From the FF101 Jargon File (edited to add, for the benefit of those who can’t/won’t find the time to click on a link, with the full text of the “Nice Guys™” entry, added text in italics) :
“Nice Guys™” – The “™” marks the difference between men who are genuinely nice people and men who wail “but I’m a nice guy!”. There are two types, which often overlap in one individual:
1. a guy who believes that the simple act of being decent means that the universe owes him a girlfriend.[defn from Mickle]
2. men who are looking to date a woman with the appearance of a supermodel, and yet they continually whine about how “women don’t like nice guys – they only want good-looking assholes” [source] [more at the NiceGuy archive at Heartless Bitches International]
Now, from a comment by Caroline at Pandagon:
Incidentally, I’ve always thought the Nice Guy(TM) theme song is “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend”, by the Mr. T Experience. It goes like this:
I still haven’t found a girlfriend
though I’ve tried a lot
So can you help me please it’s tougher than I thought.
The odds are pretty good but the goods are pretty odd
still at this point I’d take anything you’ve got.
You see this all the time nice girls in love with jerks
What could they be thinking, tell me how it works?
If I’ve got some problems well I wouldn’t be the first
but the ones I have in mind are even worse
And even Hitler had a girlfriend who he could always call
who’d always be there for him in spite of all his faults.
He was the worst guy ever
reviled and despised
Even Hitler had a girlfriend so why can’t I?
Life is full of contradictions hard to understand
and for every happy woman there’s a lonely man.
Nixon had his puppy, Charles Manson had his clan
but God forbid that I get a girlfriend.
Even Hitler had a girlfriend who he could call his own
to sweeten days of bitterness and feeling all alone.
I’m not as bad as Hitler but it doesn’t mean a thing
since they’d rather be with Hitler more than me
I don’t see why they’d rather be with Hitler more than me.Sadly, no good YouTube videos are forthcoming.)
Filed under: FWW, clarifying-concepts, masculinity, objectification, privilege, sexism
I note your caveats, Huitzil. It seems to be difficult to discuss the “Nice Guy ™” Syndrome without getting bogged down in exactly the sort of simplistic analysis of people which is at the core of the “Nice Guy ™” erroneous paradigm.
So feminists, here’s a practical example of the problem. There’s this girl who is rather sexually active. She’s had sex with three of my friends. She constantly tells me that I am so important to her. Recently, we went to a club and she made out with two guys with me standing next to her, asking me “to take care of her.” When I asked her if she had made out with the other guys so I would have made a move she looked at me like I had shot Bambi’s mother.
So what’s a guy supposed to do? I mean, I don’t really want a relationship that goes beyond friendship. But I also don’t want to be “the shoulder” to cry on, that she can rely on when she’s done making out with some other guy whom she happens to run into after having had a drink too much. This is about respect for each other, don’t you think? So what’s the feminist recommendation?
Actually, if you’re not interested in a sexual/romantic relationship with this girl, then this is not a practical example of the problem at all. But some of your language indicates that you might actually be interested, otherwise why did you ask the question that made her look at you like you shot Bambi’s mother? Perhaps you need to examine yourself a bit more closely regarding where that question came from.
Now, assuming that your claim of no sexual interest is accurate: what you have is a friend who is using you as a chauffeur/bodyguard when she goes out clubbing. If there is no reciprocity in the friendship regarding her “taking care” of you when you go out to get drunk and have fun, then you are justified in resenting the imbalance in who looks after who in this friendship. If you were another girl being used in the same way, this would be an uneven friendship needing some work in just the same way.
But, if you are in fact interested in this girl sexually, while all the time you’ve been claiming that you aren’t, so that previously she’s felt that you are someone that it’s safe to be vulnerable around but now has discovered that you are in fact interested “in that way”, then she’s justified to look at you as if you’ve suddenly taken off a mask and revealed yourself as just another NiceGuy(TM), because that’s exactly what you’ve done.
P.S. to clarify – there’s nothing at all wrong in being friends with someone and suddenly realising that one has now become attracted to them – this happens all the time. Just be honest about it, make sure that this becomes an acknowledged aspect of your interactions together. Maybe the friend will reciprocate if you are honest – honesty is very appealing, because honesty is what generates trust.
However, if the friend can’t cope with saying “thanks but no thanks” and still being a friend, then let the friendship go, maybe feel sad, but not resentful as long as the friend is being honest and respectful – you changed the status between you, the friend responded to that changed status. If you can’t cope with the friend saying “thanks but no thanks” and still being a friend, then let the friendship go, and learn something about yourself – you can’t cope with rejection.
