidbit: “As of 2003, Sting was still taking in an average of $2000 per day in royalties for the then 20-year-old song “Every Breath You Take””. For writing about his desire to stalk a woman, he rakes in an average of $2000 per day. Nice.
@A Nice Guy Bought Me An Igloo For Christmas Once!
awwww snap! again.
btw Sting=Sucky patriarchal nonsense
IMHO
I always got the impression Sting is making fun of the Nice Guys, Ms Kate. He’s come straight out and said it freaks him out that people think “Every Step You Take” is a love song when it’s about a *stalker*. Making fun of might not be the right word– he does have some sympathy for them BUT, he also writes rather amusing lyrics where he makes it clear that they are mostly to blame for their predicaments. Waiting too long to speak– writing a bitter letter after getting dumped– the Nice Guys are wringing their hands in many songs over their own lack of confidence or common sense.
I guess you could say he probably spent some of his youth as a Nice Guy and saw plenty of it in his students when he was a teacher, but looking back can see it was folly. In a great many of his songs, the narrator is not meant to be liked; he parodies Western in one song where the singer commits fratricide. In one of his Nice Guy songs, the narrator punches out a mailman to keep his letter from reaching his ex, only to have the police come to arrest him for assault.
Well, there’s waiting tables.
Karmakin, it isn’t just being a Beta male. It’s the seething stench of self-pity and narcissism that makes these guys Nice Guys ™
Thanks, Ailurophile & Ben.
Ailurophile: Just for the record, I believe EvoPsych comes close to being 100% bunk when it’s applied prescriptively to individuals, because what happens then is that individuals become, not even really representatives of the species, but stand-ins for some theorist’s idea of what the species ought to be.
Ben: the fellow you mention is a fine example of what I’m talking about, because of the fact that if you choose to look at things from a certain perspective, he’s right. If you regard human history as a record of the pattern of the transmission of genes, then the only real matter of importance is which men get to sleep with which women. (Actually that’s not quite true: the only matter of real importance is which men get to sleep with which women and produce which viable offspring, but you know what I mean.) Yet even if it’s true that we’re just vehicles for our genes, we don’t experience ourselves that way, and as a simple matter of pragmatism we have to take the experiences of ourselves, and of things other than ourselves, which we accumulate just by living into account. (Trying to ignore them sure doesn’t work.)
I had to laugh at parts of that second rant — why in heaven’s name would a John tell a prostitute he’s there to make her happy?
Because he’s fantasizing that he’s going to be able to “take her away from all this” and she will be grateful and become his girlfriend.
He should probably just fantasize that he’s a priest and she’s a naughty nun or something — it would be more honest for everyone.
For writing about his desire to stalk a woman, he rakes in an average of $2000 per day. Nice.
Stephen Sondheim made quite a nice living writing about a guy who kills people and makes them into meat pies that his accomplice then sells in her bakery.
IOW, art =/= life. Was Bertolt Brecht condoning serial killers when he wrote “Mack the Knife”?
I do agree that people need to listen to the lyrics and not just the music before they make up their minds about a song. I’m guilty of it myself, though: I picked “The Adventure” by Angels and Airwaves to use at my wedding even though I’m pretty sure it’s about going to war, not about love. But you could intepret it as being about love, so I used it anyway.
I’ve always seemed to have at least a couple of nice guys trailing me at one time or another. Ironically, the more they pursue, the more I keep them at a distance.
But I can’t say I haven’t used them when I’ve needed to and often I’ve enjoyed their friendship and even had to tolerate the expected exchange in order to get what I needed at the time.
The Nice Guy wants to present the goods and get a dividend back for his investment. He wants a prostitute but with emotional bonds as well that satisfy his shaky ego. Nice Guys never give without payment, whether it be commitment, sex all or more.
They are never up front because they do not want the vessel to command the flow or the shut-off. It is a manipulation; an attempt for them to get as much as possible for as little as possible.
I don’t care if they fix the sink, fix the car, carry the groceries or help pay the rent, an offer is an offer, a friend is a friend. A friend who expects payment is nothing of the sort and nothing about nice enters into a business relationship.
Which is why Amanda’s coupling of the Nice Guy rant with the prostitute is so perfect. Prostitutes are visited by scores of Nice Guys who even try their tired tropes on her, they are so absolutely deluded with the idea that their nice play will win them the devotion lottery, they try it on the most unlikely candidate of all.
To someone who referenced the prostitute’s lack of enjoyment of her job; please, let’s not fool ourselves. There is nothing enjoyable about prostitution. Anyone who says they love the job either is high, drunk, lying or has just started yesterday.
There is nothing fun about having a bunch of nasty bodies, fingers, tongues and dicks prodding, touching and poking every sacred place of your body. There is nothing fun about having to know that the world scorns you for what you do, could give a shit if some slob strangles you to death and blames you for the very existence of the trade.
If prostitution were set up and protected in a truly humane way, it would cease to exist; men wouldn’t patronize.
All these attacks on Nice Guys around the web are just strawman attacks. It’s understandable why one may wish to criticize insecure men, needy men, or underconfident men. But these are not the same thing as Gentlemen.
The real problem with Nice Guys is that it’s a poorly defined set. There’s really nobody who defines themselves as ‘Not Nice’. So when a girl rejects them, they claim that their ‘Niceness’ is the reason, when it can be a host of other causes.
It’s very similar to women (Maureen Dowd most notably) asking “Why do men feel threatened by smart women?” We don’t, but we are turned off by angry, raging women who may happen to be smart.
Don’t fall for the substition fallacy.
I especially love the line “You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Hey, here’s a thought: Why couldn’t she reciprocate in kind with, uh, more emotional intimacy? Like, is there some kind of one-way currency conversion rate for emotional versus physical intimacy? I… I don’t understand.
It’s outrageously, insipidly, pathetically passive-aggressive as well, but a kind of “positive” passive-aggression. Like, instead of actually telling someone how you feel about them and if they don’t feel the same way moving on with your goddamned life, it’s like “I’m going to just keep being nice to you regardless of how you feel, then call you a bitch for not rewarding me for it by chonging my dong.”.
*sigh* Good lord. Guy needs to grow the fuck up.
Unless you are utterly repulsive in some way then you will eventually meet a woman who would like to be more than your friend.
Cold comfort indeed for the guy who wrote that letter!
That may also be a very literal use of the “blaspheme” button, IMHO. Tsk, tsk.
The thing to always remember is that you can’t just go by somebody’s lyrics. They might just be playing a role, as Sting certainly is in “Every Breath You Take” and might be in other songs. I mean, you know they are if you’re listening to Daltry singing something from Tommy, for instance, or Waters singing something from The Wall. When Hendrix sang “Hey Joe” I really doubt it was a verbatim reenactment of an actual conversation he’d had. “Sex Type Thing” by Stone Temple Pilots is sung from the point of view of a rapist, which Scott Weiland is not (his band even turned down an offer to open for Aerosmith back then because they thought Aerosmith’s material was too sexist, as I recall). And so forth.
the money isn’t the thing that keeps someone (nearly always a woman) returning to sexwork. it is just the excuse they can supply that the normals (sortof) understand.
the money isn’t the thing that keeps someone (nearly always a woman) returning to sexwork. it is just the excuse they can supply that the normals (sortof) understand.
Whatever the motivation for writing it, Every Breath You Take has the useful characteristic that anyone who expresses the opinion that it is a “romantic” song reveals their assholitude for all to see.
The one thing I noticed about Nice Guys is that they were waaaaay too focused on looks, and they still often went for the hot and seemingly unattainable, while ignoring all the Nice Girls who just weren’t hitting the full spot on their hotness scale. (I had to chastise a couple of my guy friends back in our early days of hanging out online, because I was into comics and games and whatnot, and the guys would all bemoan the fact that they couldn’t find any girls like me in their area. And then I’d have to whack them upside the head and explain that they weren’t trying hard enough, that they were dismissing girls like me all the time, merely because when we’re running around in real life, we don’t look like our best pictures. To be fair to those guys, they actually took my advice seriously and stopped Nice Guying. So yay for them.)
It seriously never occurs to the Nice Guy that there are girls he’d get along with that aren’t super pretty. (And because he’s sorting first on looks, yeah, he’s probably not igniting the mental sparks that lead to chemistry and second looks.)
Anyway, the other thing with the Nice Guy is the sense of entitlement. Too focused on What They Need. It never occurs to them that the girl just doesn’t like them that way, and it’s okay for her not to.
You mean guys who are deluded that they are nice. That is a narcissist notion; only someone else can judge you nice; and that is context dependent; i.e., A finds you nice but B doesn’t; and even A finds you nice in some situations but not-so-nice in others. “Nice” is not a virtue that stands on its own, such as courage or strength, but is always in relation to someone.
“I am an unappreciated nice guy” is thus an idiotic statement, because the niceness does not exist without the someone who is appreciating it.
Nor should the “nice” in “I am a nice guy” be considered to be some kind of a bundle of politeness, consideration, kindness, gentleness, helpfulness, friendliness. (I know we use nice as a shorthand for that bundle when referring to someone else.) Because the guy who is asserting “I am a nice guy” is really admitting that he may be pursuing those virtues not for their own sake, but because it will buy him appreciation. A polite, considerate, kind, gentle, helpful or friendly person does not withdraw or abandon those qualities if they are not appreciated. One sees that “I am a nice guy” can easily turn into “OK, no more Mr Nice Guy”. Qualities of character cannot be so readily changed.
E.g., if I’m a helpful sort of guy that does leave me open to a certain type of exploitation. Should I find that happening, I can’t stop being helpful, I can only tell the exploiter to stop or avoid that person. If I was being helpful only to win appreciation, however, I’d be able to switch it off in an instant.
Jeff:I understand what you’re saying, but I have to stick to my guns a bit, to be honest. The assumption is that all these “Nice Guys” have always been manipulative assholes, quite frankly, is unfair, and probably only making things worse. It’s after the fact, so to speak. Society really does encourage this behavior.
