Pity the Nice Guy™. Please. His world is all topsy-turvy. All he wants is to know exactly what all women want, so that he can have sex with them. But it turns out that different women want different things. Some women believe firmly in traditional gender roles, while others are believers in egalitarianism. Some women are all about hooking up, others want a commitment. And this means that a Nice Guy™ is completely unable to get it right on every single date. Quelle horreur!
The latest bit of Nice Guy™ wankery comes courtesy of Kay S. Hymowitz, writing in City Journal, who explains that the rules just don’t matter anymore, and that’s just terrible for the menz. She had written a previous article arguing that today’s men are too childish (which is another stupid stereotype for another day), and men wrote in to say nuh-uh, it’s all girls’ fault:
It would be easy enough to hold up some of the callow ranting that the piece inspired as proof positive of the child-man’s existence. But the truth is that my correspondents’ objections gave me pause. Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.
Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.” You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like AmericanWomenSuck, NoMarriage, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and Eternal Bachelor (“Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).
Ah, yes, the mating call of the MRA: “Women suck and they just want our money and they totally suck and they’re slutty and icky and dirty and I really hate them because they don’t want to be with me.” You’d think, at some point, that these men would be happy that they’d figured out that women were all evil whorebags, and be satisfied with being single. I mean, if women really are as universally evil as the MRAs claim, why would men want to be with them?
Now, I would tend to think that this level of anger comes from a deap-seated hatred of women, one with roots probably going back to childhood. Through self-examination, these men might be able to overcome these problems. But Hymowitz knows better. These men are really upset that women aren’t all on the same page:
The reason for all this anger, I submit, is that the dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional. And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion. Under these harsh conditions, young men are looking for a new framework for understanding what (or, as they might put it, WTF) women want. So far, their answer is unlikely to satisfy anyone—either women or, in the long run, themselves.
Ah, yes. What do women want? Let me ask a different question: what do men want? Well, it depends, you might say. Some men want a family. Some want sex. Some want an equal. Some are looking for a homemaker. Some are looking for someone to snuggle with on a cold winter’s night, and some are looking for someone to cuckold them while they hide in the closet and take pictures. If there are 150 million American men, there are 250 million different things that those men want.
And the same goes for women. There is no one thing that “women want.” Different women want different things. Some are looking for a friend and companion that will be with them as they build careers. Some are looking for a potential father. Some are looking for a night of commitment-free sex. Some are looking for a threesome. Some are looking for all of the above, or none of the above. And many women — and many men — aren’t sure exactly what they’re looking for.
Confusing? Yes, it is. Welcome to the 21st century. Two hundred years ago, it was easy — everyone was supposed to want the exact same thing. Of course, many women and many men were deeply unhappy then.
Now, men and women have probably been a mystery to one another since the time human beings were in trees; one reason people developed so many rules around courtship was that they needed some way to bridge the Great Sexual Divide
The older I get, the more I believe that women and men are a mystery to each other only because we are constantly told from birth that women and men are a mystery to each other, who speak different languages and are unable to actually communicate. It turns out that men and women are a lot alike. There may be minor differences, but nothing that can’t be figured out by asking questions. Indeed, much of the trouble in relationships could be solved by teaching our children that if they have questions about that boy or girl they’re interested in dating, the best thing to do is just bite the bullet and go ask them. And that if they get asked an honest question, then give an honest answer. Instead, we teach boys and girls that they have to deal with girls and boys through an elaborate system of games and deception. It’s a wonder any relationships work at all.
By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him. Sure, these rules could end in a midlife crisis and an unhealthy fondness for gin, but their advantage was that anyone with an emotional IQ over 70 could follow them.
Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.
By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.
And you know, there are a lot of women who are into those things. And a lot of women who aren’t. A lot of men aren’t, too — for example, I don’t even know where my triceps are, and I assume they probably aren’t toned. And if a woman wanted to date me, but was insistent that my triceps were toned…well, it wouldn’t work out. Because I tone my triceps for no earthly being.
But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Carpentier on Jezebel, a popular website for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, wonders the ordinary guy with only middling psychic powers, which is it tonight?
Well, here’s a way to find out, guy with middling psychic powers: ask the girl. She’ll tell you.
Or maybe she won’t, but then you’ll know that she’s just looking to play games. And you’ll have to decide whether you want to play along.
Now, maybe the woman gives you an answer you don’t like. Maybe you want a relationship, and she just wants sex. You know what you do then? Thank her for her time, and move along. Because there’s another woman out there who does want a relationship, and you’re looking for her. And there’s another man out there who’s just looking for sex, and you’re getting in his way.
In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning. But plenty of others are looking for Mr. Darcy. In her interviews with 100 unmarried, college-educated young men and women, Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.
Please. You know what you do when you go out on a first date with a woman who’s really upset that you didn’t open the car for her (or did, wev)? You don’t go out on a second date with her. The reverse is true, too. First dates aren’t binding, long-term contracts. They’re a chance to meet someone and decide if they’re right for you. If you find a person whose idea of a relationship is different than yours, then you’ve probably found a person you don’t want to build a relationship with.