But if you are suddenly a person keeping a secret, and that secret involves your deepest emotional responses to your friend, and they discover that you’ve kept this secret and then feel emotionally betrayed? THAT IS A RATIONAL RESPONSE TO DECEPTION. That is the problem with NiceGuys(TM) – the deception, not the attraction.
Thanks, tigtog, “the feminist recommendation” was more helpful than I thought it would be
.
“Perhaps you need to examine yourself a bit more closely regarding where that question came from.”
Follow-up examination: This is a recent incident, not something completely rationalized. There were times when I was in danger of becoming a nice guy, but now I’m usually *very* good at making women attracted to me (and honesty is an important part thereof), and she knows that – that’s how we met. So part of my reaction here is some semi-conscious fear of relapsing. Apart from that, it’s not like I have ever told her that I wasn’t interested sexually. I just decided for myself that I am not looking for a long-term relationship right now. But despite being good at making women interested in me, I’m not as “playful” with my sexuality as she is and as most of the people around us are and I actually told her why.
Maybe that’s the problem – she may assume that she can’t fool around with me like she can with others without causing emotional baggage of some sort or another. And she is probably right about that. And maybe – following further introspection – I really resent the fact that I’m not able to do that myself and not her surprise about my asking.
You’re absolutely right about honesty and deception, although in matters involving humans and sexuality that’s much more difficult to enact than to write about. I thought my question was completely honest, more about what *she* wanted from me than about what I wanted from her. And yes, there’s probably also an ego/rejection element involved. “You know that wouldn’t be good and you/we can’t deal with that” would have been perfectly ok, but that look actually made me feel a little deceived given her previous statements of appreciation.
Again, you’re absolutely right about honesty and deception being the key to avoiding nice-guyism. I’ll talk this over with her.
This may actually be an essential aspect of the idea that “women say they want nice guys but they always go for jerks” – there’s a confusion between how people want to play and how people want to live (as well as the idea that all women should have exactly the same motivations in their personal relationships, and that if one woman (or some women) doesn’t do the “supposed-to” thing, then that means all women are lying about “what they really want”).
It sounds like maybe you have “emotional baggage” written all over you. That’s not necessarily bad – you want mutual emotional engagement and respect, and don’t want to settle for superficial physical attraction with no deeper connection. There is nothing wrong with that.
But there’s nothing wrong with her not wanting all that at this particular stage of her life, either. Deep emotional relationships take up a lot of time and energy, and maybe she’s got other things she wants to spend that time and energy on right now. Her not wanting that with you right now doesn’t mean that she’ll never want a relationship full of “emotional baggage” either (although when she does want that it won’t necessarily be with you). Just that right now uncomplicated sexual attention from blokes without that emotional baggage is physically gratifying without involving emotional work, and that’s where she’s at.
This sort of thinking about sex and relationships can also often be very hard to articulate, for both men and women. We’re acculturated to romantic myths and expectations, and this more pragmatic view is considered deeply unromantic. Feminists generally aren’t great fans of the romantic view – love and affection are great, and most humans have a deep need for both – but romantic twaddle screws both men and women up by distorting expectations.
tigtog,
Possibly, part of it.
No, it’s not written anywhere (well, I don’t think it is, but I guess that’s for other people do decide). But as I said, I told her about my baggage (and she told me about hers, too)- and that may well have been the point where she decided to not risk playing with me sexually while I interpreted her recent fooling around/drunk making out with random guys and then coming back to tell me “how much I mean to her” as her way to ask me to make a move – which is why I felt deceived (and somehow “nice-guyed”
) by the dismissive look she gave me when I asked whether that was the case. But maybe the look was punishment for asking something that was possibly obvious to her? Well, I guess I have to ask her.
Very difficult, indeed. And I abstractly share your sceptic view of romantic dilusions. That said, romance is about being part of a story that is bigger than life, it’s about deep rooted human desires, about fate, doom, and redemption, it’s about earthly transcendence. No sexual pragmatism will ever be able to kill that, whether we like that or not, whether it makes our lives more difficult or not.