I’ve known enough people who decided that in order to get some respect, not so much from women, but from their peers, they need to get the “hot babe”, they need to get the fast car, they need to get the big job, etc. that actually were pretty good people at one point. It’s about social status.
You can be confident and still not be concerned about social status. But all the same, people who are concerned about it are going to look down on you. All I’m saying is these people should say fuck’em and do their own thing. They’ll be happier for it.
Fuck the patriarchy is what I’m saying.
Whatever, Nice Guy. No one here thinks that Dowd is like some great what-the-fuck-ever. In fact, if you took a poll, we’d say that she’s a female Nice Guy®, someone who constantly chases after the wrong guy and then whines that it doesn’t work out. I don’t disbelieve that she’s been dumped repeatedly for being too smart, but then again, she dated Michael Douglas. That pretty much comes with the package.
The fact that you interjected some show-offy terms in a non-comical way into a generally silly conversation shows why you might be so defensive of the Nice Guy® phenomenon. Here’s a hint: Being condescending is not the same thing as being nice. But it does correlate nicely with being a Nice Guy®, i.e. an asshole who believes that he deserves a cookie for being a benevolent dictator rather than a tyrant.
Got it one, I think, PixelFish. It raises the interesting point about about the only time that Nice Guys and Nice Girls (or normal people for that matter) can have merit on the side of their arguments: when they are listening to a friend (who they’d like to be more of a friend) endlessly whinge about “why can’t I find a guy/girl like you out there??” Fine, they don’t have to be romantically or sexually attracted to the listener friend but knowing that the listener has or may have feelings towards the whinger should cause the whinger to at least STFU, otherwise they are just rubbing the listener’s nose in it.In the end, the writers here who have put the responsibility right onto the shoulders of the listener are spot on. The sense that they are Entitled! to the sex or romance turns a nice guy into a Nice GuyTM. The failure to take the chance and ask her/him out/to bed, but blaming them for not asking you turns a nice guy into a Nice GuyTM. Not getting over it and accepting a friendship that isn’t going to Go There turns a nice guy into a Nice GuyTM. And, if it isn’t a friendship but using, then hanging around like a pathetic puppy to be exploited instead of walking away from a one-sided relationship turns a nice guy into a Nice GuyTM.
Just one other thought: I think a lot of these Nice GuysTM are thinking not only in interpersonal terms, but symbolically: the girl on the pedestal is standing in for All Women, “and if she doesn’t like me then no one ever will!” terror turns inward as poison and outward as misogyny.
Pro comitatis, futanda sum.
“Through kindness, I must be fucked.”
Although futor is kind of an obscure Medeival word; it’s real Latin, I promise.
but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most guys have fairly shallow friendships. These are based on doing common activities: camping, golfing, fishing, drinking, writing their names in the snow, etc. Guys can muster up genuine empathy for you, but it pretty much takes a death in your family.
It’s true enough in some circles, which is why it’s important for the mental health and happiness of men to shrug of masculinity demands like, “Shut down your heart and put all the responsibility of maintaining your emotional life onto a woman.” In the end, you become like the men described above, half-human or vaguely sociopathic. You expect love and understanding from your wife, but because you’ve shut yourself off emotionally to maintain this illusion of masculinity, you cannot reciprocate and she gets increasingly frustrated with you. Perhaps you release emotion in the only way allowed to anxious men, which is anger, and become a real asshole.
Then your one allowable emotional lifeline, a woman, gets frustrated and leaves. At what point, you have a second outlet, relentless misogyny. You become pathetic and start calling Glenn Sacks’ show. You become an MRA. You try to get your ex-wife’s attention by suing her all the time. You’re an empty shell of a human being.
Alternative option, taken by increasing numbers of men: Realize that it’s okay to be a full human being with feelings and emotions. If your male friends reject you, find some that are not socially retarded.
I’ve heard about and seen these emotionally stunted men, and dated men that bought into it some. But more often, I’ve seen men who see the “no emotion” imperative for what it is, utter bullshit. Plenty of men talk about feelings with non-romantic partner people, and so far, no testicles have shriveled off. And they are more mentally stable.
And how the hell do people do that little TM superscript???? I used the superscript function in HTML and it didn’t work.
And this is Mr. Nice Guy’s problem. Mr. Nice Guy insists on having a super pretty girlfriend, when he’s not exactly super attractive himself. Needless to say, he doesn’t do too well.
While Mr. Nice Guy whines about how women don’t love him for who he is, he has no problem with judging women strictly by their looks. Mr. Nice Guy hangs onto some attractive young thing, while ignoring her personality flaws, which could include being a shallow, immature, heartless bitch.
In Mr. Nice Guy’s defense, a large part of his problem may be ignorance. The patriarchy probably taught him all sorts of false things about women, such as “men only want sex, women only want love”, and he unfortunately believed them. It becomes a problem when our hero refuses to learn from his mistakes, or learns the wrong things.
Therefore, we see the same situation play itself out over and over again. Mr. Nice Guy chases pretty young women, who aren’t interested in him, while ignoring women who are older (and more mature) or less attractive (but more compatible). Then Mr. Nice Guy wonders why he can’t get laid?
Bingo. Give PixelFish a cookie. It’s an outsized sense of entitlement - and the Nice Guy ™ often (usually?) justifies it through ev-psych (as Bekabot noted above). “Men are proooograaaamed to want Hot Young Things! It’s in our geeeeenes! We are biologically entitled!”
I mean yes, if I wanted to, I could make a biological case as to why I could drop my drawers and take a dump in the street whenever I wanted. I could also point out the Naturalistic Fallacy. However, Nice Guys’ ™ sense of entitlement is a deep-rooted thing. It’s what really makes them Nice Guys ™ in the first place.
Moreover, if the Nice Guy® was really a nice guy, he’d be friends with the woman in question whether or not she wanted to move it away from platonic. Indeed, he himself might realize at some point that while he has a spark of attraction for her, that he values her friendship more than a quick bedding, because he values her, as a person, not as an object to be won.
There is another healthy option, which is admit that her rejection bothers you too much to continue as friends, explain that to her and move on. If it’s too much to be around someone you want and can’t have, it is. No need to feel bad about that. In fact, defining what you want and articulating it in such a way helps build the confidence that can make you genuinely attractive.
It’s very simple. Emotional intimacy is what women want. Physical intimacy is what men want. Thus, the two currencies (blech!) are analogous. From here, it’s easy to get to the idea that women who want that yecchy physical intimacy are nasty, nasty sluts, and any man who wants that girly emotional intimacy is a disgusting failure of a human being. Hangs together rather well, I think. Eww! The Wall was an hour and a half of a spoiled rockstar figuring out how to blame his problems in life on women. I can’t believe people actually sympathize.Rawr. I meant to quote The one thing I noticed about Nice Guys is that they were waaaaay too focused on looks, and they still often went for the hot and seemingly unattainable, while ignoring all the Nice Girls who just weren’t hitting the full spot on their hotness scale from PixelFish and somehow b0rked the whole thing up. Apologies.
Well, don’t keep us in suspense, here.Of course, if your desire not to see her if you can’t be with her is because you see her as an object to be won and not a valuable person herself, then you have some work to do on yourself. But I can see a situation where a guy says, “As much as I enjoy being friends with you, my desire for more is undermining the possibility of a genuine friendship, so I’m going to move on and meet a woman who wants what I want out of our relationship.”
EvoPsych maintains that the basic male/female bargain is sex for companionship—with the woman providing the sex and the man providing the companionship.
Which of course assumes that women have no non-sex related value to them, which goes back to Jeff’s point and explains, to a T, why Nice Guys® are not nice at all, but are actually misogynists. “I believe women have no personalities worth mentioning, much less appreciating,” is a straightforward misogynist belief.
When a song’s lyrics are highly contrary to how it’s perceived or to its music, it’s lyrical dissonance. Note that “Every Breath You Take” is on the list.
Did anyone else ever listen to that beautiful aria from The Magic Flute and think, oh, what a pretty song? For me, it took years before I found out that “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” means “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart” after seeing a recording of an actual performance on YouTube, which seemed to involve more waving-about of knives than a cheerful song would normally include.
wayward:That’s pretty much true. The only thing I’ll add, as I said above, is that a lot of it is seeing women as being “trophies” to show off to other people.
The message sent is that the looks of a woman that you “own” (and this is using very strict criteria, skinnier==better and all that) are directly related to your worth and value as a man.
Yeah that’s messed up.
One thing I’d add about the “friendship” angle, as someone who was in that sort of role at one point, is that it can be really painful. Especially if the person you love is in a bad relationship. (It turned out that the person I was in that role with I married, but still). Not all guys are just looking for the physical payback. Although I have to ask this question. Is there a difference between sex and other forms of physical contact? I mean what about like cuddling? I’d actually classify that as emotional, but that’s just me.
Wow, this post was really on the mark, a little too close for comfort actually. Because I have to confess, as painful as it is for me to do so, that I use to be one of those “Nice Guys”. I wince sometimes when I recall how pathetic I was. After the litany of rejections and frustrations, I eventually came to the inescapable conclusion that the problem was not the women who were rejecting me because they failed to appreciate what a “nice guy” I was, the problem WAS ME.
I realized I had to change. And lo and behold it worked! Today I am a happily married man with two beautiful young children. And it didn’t happen because I went from being a nice guy to being an asshole. I simply stopped being an asshole with a sense of entitlement because I had deluded myself into thinking I was a nice guy.
Good post, Amanda.
If prostitution were set up and protected in a truly humane way, it would cease to exist; men wouldn’t patronize.
You really see this problem in the porn market. It’s not like there’s not fun-loving erotic materials that celebrate human sexuality as a good thing, as opposed to materials that set up female sexuality as de facto degrading and male sexuality as existing mostly to enjoy degradation. There are, but the money in it is scarce, and if you want to make the big bucks, paint “Cum Dumpster” across your face and have two guys shove their dicks up your ass at once.
I think that’s actually a rather hopeful thing, that so many guys post here describing their forehead-slapping realization that they were being assholes. It implies that the state of Nice Guyness has more to do with immaturity than with an inherent lack of decency.Grendel, that’s exactly it I believe, it stems from immaturity in how to relate to other people, particularly the opposition sex.
Sorry, the opposite sex! Duh!
I don’t believe the nice guy wanted to fuck. He came with resentment and wanted the resentment. That was the real desire, the self-confirming gesture in which he gets to set himself up as nice - with that self image, completely shutting down the possibility of self reflection and, well, possible change - while maintaining his sexuality as a damaged and damaging enemy within.
This makes perfect sense for the libidinal economy of niceness, too. Because resentment is way hotter than any person can possibly be, and lasts far longer than any mere orgasm — usually, I believe, for entire lifetimes.
So, I realize the problem(s) behind the Craiglist post by the “Nice Guy.” But, it’s easier to criticize other people’s answers than to offer answers of your own.
What would have been the proper response to “What happened to all the nice guys?”
Reader: They weren’t that nice after all. I sympathize with men that they have an extra obstacle to engaging the opposite sex that women don’t have, which is overcoming mounds of conditioning to believe the objects of desire are fundamentally rotten, flawed, and worthless outside of sex, but if men want to be happy with women, they need to work on that.
I don’t think that wanting more than platonic friendship = Nice Guy ™. What makes a Nice Guy ™ in this situation is the sense of entitlement (”I DESERVE sex because I have a penis and I don’t hit her or take drugs!”) plus passive-aggressiveness rather than straightforward fessing up (”If I hang out with her and am ‘nice,’ she’s bound to suss out my feelings and beg me to jump her bones”) plus seething resentment if told “No, I don’t feel the same way about you” (”But I’m a niiiiiiiiice guuuuuuyyyyy!”)
If you love a friend who doesn’t feel the same way about you, distancing yourself from the relationship is fine too. As long as it’s done without a sense of resentment and entitlement (”Look, Jane, I am attracted to you so I don’t think I can continue the frienship as it stands, so I’m going to be making my self scarce for a while” versus “BITCH! I WANT MY NOOKIE!”)
I particularly like this construction, as the English translation contains both senses of the sentiment:
1) “You must fuck me because I was nice to you.”
2) “I was kind, and instead I got fucked over.”
I concur with Olo. This is brilliant. Maybe the Adonis-like Nice Guy on the coat of arms should be bleeding profusely from his too-Nice heart as well, as he looks nobly off into the distance and keeps a stiff upper lip.BTW, I want to emphasise that the Nice Guy is not the same as a genuine nice guy. (And there are girls who have the same problem). But if this is you, you can step back from the brink.
Remember if somebody gives you something, you never say, “Why didn’t you give me MORE?” You thank them instead. That’s how friendship works.
And if you want more than friendship, or only more than friendship, it’s better to be up front about that, instead of LuvBombing the object of your affection and trying to guilt or NiceGuy them into a relationship.
Also, if you think you might be a Nice Guy, think a second time about whining to your girl friends about how Wimmin Done Did You Wrong. After a while, your girl friends are gonna start feeling uncomfortable because they too are women, but they shouldn’t have to make up for the perceived wrongs of their entire gender.
OK, but it’s hard to disagree with statements like this. You’ve redefined a ‘nice guy’ to be some sort of asshole, then made some true statements about this sort of asshole. But that does not mean that Nice Guys are born with a sense of entitlement or expect sex as a trade for their friendship.
Nobody denies that whining is unpleasant.
Still, I saw a re-run of an episode of Hotel Babylon last night that perhaps gives me a glimmer of understanding. A sweet, bookish author is persuaded by Jackie to give him a private reading. She gives him a kiss, and he immediately pushes for far more. When he doesn’t get it, he calls her lots of very nasty names and very nearly succeeds in raping her.
Perhaps this is the type of person you are concerned about? Did I understand correctly?
Point blank: There are straight men who like a girl, don’t want to be her boyfriend, and may enjoy her company. They do not necessarily want or need sex from her. They do not, however, want to hear her whine about the man who is fucking her.
My concern in these otherwise silly threads is that people who want to be gentlemen may feel that doing so just makes them appear as sissies. The world would be worse off if gentlemanly acts are seen by woman as just another bid for sex. They’re not.
BTW, I wanted to point out this sentence from the Craigslist Nice Guy:
Fact is, now, he’s probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. And I’m sorry that it took the complete absence of “nice guys” in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.
Except that….you know what. I have a better opinion of most guys than you do, Mister Nice Guy. I am not worried about the lack of genuine men in the world. I know lots of decent guys–but I don’t assume at first glance that I’m entitled to anything more than common courtesy from them, nor do I owe them anything. We can be friends or not. But I assume that there are more than enough great guys to go around. (Once again proving that feminism has a better view of men than the patriarchy does.)
Also, one wants to ask him where did all the “great girls go”? But again I don’t think he’d have the same view that I do. (I’m an inherent optimist. Which is weird, because I’m also a hypochondriac that hates to fly, but I guess I save most of my optimism for people.)
Can you explain your reply to me a bit more?
I liked this opening. Made me laugh. I just needed an example from the opposite sex.
It seems then,we are in agreement on this point?
What show-offy terms? Can you help me by being more specific?
I’m curious about why you call this a ‘Silly Conversation’. I think the issue of gender defenses and friendship is an important one that seems to be surrounded with great interest.
I’ve seen this issue in other literature defined as Nice Guise all the way back in the 80s.
Why the need to re-define a Nice Guy (no [R] needed) as a jerk?
That said, there is more than a grain of truth to what you are saying about your need to see your male friends act more appropriately.
There are some other issues that make changing from a Nice Guy to a Genuine Human Being challenging for young men.
A romantic tradition in literature dating back hundreds of years that appears to reward excessively devoted behavior.
In a related vein, seeing our female friends move from friends to more based on this persistence.
The entrenched belief that women play hard to get, and the first ‘No’ may just be a bid for further expressions of interest to demonstrate sincerity. This system is not just my imagination. Many articles in the ‘girly magazines’ encourage females to do just that.
Relating to TommyKeys post, this flawed model of love is often not refuted often enough, so the Nice Guy may flail about hopelessly for too long before having that ‘forehead slapping’ moment that we’ve all had.
Oh bleep - I forgot to mention the enormous # of movies where the friendship suddenly an inexplicably evolves into ‘True Love’ when she realizes he’s ‘The Best Thing’.
I’m just saying the cultural set-up for romance is discouraging YOUR BRAND of the Nice Guy from ever seeing the light.
It’s all about framing. I’m operating in your frame now, so I’ll never get my point across. You’re attacking insecure assholes, calling them nice guys, but also discouraging the True Nice Guy- whatever-the-fuck-that-means-because-I-no-longer-know.
I certainly agree - YOUR type of Nice Guy(R) does need some realignment. But we all knew that. It appears that Genuine Nice Guys need a new brand name.
Reading Nice Guy’s post, understand I am not defending his behavior, how he handles his anger, or how he expresses it. But I would be interested if there are any opinions on this:
Sure it is fair and correct to point out his sense of entitlement is wrong, where he expects sex in return for emotional support. But if what he says was true, and the woman he has this crush on use his status as a “puppy dog” for gratification, is that ethical? Is that right?
Nope. And nobody here says it is. But people have accurately pointed out that if such a guy is in such a situation then he has the responsibility to himself to GTFO ASAP. Nobody is forcing him to be a doormat. If he can’t then he has some serious Issues just like anybody else who stays in an exploitative or emotionally abusive relationship; at that part disdain should cease and psychiatric concern begin.There is, of course, the middle ground of keeping the friendship and actually having the stones to speak your mind: “Peddie, darling. Please stop using me as a goddamned crying shoulder instead of a person, stop whining about a man who treats you badly to a man who treats you well.” If the woman won’t stop, then we are back at GTFO ASAP and the realization that it’s the woman who needs counselling.
What distinguishes a Nice Guy(tm) is his assumption (shown clearly in the quote that you extract) that the woman is doing it for a conscious, negative reason. Why? Because that woman must be, within his simplistic worldview, a complete bitch and doing it to be cruel. Why? Because women are bitches. Why? Because they won’t sleep with him.
If only! No, if you’re good looking and actually have the misfortune to wind up dating a “nice guy” he then embarks on a program to improve “shallow,” “immature,” “heartless” you. Your interests, your friends, your job or course of study - all are wrong. But his basement-dwelling, video-game-playing, comic-book-reading self can set you straight. He’s not saying these things to be an “asshole” he’s on an altruistic mission to improve you.
Rowan Crisp (#59) (and subsequent commenters): When I comment under my “own name,” I’m “Older” and believe me, I am. In my long life I’ve found that almost every job or profession would be a lot nicer if not for the clients. The call girl may be seeing worse clients than I have seen, but not by a whole lot.. Pretty much everyone wants something they haven’t paid for, something you don’t actually offer, or something you’d lose your job if you did it.
Mrs Nice Guy
Why the need to re-define a Nice Guy (no [R] needed) as a jerk?
it’s a ™ you twit. and the reason it’s there is to clarify that it isn’t redefining a genuinely nice person as a jerk, which YOU seem to be laboring under the impression.
A nice guy is a genuinely nice person.
A Nice Guy(TM) is a bitter, self-entitled asshole who engages in the sexual equivalent of “I was good all year, so Santa HAS TO give me a pony!” They are called Nice Guys(TM) because they will, without failure, refer to themselves as Nice Guys. as in “Girls are only interested in dating abusive assholes, I’m a nice guy, but they won’t fuck me.”