Oh, you’ve got it bad
Of course, I do see that appeal in the romantic view of politics, work, sport and so many other aspects of life (not just love), it’s just that as a middle-aged cynic I’m not quite so swept away by it all. I don’t think it’s helpful to just shrug one’s soldiers and say that people are naturally romantic and prefer romance above pragmatism. There’s a lot of self-interested cultural institutions that know that their privileges are reinforced by encouraging the masses in the escapism and folly of romantic worldviews rather than encouraging a rationalist worldview of analysis and questioning.
Transcendence is a particularly tricky term, I think. By definition it must be lonely, because if lots of people share that sensibility then it can’t be transcending the human condition, it’s just another part of it. What is the attraction in seeking something that aloof from all others around one?
tigtog,
*very* good question! Alas, I don’t have time to reflect on that right now. But I will, and I will reply here (probably tomorrow).
tigtog,
sorry still no time for an elaborate philosophy of romance, but sorted out the nice-guy-issue in a long talk. It was this –
“she may assume that she can’t fool around with me like she can with others without causing emotional baggage of some sort or another.”
- and the reason is that we’ve already become too close to each other to pretend it wouldn’t mean anything if we just fooled around. Which sucks for both of us, I think, but it may be true – as long as we don’t want something exclusive. So maybe that’s another kind of “nice guy” problem… providing too much emotional value and thereby creating a situation in which women who may not want a relationship at that moment still would not want to risk that connection or create assumed complications even if that means they have to make out with someone they have no connection with. Does that make sense?
Nice guy files contd. – so said girl had more sex and apparently fell in love with a “bad boy” friend of mine who’s emotionally freezing her out, and she actually digs that. But as even desired pain still hurts when it hits, it’s great when there is a shoulder to cry on. Mine was available again…. I briefly considered leaving her on her own after bad boy left her standing in the rain but I just couldn’t do it – I actually like her too much to not care.
I still don’t want a relationship with her, and I certainly won’t fool around with her given where we are now. So a) I’m so not trying to get into her pants and b) particularly not *by being that shoulder she can cry on”. But at the same time I hate that I’m apparently not being perceived as a sexual being by her – and by now I really think that is because I provided too much emotional value for her too quickly – luckily, there are enough women around who do perceive me as a sexual being for me to be able to not blame this on my general self.
So I came to think that maybe that’s another root aspect of the core of the “nice guy” problem: Sexual confidence and male need to be respected as a sexual being. Female friends not appreciating their “nice guy” male friends as men – not by doing anything sexual with them, but by simply by respecting them as sexual personae. When it comes down to it, while I want to be there for her as a friend, I also want to be seen and respected as a MALE friend, not as an asexual being.
Unless you are someone who views women that you don’t want to have sex with as “asexual beings”, then why assume that this is how your friend views you?
How on earth is a woman supposed to “respect a male friend’s sexual personae” while interacting as a friend? Other than by using male pronouns rather than referring to you as “it”? Although I doubt that’s what you mean.
Serious question, because I’m bewildered as to your meaning, and my immediate reaction is that it is a bizarre concept. ETA: Not being sexually interested in you is not at all the same thing as viewing you as an asexual being, but you seem to be conflating the two.
tigtog,
“Serious question, because I’m bewildered as to your meaning, and my immediate reaction is that it is a bizarre concept. ETA: Not being sexually interested in you is not at all the same thing as viewing you as an asexual being, but you seem to be conflating the two.
yeah, I can see why it’s not entirely clear what I mean, it’s something I sense and hard to put in writing. I’ll try, though.
Example. I have no interest whatsoever of having sex with my best female friend, a married woman, and she doesn’t have any interest in having sex with me – but when you’re so close to someone that you’re sharing stories about your sexual fantasies and problems (I’m rather certain I know more about her sexuality than her husband) there must be an implicit understanding and respect for each other’s sexuality, because we know our brains well enough to understand what’s going on inside them when we’re talking to each other about these kinds of things. With the girl in this story that’s different, even though the content of the stuff we’re talking about, that she’s crying about on my shoulder, isn’t very much.
In a way it feels like I’m being “objectified.” Women often complain about men not relating to them as complete human beings but rather as a collection of body parts. Here it’s different, but also similar – I feel like I’m being regarded as the shoulder, but the rest of myself, especially my being *male* and sexual, is not being respected. I don’t resent her for doing that, after all, I’m the one offering my support, but there’s still a nagging feeling deep inside that I felt may be at the core of this whole problem.
Does that make more sense?
It sounds like you are expecting your two friends to offer exactly the same behaviour to you, even though they are different people. You also appear to be universalising aspects of this one friend’s behaviour as if she is representative of all other women.