Being a nice guy and Nice Guys(TM) are in fact mutually exclusive, as you can’t be a good person concerned with the well being of others and offer friendship when your only concern is being an egotistical, self-entitled jackass who wants to manipulate others into appearing nice so they will do what you want (in this case, fucking).
Pro comitatis, futanda sum.
realityfighter: Bloody brilliant! Olo: thanks for the clarification.
Help, repeated: And how the hell do people do that little TM superscript???? I used the superscript function in HTML and it didn’t work.
seeker, I’d help if I knew the answer. Sorry…
Gee - thanks. the clarification was helpful. The needless name calling [twit] will at least ensure you are not put into either ‘Nice Guy(TM)’ or ‘nice guy’ category.
If they’re clearly opposites, then it’s such a good thing that the same words are used for both with only the punctuation differing.
Agreed.
For the benefit of all nice guys everywhere I would distill it down to this: Not every woman who likes you is going to want to fuck you. Just get used to it.
I was just watching the new Futurama movie today, and I realized… it’s all about showing [in a “let them down gently” way] why Nice Guys [TM] are wrong. If you’ve seen it you know what I mean. I thought this would fit in well here.
And the reason “Nice Guy [TM]” is used is because that’s how Nice Guys [TM] describe themselves, despite the fact that [adolescents notwithstanding] they aren’t all that nice.
In college I usually took the term “nice guy” as a quasi insult. I thought it was synonymous with total doormat. Or (poor analogy) like some nervous politicians are afraid of being labeled as a (gasp) liberal.
I read that “heartless bitches” article on the so called nice guy right around the time my last relationship was ending and it pegged some of my behaviors.
I thought the lesson was to be “nice” but not so god damn needy.
I just read the craigslist thing.
Hasn’t that guy learned anything from teen sex movies?
You’re supposed to ignore the cheerleader archetype for your tomboy best friend who turns out to be a closet hottie after all.
(snark)
I just read the craigslist thing.
Hasn’t that guy learned anything from teen sex movies?
You’re supposed to ignore the cheerleader archetype for your tomboy best friend who turns out to be a closet hottie after all.
(snark)
(there was a hiccup. don’t know if this posted twice.)
I just read the craigslist thing.
Hasn’t that guy learned anything from teen sex movies?
You’re supposed to ignore the cheerleader archetype for your tomboy best friend who turns out to be a closet hottie after all.
(snark)
(There was a network hiccup. I don’t know if this posted more than once. Sorry if it did.)
Or to be genuinely decent, not just outwardly “nice” because you felt you had to trick some girl into giving you what you wanted. Additionally, not to feel ENTITLED to a sexual relationship with a certain girl because she was willing to talk to you. It’s the hidden motives and sense of entitlement that create the problem.
I do think the “needy” characterization is covered by the lack of self-esteem, if you thought a girl wouldn’t want to go out with you unless you created a sense of obligation in her first by being SO NICE to her.
Cuddling your tender, tender fee-fees isn’t, I think, the primary goal of anyone here. You weren’t paying attention to the entire thread; you expected folks to come out and kneel before your mighty mighty wisdom. Acting all hurt because someone called you on it makes you a twit. Own up to it, dude. Perhaps you should blame the vast contingent of self-proclaimed Nice Guys who are, in fact, nothing of the sort, rather than the people decrying them.A Nice Guy- the major reason why we call them Nice Guys ™, is that one of the unifying, defining characteristics of these dudes is the full-on whine “But I’m a nice guy!!” It’s such a defining characteristic, that I had no trouble figuring out exactly what kind of person they were talking about within a few sentences of Amanda’s first post on the breed.
They’re the ones who started calling themselves “nice guys” when they weren’t. We’re merely pointing out that the term doesn’t mean what they think it means.
“”You know, I have a thought, and my thought is that a lot of these Nice Guys™ seem to be devotees of EvoPsych.”
Yeah, because it allows them to excuse their assholishness with “I can’t help it; it’s in teh genes!”
“Here’s a Nice Guy Hall of Fame Nominee!”
That was excellent satire.
“Eww! The Wall was an hour and a half of a spoiled rockstar figuring out how to blame his problems in life on women.”
Interesting. I always thought of it as a vivd description of a rockstar’s descent into mental illness that includes delusional blame of his wife and mother. I thought it made it pretty clear that the reason his wife was cheating on him was because he was a narcissistic drug-addicted asshole.
Yeah, the “Nice Guy” thing comes from from ubiquitous American folk wisdom. That starts with “nice guys finish last” or “nice guys don’t get laid.”
The latter point always baffled me because I was a pathologically shy young adult, anti-alpha, and with a face and body that was more Pee Wee Herman than Orlando Bloom. Due to a childhood stutter, I engage in conversation with strangers usually after rehearsing silently multiple times. And I found myself going through college with so many enthusiastic sexual partners, I took a weak vow of celibacy my junior year so that I could focus on my studies and my own needs.
If a total nerd like me can find someone to love (or at least engage in mutual play now and then), then there must be something really wrong with the whole “nice guys don’t get the girl.”
How to make that little ™ (and watch this not work!) Put the letters tm in parentheses like this ( tm ) omitting the spaces. You also have to put one space between the ™ and any word preceding or following.
And yes, what Tapetum said: The Nice Guy ™ has gotten his name because of the eternal whine: “But I’m a Niiiiice Guuuyyyy!” usually in conjunction with “All women like assholes!” It’s rooted in an oversized sense of entitlement. Here we can, once again, blame the patriarchy.
I just read the craigslist thing.
Hasn’t that guy learned anything from teen sex movies?
You’re supposed to ignore the cheerleader archetype for your tomboy best friend who turns out to be a closet hottie after all.
(snark)
(There was a hiccup. I don’t know if this posted and failed.)
you expected folks to come out and kneel before your mighty mighty wisdom. Acting all hurt because someone called you on it makes you a twit. Own up to it, dude.
What did I say that indicated I ‘expected folks to come out and kneel….’. I would certainly appreciate the feedback.
Perhaps you should blame the vast contingent of self-proclaimed Nice Guys who are, in fact, nothing of the sort, rather than the people decrying them.
Why can’t you give the Nice Guy ( TM )’s pathological behavior a different name rather than inadvertently indict the many True Nice Guys who rarely do anything of the sort?
What I am trying to do here is preserve some linguistic space for men who are Nice Guys, but necessarily expecting something in return. I don’t think the original Craigslist post that started this thread comes from a true nice guy.
But I do think that women complaining about where all the ‘Nice Guys’ are are doing a bit of self-pity dance, too.
Oh bugger. Sorry.
Nice guys don’t get the girl, but it will take them on average longer to find somebody right for them, because not every girl is.
@A Nice Guy: “What I am trying to do here is preserve some linguistic space for men who are Nice Guys, but necessarily expecting something in return. I don’t think the original Craigslist post that started this thread comes from a true nice guy.”
Shorter A Nice Guy: “Teh sarcasm. Do not want!”
OK - I’ll come clean. My real reason for participating in this thread is that I am very concerned that one day my son will hear this expression (Nice Guys finish last) , mis-interpret it and spend too much of his time trying to act all cool, indifferent , or perhaps even cruel, because ‘Nice Guys finish Last.
I’ll do what I can to encourage him not to blame women for his problems, but just understand this is not a part of life where you’re going to bat .300.
I finished this learning curve back in High School. And yes, I’m embarassed at the incredibly dorky things I did. Live and Loin.
Why can’t you give the Nice Guy ( TM )’s pathological behavior a different name rather than inadvertently indict the many True Nice Guys who rarely do anything of the sort?
Because those of us who are nice and don’t have a need to blame others for our relationship failings don’t call ourselves, “nice guys.” We say something like, “happily partnered for 12 years.”
But I do think that women complaining about where all the ‘Nice Guys’ are are doing a bit of self-pity dance, too.
Bwah?
Why can’t you give the Nice Guy ( TM )’s pathological behavior a different name rather than inadvertently indict the many True Nice Guys who rarely do anything of the sort?
We are. hence the ™.
really, you aren’t this stupid. You’re being deliberately dense so you can pretend to be offended. It’s an offshoot of concern trolling.
You might as well ask “What sort of message does it send that you use such similar terms to refer to people who steal passwords, credit card numbers and SSNs as Phishers? My Grandfather LOVES fishing! He doesn’t do such horrible things! you should use a word that sounds more different, so people don’t think my grandfather is a criminal.”
Nice guys don’t get the girl, but it will take them on average longer to find somebody right for them, because not every girl is.
Now you see, I totally disagree with this because looking at my experience, I had no lack of romantic companionship with either women or men. And looking around me I see that upstanding men who treat women like human beings are not suffering from a lack of romantic companionship either.
In fact, the only people in my experience who have ever complained that “nice guys don’t get the girl” have been obsessive creeps.
Okay. What more do you need? This Nice Guy ™
uses “the … guy that you were fucking” to define relationships. A woman isn’t in love with a man, or giving and receiving emotional and physical intimacy. No, her boyfriend/husband/lover is the man she’s “fucking.”
Currency, indeed. I think we should develop a Nice Guy ™ money system that has 1 sympathetic “hmmm” equals a kiss, 1 “Gosh, that was horrible” equals 1 kiss and a quick brush across the breasts, 1 picking-you-up-when-your-car-breaks down equals a hand down the pants.
Haven’t really got the patience to read everything and get all caught up, so I’ll just answer one question that caught my eye:
One proper response would be “Well, I think I’m nice. Do you?” (Smile and, perhaps, wink. See what happens.)
And in fact, I think the TM is overkill because the phrase implies buying into the “nice guys” vs. “jerks” dichotomy that drives sexism. The men who are aware of their privelege, are willing to examine it, and be called on it, know better than to identify with such a simplistic implication of essential goodness.
“What would have been the proper response to “What happened to all the nice guys?””
Does anyone ever actually ask that except people who have a +10 to attract douchebags? I’ve only heard one girl ask that, and that was after the fifth or sixth guy she’d considered a friend got snotty/verbally abusive and dropped her like a hot rock when she didn’t want to go out with them. It’s hard to blame her; that year must have felt like an episode from the freakin’ Twilight Zone.
The best of Craigslist is one of the true delights of the Internet, a growing collection of small ironies that helps keep me sane while I plot my escape from the west coast of Florida. Apparently the appreciation of irony and the ability to reason diminishes as one travels south, foolish of me not to have believed the rumors. My eyes were opened by my ethics prof. who after spending 2 months teaching a class about coming to ethical positions without “relying on the gods” explained to me that he couldn’t justify his position on abortion without referring to his Catholic faith. To which I responded in my best NJ accent “then what the F!ck are we doing here?” Here, unfortunately, is amid the population that made Terri Schiavo famous. So when I read “An apology to the Ayn Rand man - w4m”, & “To the lady handing out Jesus pamphlets to us trick-or-treaters” & “My Turtle Needs A Booty Call” I remember that yes, I’M the sane one.
Not only are there whines about personal sexual incompetence, there’s Hot Turtle Sex TOO!
Not all guys are just looking for the physical payback.
Different Nice Guys definitely have different motivations. There are those who decide that the Woman “owes” them sex for being nice, though they won’t put it in such sordid terms. There are others who insist that their love for the Woman is pure and true and unpolluted by evil sexual desire. Both types of Nice Guys believe that their own sexual desire is bad and hate themselves for having it, but the first type rebels against that idea while the second embraces it.
Yeah, the “Nice Guy” thing comes from from ubiquitous American folk wisdom. That starts with “nice guys finish last” or “nice guys don’t get laid.”
Self-proclaimed Nice Guys feel the bitter irony of the term as much as anyone else. Being “nice” is not a good thing in America. People are cruel and evil and will fuck you over, and if you’re idiotic enough to be “nice” to them, you deserve what you get from them. If you’re a straight male, women exist to make men cry and grovel and hate themselves. No one deserves your “niceness,” and you’re despicable for continuing to offer it. You’re only “nice” because you’re a bitch and a pussy and a coward and you can’t be a real man.
OK. WTF.
Many times the issue is that the model we were sold on “Friendship evolves into Sex” does not seem to actually operate that way. This can be frustrating if failure is repetitive and there is no feedback to set one straight. Of course, this is often where the benefits of having non-sexual-female-friends really would kick in. But alas.
Do any of you remember that episode of Married with
Children where Bud jumps out of the airplane, and does all sorts of degrading things to try to impress a girl, about whom Kelly already predicted that sex would never happen. Perhaps its the same vibe. Self-degradation is simply unattractive.
But, labels aside, how can we coach the next generation of boys on how to treat a woman when we’ll be retorted with “But nice guys finish last”
So, from this we infer that ‘real’ men should …well….what?
Gosh I wish I could remember the name of the writer…but I read this article once that talked about walking into the grocery store and seeing a great big plastic bag labeled “Fresh Popcorn.” It’s not actually fresh popcorn it’s clearly been in a plastic bag for days, weeks, months, possibly years. It’s just *called* fresh popcorn. The writer used it as a metaphor for “No Child Left Behind” ™ It’s a metaphor I’ve returned to over and over with various Bush administration programs.
For me Nice Guy ™ is very similar. The ™ really makes it clear to me that we’re not talking about actual nice guys…that’s just what they like to call themselves. But in defense of Mr Nice Guy, I’d like to point out that it’s probably through experience that this distinction is so clear to me. You probably won’t meet a woman over the age of 22 that hasn’t had some sort of bad experience with a Nice Guy ™ . But most men lack this experience and probably truly do not understand the difference.
Well, good for you. Not everybody has experienced your outstanding success, even when they ‘treat women like human beings.’
That may be true in the rarefied, civilized world where you live, but it certainly wasn’t always true in High School. I’ve seen many decent folks of both genders passed over needlessly.
I wonder about gay men, or if this is just a male-female dynamic.
Tapetum wrote:
Inconceivable!
If you look at the post title, it is indeed an (R).
I’ve seen many decent folks of both genders passed over needlessly.
Maybe they were “passed over” because the people they were attracted to weren’t attracted to them, which is not exactly “needlessly.”
OK, but it’s hard to disagree with statements like this. You’ve redefined a ‘nice guy’ to be some sort of asshole, then made some true statements about this sort of asshole.
And indeed, he is. He’s a misogynist who thinks that women are only good for sex, and gets angry with said women when he pretends to be their friends in order to get sex and it doesn’t pan out. What part of that is not “asshole”? The part where the guy feels he deserves to be told he’s “nice” because he pretends to like women.
But I do think that women complaining about where all the ‘Nice Guys’ are are doing a bit of self-pity dance, too.
Don’t they understand that women are here to please men, and by being annoyed at men who bother you, you aren’t functioning properly? How dare women feel they have rights and autonomy, even if there’s someone trying to “nice” their pants off! Whiny, whiny bitches with all this talk of self-determination.
But like most Nice Guys®, you’re mostly interested in getting attention and validation, so I’m cutting you off on responses. You are free to read the link if you need to know more about why this is so nasty and infuriating.
As several others have pointed out, the real irony is how many Nice Guys whine about how girls never give them a chance, and never realize that they’re whining to girls they won’t give a second look because they’re not supermodels.
Because man, welcome to my college years.
“but it certainly wasn’t always true in High School. I’ve seen many decent folks of both genders passed over needlessly. ”
In the context you put it, almost sounds like you’re implying life ends after high school, and the number of times you were or weren’t “passed over” at age 18 will forever follow you around to the grave.
Although it does lead to a psychological debate, that’s barely been discussed here much, over what actually LEADS to ngism, and what could be done in parenting or other childhood/adolescent influences to reduce it.
Is it a genetic predisposition? Possibly some inherited personality and physical appearance traits play a part, although they also may gradually wash out of the gene pool due to their difficulties.
Is it related to how a kid grows up? Abso-friggin-lutely, and it can probably be traced back to at LEAST early teens if not pre-teens. It can be probably connected to a boy having a weak relationship with his parents, or weak friendships with peers in middle school. How can things be changed to reduce kids growing up into ngs? I lucked out in that I was an environment where my friends tested me on my social failings constantly in high school.
/end pop psychobabble
Men are a means to an end for women, as women are the same for men.
But, labels aside, how can we coach the next generation of boys on how to treat a woman when we’ll be retorted with “But nice guys finish last”
Tell them what several people in this thread have already said. Not every girl you’re attracted to is going to like you, and that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you or with her. Believe that you’re worth another person’s love and attention, respect yourself and others, don’t treat every girl you meet like a representative of All Womankind, and eventually you’ll find someone you can be happy with.
So, from this we infer that ‘real’ men should …well….what?
Be heartless cads who treat women like shit and are rewarded with unending devotion, ego-stroking, and pussy. Of course.
I do not think Nice Guy said what you said he said.
I like that term - “Fresh Popcorn”.
That could be the title of a show that examines this kind of topic in the quasi snarky sitcom way.
I’ve heard some people complain at the bar that they are an asshole or bitch magnet. I thought to myself “Maybe it’s you.”
“But, labels aside, how can we coach the next generation of boys on how to treat a woman when we’ll be retorted with “But nice guys finish last”
umm…well you could start with not watching Married With Children…
See, what clinched it for me was that he recalled his grade-school teacher being an oppressive jerk… and then proceeded to blame it on his (never-seen!) “fat and psychopathic” wife. That made it pretty damned clear (to me) that he was looking for an excuse to blame women. I suppose it could all be written off as part of his mental illness, but I don’t think it was ever repudiated–was it?
You didn’t pay attention, dropped in halfway through the thread completely missing the point, and, again, acted all hurt when someone called you a twit because you were acting like one, because rather than it being about how you were acting like a twit, it was all about how mean people were being to you. This pretty much defines the sense of entitlement which is at the core of the Nice Guy personality. Because, as I explained previously, it’s not feminists who call them Nice Guys. The whole point is that there are a ton of emotionally-stunted, overentitled jackasses running around, their collective whines rising to the heavens, declaring themselves to be Nice Guys. If you have a problem with that, take it up with them. The addition of the ™ is a bit of mockery. The root of the problem–where assholes are referred to as Nice Guys–does not lie in this thread. Look elsewhere. Did I miss something upthread? Who are you pointing to? As others have already opined, you cannot actually be this dense. You’d be too puzzled by doorknobs. Maybe you could, I don’t know, explain things to this son of yours? Perhaps describe how a sense of entitlement leads to the Whine? Hand him a copy of a well-written description of the problem? Raise him to treat women as fellow human beings rather than obstacles to his goal of trading friendship for pussy? Ah, I see. You’re threatening to raise a whiny, abusive jerk, and it’ll be all our fault.@grendelkhan:
I always have viewed The Wall as being descriptive of the inner world of someone who is becoming more and more insane, and all of the characterizations of others as being from the point of view of that insanity. In other words, what is being depicted is not the fatness and psychopathy of the teacher’s wife, but the disturbed fantasies of the rockstar concerning the people in his life. I could be wrong.
The real problem with Nice Guys is that they weren’t confident enough to actually ask for sex. They hang around, doing nice things that could possibly lead to getting noticed as a worthy mate, but don’t actually have the courage to say, “Hey, how about some sex?” The sense of entitlement isn’t just that they expect the sex for the good behavior, but that they expect the sex without even asking for it. It’s hard to imagine how that mindset would lead to someone getting frustrated.