What if your friend finds the whole idea of sharing her sexual fantasies/problems with ANYONE, not just you, horrendously uncomfortable? That it has nothing at all to do with whether or not she respects your sexuality and everything to do with her own personal boundaries?
I personally would find a “friend” EXPECTING to discuss their and my sexual fantasies/problems as a matter of course to be as creepy as fuck.
tigtog,
we seem to talk past each other…
“It sounds like you are expecting your two friends to offer exactly the same behaviour to you, even though they are different people.”
I’m not a complete idiot, thank you very much. I was using a different situation as an example of what I think is the difference between the two things I mentioned but you said you weren’t quite sure how to distinguish – (a) being respected as a sexual being, b) not being sexually interested in someone).
This has nothing to do with expecting anyone to share anything, but with the expectation that *if* something (in this vein) is shared, there needs to be – full – mutual personal acceptance and respect between the people sharing it. That’s what’s missing, in my opinion.
As I can’t seem to communicate what I mean, and as apparently, not even the “objectification” comparison seemed to get my point across, I’ll try this – don’t you think there’s a conceptual difference between “not being interested in someone sexually” and “not contemplating the possibility of being sexually interested”? Personally, I find the former to be respectful of another person’s sexuality, but not the latter. In the former case, a person is considered fully in an interaction, in the latter, a whole part of that person is disregarded.
I ignored your objectification comparison because I think it misrepresented the concept of objectification totally.
I glimpse the nuance you are attempting to create, but I don’t really see it. As a het woman, I have lesbian friends whom I am not interested in sexually and whom I do not contemplate the possibility of becoming sexually interested. I’m just not sexually attracted to them. I have exactly the same lack of sexual interest in my friendships with several het male friends – just because they are male and I am a het female doesn’t mean that there is an undercurrent of sexual attraction (although with some male friends there is that undercurrent). However, in none of the cases of friends to whom I feel no sexual attraction do I feel that I am negating their sexual personae by this fact about our friendships – that aspect of their lives is essentially irrelevant to our friendship apart from interactions with their dates/partners, whom I freely acknowledge and who have often also become friends. If the undercurrent of sexual attraction is just not there, it can’t be manufactured just by thinking that it should be there.
As to your situation: in any friendship where one person is not feeling fully respected, there needs to be an examination of the basis for the friendship IMO. I’m just not sure that the convolutions of one particular friendship are an especially useful way to make broad generalisations about relationships between the genders as a whole (and especially when even looking at a purely personal level we’ve only heard one side of the story). Your personal troubles with this friendship do not actually provide any particularly useful insight into the NiceGuy(TM) phenomenon that I can see – you just seem to be shoehorning your personal dramas into a larger societal narrative that does not appear to be a particularly good fit, except for the fact that just like any old NiceGuy(TM) you are attempting to universalise your problems with this one girl into a dissertation on women in general.
tigtog,
“I ignored your objectification comparison because I think it misrepresented the concept of objectification totally.”
I think it fits pretty well.
“except for the fact that just like any old NiceGuy(TM) you are attempting to universalise your problems with this one girl into a dissertation on women in general.”
Well, occasionally, “the personal is political”… I didn’t say so first.
Pouring one’s emotions all over another person is the essence of a Subjectifed interaction, and is the total opposite of an Objectification. It may well be exploitative, but the nature of the exploitation is not one of objectification.
“The personal is political” refers to the difference between public policy and the culture of domestic privacy. It doesn’t mean that every personal conflict necessarily has a political dimension, although many do. I’m not seeing it in this one – you’ve already indicated that this young woman is not typical of your interactions with the opposite sex – that you have no particular trouble finding other dates, and that you have at least one other woman just-a-friend who doesn’t spark this sense of resentment at a lack of reciprocity and mutual consideration. So why the attempt to generalise the dysfunctional dynamics of this one friendship into a general thing about “what women do”?
tigtog,
“So why the attempt to generalise the dysfunctional dynamics of this one friendship into a general thing about “what women do”?”
No, I was actually thinking not of “what women do” but what men perceive and what I think may be a core misunderstanding or misperception with respect to the nice guy thing. Why in this case? Because well, it just feels like it fits here – think of an extended social circle that she seems to want to check out sexually, and the person with the shoulder is apparently the only only one she’s not even considering sexually. Now I’m luckily in an emotional state that allows me to rationalize this and abstractly analyse whatever little nagging feeling is left, but I imagine not just a couple of other men would have trouble doing that.