And the Nice Guy rant is in relation to another whiny meme that appears throughout the world of people who date but don’t do much real communicating or self-evaluating: women who complain in the company of single men about the lack of decent men. We available men aren’t going to jump up and present ourselves to someone who is a master of finding things wrong with people. Just say you haven’t found the right person yet, and leave it at that. You can be just as specific with the things wrong with various men, but don’t rag on all men unless you’re dedicating your dating life to women only. Misandrony isn’t as big a problem in the general culture as misogyny, but it sure rears its ugly head in datingland. Of course, Mr. Nice Guy was an idiot to do anything more than roll his eyeballs at such stupid comments, but clearly he has an axe to grind.
As for the prostitute’s rant: wow. There’s anger, venom, defensiveness, justifications, humor, and some pretty fucking scary shit there. I’m so glad I’m way too cheap or I’m okay with masturbation or whatever it is that keeps me from having to question my aversion to paying for sex. I guess even a paternalistic pride may have kept me from using such services. I’ve bought porn before, which isn’t quite the same (though it is on the spectrum,) but am so glad I’ve never had to stand before a live woman and pay for sex and try to justify it in all the clumsy and ridiculous ways she reported. I laughed when I read about men saying they were interested in her pleasure, mostly because I could picture my guilty-feeling and self-justifying idiot self saying something just like that.
“You really see this problem in the porn market. … but the money in it is scarce, and if you want to make the big bucks, paint “Cum Dumpster” across your face and have two guys shove their dicks up your ass at once.”
Fact is, this is prostitution in the sense that, although they are actors, they are acting out fantasies, just like the prostitute, but with some modicum of pay, legal protection and health safety (a gross generalization I admit, but follow me here).
Therefore, unlike porn, the prostitute is the living embodiment of fantasy-land and is expected to surrender every bit of her body and even person to the whims of her patron. With no legal, physical or social protection or oversight, the man wins every time, gets to dictate and control the market rate and all parameters of the performance.
That a man can pay a woman to allow him to determine whether she lives or dies that very hour, whether he’ll release her in an hour, whether he’ll pay her or not, or whether he’ll beat or torture her is just simply Popular Porn; The Live Version.
The prostitute’s rant struck me the most. What strikes me the most here also is that everyone is consumed in defining to intricate detail the qualities and causes of the Nice Guy and yet could give a rat’s ass about the prostitute.
The Nice Guy will live. Prostitutes often don’t.
See, what clinched it for me was that he recalled his grade-school teacher being an oppressive jerk… and then proceeded to blame it on his (never-seen!) “fat and psychopathic” wife.
Nope. There’s an analysis here which, while I don’t agree with all of it, makes the point that there’s more than one teacher involved and that there’s a cycle of violence involved. Pink (note - a character, not the actual singer) isn’t blaming the “fat and psychopathic wives” but just putting them in as part of the hell of his schooldays. they’re not an excuse for the actions of the schoolmasters; they’re part of the tapestry.
That made it pretty damned clear (to me) that he was looking for an excuse to blame women. I suppose it could all be written off as part of his mental illness, but I don’t think it was ever repudiated–was it?
No. He blames his mother. He’d like to blame his wife for cheating, but he alienated himself from her first. He’s an asshole to her, but (assuming the analysis is correct) comes to the conclusion it’s his fault.
What strikes me the most here also is that everyone is consumed in defining to intricate detail the qualities and causes of the Nice Guy and yet could give a rat’s ass about the prostitute.
we’re consumed with calling the Nice Guy ™ a whiny tittybaby, and telling that one trolling apologist he’s a moron. As we don’t really have nearly as much reason to call the anonymous prostitute a whiny tittybaby (what with the whole host of legitimate gripes about a creepy-as-fuck industry) there’s not as much to say.
If you really wanted analysis, I’d say she’s spewing some pretty creepy fat-phobic, anti-handicapped venom there, which I generally find as reprehensible a behavior as gaybashing. but in the interests of cutting her some slack, I’m going to assume she’s not saying such hateful things about everyone in those groups, just prostitute clientèle, which is a pretty narrow subset of everyone.
Why are you telling us? Why don’t you contact that ranting prostitute and tell her to get a new line of work because her life is in danger?
Precious. Just precious *claps*
Good point! Some of my high school friends who were in such situations did exactly that.
Out of curiosity, how would one guard against potential social fallout that may result from the friend being rejected becoming vindictive? I asked because while such situations were rare, it did cause the friends who experienced this fallout to become effective social pariahs in their social circle or even the entire campus if they happened to be attending an institution with a small student body.
As for the “Nice Guy(TM)” concept, had some difficulties understanding this concept at first because I never bothered to date or even socialize beyond participating in a few extracurricular/volunteering activities on/off-campus and working part-time. Dating was the last thing on my mind during vast majority of my undergrad as my first priority was on academics and related extracurriculars not only because I was very engaged with my studies, but also to maintain eligibility for the generous scholarship which allowed me to attend college in the first place.
For the benefit of all nice guys everywhere I would distill it down to this: Not every woman who likes you is going to want to fuck you. Just get used to it.
Thank you, Hector. I’d just like to add that the genuinely cool, sweet guys who hung out for companionship with the hope of more also got introduced to my girlfriends…and moved on…and abiding friendships have resulted.
Nearly 34 years later, 3 couples are still exchanging good booze at Xmas.
I see this question posted with some regularity in the personals section, so I thought I’d take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there that haven’t figured it out.
What happened to all the good women?
The answer is simple: you did.
See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic young woman pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. She’d tag along with you when you played video games, ask about your family and friends, and remembered to give you a card on your birthday.
At the time, you might have joked with your guy friends about how she was a maybe a little into you, always following you around, trying to do things to get you to pay attention to her. They probably teased you because they thought she had a crush on you. Given that her behavior was, admittedly, a little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for her, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were “just a girl, not hot like you like them.” Besides, she totally wasn’t your type. I mean, she was a little too tall, or boobless, or too fat, or too poor, or didn’t know how to dress, or basically be or do any of the things that your imaginary vision of an amazingly good-looking, physically fit, dressed-to-the-nines trophy girlfriend would someday pull off with such ease.
Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as you continued to endlessly long after women who looked like they could be on a magazine cover, and spending time with this other girl was, admittedly, a little weird, if you weren’t dating her. More time passed, and the supermodel girlfriend failed to materialize, or you kept driving your other female friends away, or maybe you even got to date the girl of your dreams and you realized that the things that attracted you to her weren’t the kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now, you’re single long-term, and after having tried the bar scene for several months having only encountered ugly hoes and golddiggers, you wonder, “What happened to all the good girls?”
Well, once again, you did.
You ignored the good girl. You used her for a fake friendship, an emotional pick-me-up, without reciprocating, in kind, with a real relationship. You laughed at her consideration and resented her devotion. You valued the fantasy girlfriend more than the attentive and real “just-a-” friend. Eventually, she took the hint and moved on with her life. She probably came to realize, one day, that men aren’t really attracted to women who really care about them; or go to dinner just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you’re upset; or hold you when you cry. She came to realize that, if she wanted a man like you, she’d have to act more like the women that you pined for. She either seriously upgraded up her wardrobe and started golddigging, or more likely she decided to “settle” with a real man who might not be quite as physically attractive as you could when you really wanted to be, but at least will care about her as much as she cares about him.
Fact is, now, she’s probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate rejection of her is to thank for that. And I’m sorry that it took the complete absence of “good girls” in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most men will only have a handful of good girls stumble into their lives, if that.
So, if you’re looking for a good girl, here’s what you do:
1.) Build a time machine.
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass.
3.) Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab ahold of it.
I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don’t really want a good girl, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have matured beyond your infantile taste in women. In which case, you might be in luck, because the good girl you claim to want has, in reality, shed her good girl mantle and is out there looking to unleash her cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.
If you were ten years younger.
So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the fact that you’ve fucked yourself over. You’re getting older, after all. It’s time to excise the bullshit and deal with reality. You didn’t want a good girl then, and she certainly doesn’t fucking want you, now.
Sincerely,
A Recovered Good Girl
Doh! Missed one!
“To all the men who haven’t figured it out…”
Sadly, No! has post up about what Mr. PlayDoh and Bacon has to say about Nice Guy ™. Apparently, he thinks Nice Guy is pathetic for not at least asking. Of course, Ace is still kind of an asshole about it, but I didn’t expect much from him.
What kind of a loser do you have to be if the guy who describes women’s genitalia as PlayDoh and bacon thinks you’re pathetic? Oh, wait, it’s just all about getting in women’s pants and not about having those whiny creatures as your friend.
And cpp - I like the regendering of Nice Guy(TM)’s post.
The thing in the original post that gets me is “He cleaned up is look, started making more money”. Apparently, no one had ever told this guy that women might find you more attractive if you bathed regularly, actually did your laundry, and had a job, ie, acted like an adult instead of a 15 year old who wants Mommy to do everything for him.
cpp- clear up the typos and that’s the best response i’ve read so far
I was wondering when someone was going to rewrite the original post in a (my bad Latin skills) tua verba contrata te style. (Your words used against you.)
Maybe the craigslister could use the cliche-o-riffic movie “Trojan War” starring Jennifer Love Hewitt or “Just Friends” with Amy Smart to learn something.
Because those movies and situations are just like real life ! Really !
Please don’t ban me for expressing a different opinion…but I really don’t agree with this post.
Why assume that the Nice Guys just want to sleep with the women they’re friends with? It’s not at all possible that he liked the girl as a person and wanted a relationship with her?
Men may be more likely to be assholes to women than vice versa, but I know plenty of women who treat men (who are, with no irony intended, nice guys) like shit. Acting as if it’s not possible for a genuinely nice guy to be hurt by a woman he likes is, frankly, pretty sexist.
Yes, he could have just asked the girl out and been rejected. But as a woman who was in a similar situation with a male friend, I realize that it’s often not an easy thing to do.
Tar and feather me if you must, but I do actually sympathize with him.
Nancy: “Why are you telling us? Why don’t you contact that ranting prostitute and tell her to get a new line of work because her life is in danger?”
Awfully snotty remark for someone who professes to give a shit about the state of women.
I can’t help but wonder why Nice Guys are so fucking fascinating, or is it just that men are so complicated and hard to figure, or do they hold the secret to women’s oppression and thus our understanding and helping them will free us?
karpad: “#
I’d say she’s spewing some pretty creepy fat-phobic, anti-handicapped venom there, which I generally find as reprehensible a behavior as gaybashing. but in the interests of cutting her some slack, I’m going to assume she’s not saying such hateful things about everyone in those groups, just prostitute clientèle, which is a pretty narrow subset of everyone.”
Yes she is and I’d say she says it as her entire identity relies on exaggeration of the importance of the physical over anything else. She is paid well to look very well and knows quite clearly the fine line she walks on and yet is rightfully disgusted that those who worship upon this alter of physical appearance as god, also can pay for the privilege to get an exception.
Whereas the Nice Guy and the girls who use them seem to pretty much have a lot of their own agency, I’d posit that the prostitute has less agency, within the parameters of the system she works and functions in and that the nature of prostitution is one in which the entire individual’s existence and identity is completely and wholly usurped, forever.
And you, as a parent, are so inept that you won’t be able to instill proper values in your son, or be able to debunk little myths like that he might “misinterpret”. Gotcha. Are we responsible for the parental controls on your TV, too?
Erin, if he’d really liked her, he’d have merely been disappointed that she didn’t want to date him, instead of filled with rage that it didn’t occur to HER to ask HIM out and make HIS life complete.
Wanting sex or not isn’t the issue. Wanting something from someone and whining because they didn’t read your mind is the issue. Feeling entitled to be ANGRY with them because they didn’t give you the relationship you wanted is the issue.
See the difference? It’s the feeling of entitlement and subsequent whining and rage at not getting what he wanted that’s the problem. Mix passivity with entitlement and you get the Nice Guy(tm).
Uh, Erin?
People who actually LIKE other people do not feel that they are owed a good fucking for being nice. (Sorry, “Nice.”)
Yes, RKMK, I forgot that part, which kind of embodies the whole idea. (It’s because I didn’t really read the rant; it grosses me out too much).
God, I am beside myself here…read between the lines…
This loathesome twit isn’t looking to connect with the woman he fancies…this pathetic little boy is looking for “man status” via banging a “hot chick.”
It case it hasn’t been made clear enough already what the difference between a Nice Guy(TM) and a genuine nice guy is, I’ll give some examples from my own experiences as a former Nice Guy(TM).
I lived what is perhaps the quintessential Nice Guy(TM) experience; many years ago I met a girl (we were both teenagers at the time) who was incredibly (though not conventionally) beautiful.
We got to talking and I very quickly realized there was absolutely no chance of there being anything more, and I even got to be the male friend to whom she *literally* complained about the egregiously assholish behavior of the guys she dated and slept with, as she only ever went out with guys who were the stereotypical “assholes” of Nice Guy(TM) rants; Guys who acted like they weren’t that into her and were a little insulting and domineering to boot (real Game posterchildren down to the ‘negs’).
Do you know what I did? I basically distanced myself from her because I realized it was pointless and unhealthy to torture myself with my unfulfilled desire for more.
And do you know what distance allowed me to realize? That a woman who was only interested in those kind of guys and into game playing wasn’t someone I wanted to be with, regardless of how attractive I found them physically.
What I didn’t do is assume I was entitled to more, or resent her (much less women in general) for not being attracted to me. With time I realized that they were someone who I truly valued as a friend but whom, today, I wouldn’t go out with even if they turned around and asked me because I can’t stand how they are in their relationships.
Whereas the Nice Guy and the girls who use them seem to pretty much have a lot of their own agency, I’d posit that the prostitute has less agency, within the parameters of the system she works and functions in and that the nature of prostitution is one in which the entire individual’s existence and identity is completely and wholly usurped, forever.
At the risk of sounding more snarky than I intend to be, “and your opinion is based on what experience?”
I’ve worked some pretty shitty jobs - literally. In as far as prostitution is chosen rather than forced, it might be soul destroying - or it might not be. I know a couple of people who have hooked. To state that “an individual’s existence and identity is completely and wholly usurped, forever” is bullshit.
Erin said:
Please don’t ban me for expressing a different opinion…but I really don’t agree with this post…
—
I’m with you, this thread hits a little too close to home. I can remember being a bit of a Nice Guy ™ in college. I will say it wasn’t about entitlement or misogyny or any of that. Frankly it was due to lack of confidence and self-esteem, and not being experienced enough to tell your new ‘friend’ what you’re looking for.
The Nice Guy Routine failed disastrously. I spent a lot of that time dreaming about putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger. So I can’t say I find any of that craigslist memo funny; it just makes me sad for the guy. Maybe the right application of psychopharmacology will get Mr. NG properly laid and married; it did for me.
“Please don’t ban me for expressing a different opinion”
Well, nothing like advertizing in your very first sentence that you’re a troll.
____
“I will say it wasn’t about entitlement or misogyny or any of that”
Except, as those in this thread have explained a numebr of times now, both of those is EXACTLY what it was.
Nick, it was entitlement and misogyny if you: a) were pretending to be her friend and care about what she said so you could get into her pants, or b) GOT ANGRY at the girl for not giving you what you wanted.
The fact that you put “friend” in quotes tends to give me a hint. Just because you wanted to kill yourself instead of the girl doesn’t mean you weren’t suffering from the same issues.
If you now see women as actual people instead of panaceas (sp?) for all that ails you, as you seem to be saying, then that’s great.
Cara, this thread should be labelled ‘Picking on the desperate and the weak’. It’s bad karma and poor sport to mock weaker people - it strikes me as a little bit of fat-girl-teasing, feminist style.
The source of NG’s frustration is not patriarchy, it’s promiscuity As a young person, he believes everyone around him is getting ltheir fill of pussy and dick - but he is definitely not.
The NG’s crimes can be boiled down as follows
1) Wanting pussy
2) but not being honest about it
3) Being angry about failure
Y’know deceiving in a relationship is not cool but it’s common and forgivable.
Actually the NG just needs someone compassionate and more experienced to sit him down and tell him to smarten up, stop playing games, and be a little more honest when he meets someone he would like to fuck.
Now maybe you are getting everything you want out of your relationships, but don’t you think your mockery of these poor sacks is a bit cruel? A bit like peeing on a puppy?
What’s next, a photo montage of cute animals caught in traps?
Shorter Nick: Won’t somebody please think of the Nice Guys?
I hate to defend Nice Guys, but I know I really was one, evo psych and all, as recently as … I guess its been about nine years or so. In my experience Nice Guyism was clearly misogynistic. Maybe nice guys who are still “active in the disease” can’t see it, but I know I resented women.
I am with Nick, I was a a Nice Guy™ once, and it was associated with untreated depression. Why depressed young men become misogynists is beyond the scope of this comment, but it happened to me. I part ways with him about the causes. A lot of people can be disappointed they aren’t having enough sex. But only a Nice Guy™ turns this into a misogynist world view. Nice Guys™ aren’t necessarily celibate. Its not about how they live, but how they view the world. A Nice Guy™ thinks he is entitled to something. I know I did, I thought the world owed me something, and by proxy “hawt chicks” owed me something
I recovered a lot on my own in my senior year of college, mostly by learning about feminism. But I don’t think I was finally fully recovered until I was treated for depression and stopped seeing the world in such an irrational way. I will leave it to post-modern theorists to ask why Nick and I turned depression and self loathing into woman-hating. (patriarchy + hormones + depression = Nice Guy?)
For me the best cure was learning about feminist thought, so maybe more blogging about Nice Guys™ will help society. Hopefully Nice Guys™ still suffering will read this post and start some serious introspection.
No disagreement here. I’m not sure what you and Nick are “defending”, Stephen, since you agree this attitude is misogynistic, but whatever.
Speaking of Nice Guys(tm), check this Craigslist rant out.
The best thing about it? It’s in the platonic M4W section. Here are some choice quotes (the all caps are his, not mine):
God, how dare women want to date men who are attractive, intelligent, and successful, and with whom they share common interests.
i.e. I have nothing to offer, but you have to date me lest…
Holly R @ 39
I was surprised about the prostitute’s mentioning of male clients who have prostitute girlfriends/wives. WHAT? Oh, man…
Is it really that hard to understand? If it really perplexes you that much you can ask me yourself, my girlfriend is an escort and we’ve been happy together for over four years now. Admittedly we are not a “typical” couple but, well, fairytales are fun but they’re not real. I have a very real, healthy, genuine relationship with a sex worker who enjoys her job. It probably makes me part of a small minority but I still exist.
I do agree that the ranting escort should stop though. It’s not a job you should do unless you want to do it.
mnemosyne @ 80
Because he’s fantasizing that he’s going to be able to “take her away from all this” and she will be grateful and become his girlfriend.
He should probably just fantasize that he’s a priest and she’s a naughty nun or something — it would be more honest for everyone.
Well, not really. Some clients no doubt harbour those fantasies but many of them are quite realistic about what’s expected. I think the assumption that men who use prostitutes are just “masturbating into them” is misplaced. Lots of men pay for it for all manner of reasons, because of insecurity or inability to talk to women or because their wives don’t want to have sex any more or because they’re a kinky couple and want to have some fun. Lots of these men want a prostitute to enjoy herself because they won’t enjoy the sex as much if she isn’t.
I mean, let’s face it, there’s a burgeoning fair trade industry that’s come about because a lot of people don’t enjoy bananas as much if they think people have suffered to produce them. It’s entirely moral and reasonable to want minimal harm from any financial transaction. The judgement of that comment seems to be that all men who use prostitutes are so heartless that they don’t have normal human empathy about a woman they’re next to, when in point of fact a lot of them are just a bit socially awkward and lonely. Some of them may, in fact, be “Nice Guys” but some of them also aren’t. It’s not wrong to want someone you want to have sex with to enjoy it, even if it’s taken money to get them into bed.