I actually believe her when she says that I mean more to her than those guys – so not considering me sexually may even be compliment from her in some sense. But that’s where I figured this may be part of a general communication/ perception problem that may contribute to the problems of relationships with nice guys (and “nice girls”). And I think this has to do with what I – probably not very eloquently – called “respect for one’s sexual persona.”
I’m not sure it’s helpful to limit the definition of “objectification” to the physical appearance, just because that’s the way it is commonly used in feminism. In my opinion, occasionally this kind of “objectification” of body parts can even mean the opposite – a woman or man who’s not usually interacting sexually with other people may consider an “objectifying” compliment about their appearance as very subjectifying as the perceived range of their being has been enlarged.
You seem to have decided that there is some choice here about who she is sexually attracted to. Why? People feel how they feel.
From what you’ve said, she is very clear about not being interested in you sexually, and also clear about having affection for you non-sexually. Lack of clear communication from her end doesn’t appear to be a problem. Your perception appears to be that non-sexual affection from a woman to a man is somehow wrong. So is it the inability to separate affection from sex that is the NiceGuy(TM)’s problem?
The concept of objectification has a much longer history than just feminist theorising. The OED first cites the term in a publication on metaphysics from 1859 in a discussion of selfhood. While you are right that objectification is not just physical ogling, to me your ideas of what might be “subjectifying” don’t ring true.
I think the main problem with the nice guy type that is being described here( which I personally know all too well) is that as someone put it, these kinds of guys and possibly others too, seem to view sex from a woman as a form of charity or love at least on some weird level, when really it is just that-sex …period. I went through more than a year of this kind of dilemma with one guy in particular whom I actually did give into, on sort of a feeling of well, maybe just maybe there is a point to the beleif that a woman can be charitable or affectionate through sex, mind you I was considerably younger and less expierienced at the time, but what I came to find was that when you do give in to this idea, it actually turns out that nothing is enough for this type of guy. Its not enough that you already gave in and against your better judgement or preferances gave him a little bit, so to speak, because then he decides that if he cant have it whenever he wants it then you are wrong for that too, so it becomes a real issue of damn near unofficial prostitution ( I help you out somehow or other whether its monetary or not and claim that its out of the goodness of my heart and you are supposed to give sex in return) on the guys part and ( maybe I do owe him something or just plain fine let the baby have his bottle for the dont care types) on the womans part. The really odd thing about this though is that these same guys have a passionate hatred towards real prostitutes, ironically enough, who are exactly the type of women that from a logical point of view should be their “dream girls”. but on a second note I also know that these types will and often have/do solicit prostitutes, however their attitude seems to be that if the woman feels the same way they do about the whole tit for tat view of sex and is honest about it, plus wants to be in charge of the transaction (the nerve right?) then she’s a peice of garbage. Go figure.
tigtog,
Sure, people feel how they feel. But they usually have reasons for feeling one way or another, and not rarely it’s possible to identify those reaons, or at least attribute meaning to their temporal occurrence. The thing here is that her attitude towards me changed when I offered the shoulder.
I have to add at this point, though, that something in our dynamics has changed again, in that, when we met again (at a club) she apologized for monopolizing my shoulder and told me to go and have fun with other girls – which I think falls into both the balancing and the “respect the sexual persona” category.
“So is it the inability to separate affection from sex that is the NiceGuy(TM)’s problem?”
I think there’s a lot to this theory. And I think it’s absolutely compatible with my “sexual respect” hypothesis – someone (woman or man) with low sexual confidence (who doesn’t feel their sexuality is respected) will likely have a much harder time separating affection and sexuality than someone with a lot of sexual confidence. I mean, at best, those two come together. So they’re not entirely unrelated languages in human interactions.
I find it quite understandable that someone who’s not fluent in both languages would try to substitute one for the other – and for nice guys that means occasionally being “nice” where they would rather like to be sexual, and unsurprisingly, mistankingly interpreting affection (niceness) from a woman as a sexual signal. That lack of communication skills, of course, doesn’t justify bad behaviour when the misunderstanding is becoming apparent. But it would explain it. I once read a great quote from somone living next to an indigenous tribe in colonial times who thought for three years that what he thought meant “yes” (in his dealings with that tribe) actually meant “no”…
I’ll leave the objectification theorizing at that.