This is another reason I think the hooker ranting on CL should call it a day: she seemed to not want to enjoy it for her own sake. I don’t know how much money it would take for me to show up day after day at a job I hated that badly — I know I’ve turned down good money for jobs I’ve hated less — but I also know that if I could get $500 a day for doing a crappy job I’d wouldn’t do it for long, that’s a short-term easy cash kind of project, not a career. I can only hope she’s getting out soon.
Goddamn tags. That formatting worked in the damn preview window. I hope everyone still reading this can work out what’s a quote and what isn’t.
I think Nick and Stephen are “defending” in the sense that they are (mostly wrongly) interpreting the thread as “kicking someone when they are down.”
I would say it’s not true in that there is some advice, i.e. a man can make himself more attractive (although the “just shower and comb your hair” on post #29 is a severe oversimplification; at least trying to get some semi-fashionable clothes helps too, exercising a lot, changing your leisure activities to become a better person socially, etc. And as far as changing any social shortcomings goes, don’t worry too much about “not supposed to’s” short of not dating co-workers or best friend’s ex’s; I know I’ve blown a few people’s gaskets on here complaining about how I’ve held myself back because I’m not exactly sure who’s left if you’re “not supposed to” date people because of other “rules,” but I’m moving past that phase
the “just shower and comb your hair” on post #29 is a severe oversimplification; at least trying to get some semi-fashionable clothes helps too, exercising a lot
When your friends nag you to get bikini waxes and lament that they need breast implants and nose jobs when in fact they do not, we’ll talk. Until then, please remember your audience.
I know my audience and I know I can’t dispute your statement; however, the “oversimplification” statement also remains accurate.
Although as far as spending a lot of money goes I’m probably going to get lasik once I can spare that much money (obviously it can’t be assigned to a specific gender so that’s not part of the debate.)
You may wish to read Christopher Bird’s dissection of this rant.
“Is it really that hard to understand? If it really perplexes you that much you can ask me yourself, my girlfriend is an escort and we’ve been happy together for over four years now. Admittedly we are not a “typical” couple but, well, fairytales are fun but they’re not real. I have a very real, healthy, genuine relationship with a sex worker who enjoys her job. It probably makes me part of a small minority but I still exist.”
I think the “WHAT?” was more about the rant’s author having enough clients whose wives/girlfriends were also sexworkers to rant about them.
People being in sexual relationships with sexworkers isn’t difficult to understand. Those people then going to other sexworkers and trying to weasel out of paying the set price because that’s not what their significant other charges is about ten different kinds of wtf.
The attitude of entitlement isn’t being “down”, Ace. It’s acting entitled. It DESERVES a kick.
We’re not talking about men who are disappointed they can’t seem to get a date; we’re talking about genuinely screwed up men who blame women for not liking them and go on to justify their horrible attitudes that way.
As I’ve said, a genuinely nice man can find women (if he bathes). It’s just not that hard. I’ve dated plenty of men who were perfectly decent but not on anyone’s “Hottest” list. The ones who get all woman-hating are the ones who feel entitled to something they’re not getting.
Besides, if they agree it’s a misogynistic attitude, and they’ve outgrown it, what’s to be defensive about?
I’d tend to agree with that ALTHOUGH I don’t think that “being down” and “acting entitled” are mutually exclusive…although it may not be the same definition of “being down.”
I’m not a mind-reader, and I wasn’t looking over his shoulder at the computer screen while he found this thread; therefore, I can’t know what Nick read and didn’t read or whether he considered the whole context. But my guess is that he saw how this thread repeatedly conjured the image of men trying and failing with women, and considered it “piling on” because he saw their main fault as not being perfect-looking and thought plenty of them would simply fall within that “men who are disappointed they can’t seem to get a date” camp, rather than looking at the whole context of how the guys in the “image conjured” look at it in terms of entitlement. And he’d obviously have read it wrong in that case.
I won’t dispute the rest of the post. (I won’t beat the dead horse on the “it’s just not that hard” thing even though I don’t see how it’s disputable that it can be hard for reasons that have little to do with your appearance or persona, i.e. relocating to a small town for a job. But we’ve been over it many times and has nothing to do with this discussion anyway, so that will be the last of it from me.)
So is there a female counterpart to nice guy[tm]? A type of woman that feels entitled to someone who is not interested in her, and generalizes that anger to a whole class of men?
“Its not about how they live, but how they view the world. A Nice Guy™ thinks he is entitled to something. I know I did, I thought the world owed me something, and by proxy ‘hawt chicks’ owed me something. … I will leave it to post-modern theorists to ask why Nick and I turned depression and self loathing into woman-hating. (patriarchy + hormones + depression = Nice Guy?)”
You know, Stephen, it’s really not that hard to figure out. Why turn self-hatred against women? Because it’s easier than really feeling all that self-hate, and women are a convenient target. Because that’s what immature men are trained to do. Men are steeped in a culture of patriarchal entitlement from birth; whether they buy into it or not is their own personal problem.
Except when it isn’t. When they turn that hate and rage outward against the objects (women) who won’t give them what they want (sex), the results are often interpersonally disastrous: girls who end up confused or even scared by their irrational behavior, verbal abuse, stalking, rape.
So excuse the lack of sympathy found here for Nice Guys’ depression. As a previous poster said, if you’re a woman, and you’re over the age of 22, chances are that some Nice Guy has used his feelings of entitlement, self-hate, and rage as an emotional club to beat you with at some point in your life.
I know it’s happened to me. I rejected the Nice Guy, point-blank but nicely, just like you’re supposed to do (I had a boyfriend! They were friends!), after I figured out that he was stuck on me. He threatened to kill himself, and made me talk him down. When he was done with that charade, he laughed at me for having taken him seriously. Then he calmed down and said he “just wanted to be friends.”
Soon after, I went in the hospital for an accidental medication overdose. He called me after I got out, ostensibly to wish me well, but then pushed the issue of our “getting together” (I’d been out of the hospital for 2 days!). I told him, calmly but firmly, that there would be other girls, and that I would not leave my boyfriend for him. He told me that he wished I had died in the hospital. Then that, wait, on second thought, he wished I had permanent brain damage. Then he hung up on me.
I was 17, sick, vulnerable, and very naive. He was supposed to be my friend. I cried for hours.
I don’t care if he was depressed, and I don’t care if he did hate himself. I have no sympathy for him or for his kind.
This is probably too late for anyone to read, but…
I don’t like any of the Latin so far, sorry.
Bonus fui sed sexus deficit is wrong because sexus means genitals or gender. You’d want maybe fututio (=”fucking”). Also I’d prefer defuit: “there has been no sex” (deficere = “to run out” rather than not be there at all). But otherwise it would work.
Pro comitatis, futanda sum is grammatically and lexixally wrong in a couple of ways.
Pro requires the ablative case, not the genitive, so it should be pro comitate, except that comitas means “friendliness” or “affability” more than “kindness”. You’d want beneficium, so pro beneficiis (=”[in return] for acts of kindness”).
There are several problems with futanda: it’s feminine, first of all, and we’re working from the viewpoint of the Nice Guy. It’s also not the right word to use of a man getting laid, because it strictly means “to insert one’s penis in a woman” (the Romans were nothing if not precise in these matters!). Also, it’s not the correct gerundive form of the verb, which would be “futuendus”. You could say pro beneficiis, futuenda es: “In return for acts of kindness, you must be fucked, but it sounds like the woman’s doing the acts.
So, what do I suggest for “You Must Fuck Me Because I Was Nice To You!”?
Well, there’s an actual Latin phrase: do ut des, which means “I give so that you will give”. Roman culture was very much based on, well, quid pro quo dealings: do ut des is the equivalent of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. But dare (”to give”) not only means literal giving of money, time, gifts, even sacrifices, but is also slang for “giving it up” - i.e. agreeing to have sex. I think this is the purest form of Nice Guy-ness: giving of oneself only so as to get laid.
“You Must Fuck Me Because I Was Nice To You!” is actually quite hard to do in Latin. A nearish translation would be mihi futuenda es, quod blandus tibi eram: roughly “you must be fucked by me, because I was flattering to you”. But it’s ugly Latin.
Or how about sed bene [or bona] tibi feci! - “But I did nice things for you!”. Or simply ingrata, which is the feminine form of “ungrateful” or the neuter plural form of “unappreciated”, so could be taken as “she is ungrateful”, “you [fem.] are ungrateful”, or “they [my good deeds] are unappreciated”.
Because the depression makes the “defeats” of not getting what you want harder to recover from, and the present all that bleaker, and makes everyone else’s happier (or at least more conventional) romantic lives look effortless? Because men who really EMBODY conventional masculinity really DO effortlessly attract (some) women, and it’s hard not to resent the pavlovian nature of the hair-fluffing and back-arching, when you notice it inevitably takes place without the exchange of a single word? The resentment itself IS a prison, constructed daily anew in the mind, and yet the gift keeps on giving, when one’s partner needs daily reassurance that you love her, a reassurance that wouldn’t be so badly needed if society hadn’t been trashing her so comprehensively about her lack of compliance as well, this time with norms of female beauty?
It takes world enough and time before one looks to the depression as the source of the woe, and acquires some kind of context for the misfires of the past, and a certain degree of introspection not common to all…
Well after reading a lot of the comments ripping on the “nice guys” as well as the essay of that prostitute..these just confirms an ugly observation that has shown up time again on feminist blogs:
It appears to me that the very people who’d adamantly (and rightly I might) believe that a womans “fuckability” status should not determine her worth as a person, can sure display quite an amount of pitiless contempt for men that dont measure up on mating worthiness.
re: my last post
sorry typing error
*(and rightly I might add)