I don’t believe in relationships where the man is supposed to be the guy in charge, and so I’m going to avoid them. If I meet a woman who expects me to plan every date, she’s going to be disappointed in me, and I’m going to be disappointed in her, so why would I be upset that she didn’t want to date me again? If she and I are so incompatible, I don’t want to waste my time dating her again, either.
The cultural muddle is at its greatest when the dinner check arrives. The question of who grabs it is a subject of endless discussion on the hundreds of Internet dating sites. The general consensus among women is that a guy should pay on a first date: they see it as a way for him to demonstrate interest. Many men agree, but others find the presumption confusing. Aren’t the sexes equal? In fact, at this stage in their lives, women may well be in a better position to pick up the tab: according to a 2005 study by Queens College demographer Andrew Beveridge, college-educated women working full-time are earning more than their male counterparts in a number of cities, including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis.
This is a bit of a muddle, but only because we’re processing through the change from the era when men worked and women didn’t to an era where everyone’s equal, and that means that the bill question isn’t cut-and-dried. But again, so what? My ex-wife wasn’t overly impressed that we split the bill on our first date (I was being egalitarian, and I was also poor), but it wasn’t a deal-breaker for her, because she understood that it’s not cut-and-dried. She didn’t let a minor faux pas become bigger than it was.
By and large, I think moving to a he-or-she-who-asks-pays rule is probably good, but it will take time to work itself out. And until it does, everyone should be patient and let it work itself out. And women and men alike can show patience in that process — and those that can’t might not be worth another go-round.
Sure, girls can—and do—ask guys out for dinner and pick up the check without missing a beat. But that doesn’t clarify matters, men complain. Women can take a Chinese-menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday night and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day. This isn’t equality, say the male-contents; it’s a ratification of female privilege and, worse, caprice. “Women seemingly have decided that they want it all (and deserve it, too),” Kevin from Ann Arbor writes. “They want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual.”
Well…I want to be able to stay home with my daughter and come back at the position I left. You see, being able to be with your kids isn’t simply something women want, it’s something parents want. You make choices and sacrifices, but wanting the best outcome isn’t the end of the world.
Again, though, look at all the theys in the above sentence, all the painting of women as a monolithic entity. But they aren’t. Some women want to pay for movie tickets and melt at a single rose for Valentine’s Day. Some women want the executive position and really hope their husband will stay home with the kids. Different women want different things.
This attraction to bad boys is by far guys’ biggest complaint about contemporary women.
No it isn’t. Not remotely. It’s Nice Guys’™ biggest complaint about contemporary women. The “bad boy” exists primarily in the fevered imagination of Nice Guys™ everywhere, primarily defined as the guy the girl I’d like to be dating is dating.
Young men grew up hearing from their mothers, their teachers, and Oprah that women wanted sensitive, kind, thoughtful, intelligent men who were in touch with their feminine sides, who shared their feelings, who enjoyed watching Ally McBeal rather than Beavis and Butt-Head. Yeah, right, sneer a lot of veterans of the scene. Women don’t want Ashley Wilkes; they’re hot for Rhett Butler, for macho men with tight abs and an emotional range to match.
Yes, some are. Other women are most certainly attracted to sensitive men. Other women are looking for a mixture of the two extremes — a sensitive man who can also be assertive when he needs to be.
According to a “Recovering Nice Guy” writing on Craigslist, the female preference for jerks and “assholes,” as they’re also widely known, lies behind women’s age-old lament, “What happened to all the nice guys?” His answer: “You did. You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Women, he says, are actually not attracted to men who hold doors for them, give them hinted-for Christmas gifts, or listen to their sorrows. Such a man, our Recovering Nice Guy continues, probably “came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.”
Yes, I remember, we’ve dealt with this asshole before. And that’s what he is — an asshole. Because only an asshole could write, “You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy,” and not realize that he was betraying a completely facile and stereotypical idea of What Women and Men are Supposed to Want. Men want sex, women want emotional intimacy. If you’re a guy, and you’re a friend to a girl, she owes you sex. That’s the payback. Never is it noted that the guy might have received emotional intimacy from his female friend — what guy feels emotion? No, he wanted sex, and didn’t get it, and now he’s gonna whine about it.
There’s a ton more to the article — it goes on and on an on, talking about the Seduction Community and Darwinist Dating and how women really want to marry a rich guy, before coming to the obvious conclusion:
Nevertheless, you might ask, are there really so many dating Darwinists on the prowl? Is dating really hell, as the website would have it, for the majority of contemporary SYMs and Fs? Probably not. It’s a safe bet that for all the confusions and humiliations of dating, most men will still try to be nice guys who say “please” and avoid asking a woman about her sexual history until, say, the third date. And if the past is any guide, most of them, even the most masterly PUAs, will eventually find themselves coaching Little League on weekends. In a national survey of young, heterosexual men, the National Marriage Project, a research organization at Rutgers University, found that the majority of single subjects hoped to marry and have kids someday.
Um…yeah. You see, as most of us who live here in the real world know, dating isn’t particularly hellish. There are awkward moments and bad dates and people you don’t want to see again, but there are funny stories and entertaining anecdotes and every so often, a person you really, really are glad you met. Equality hasn’t ended dating, it’s just made it more chaotic and free. And while it may take a bit more time to find the person who fits with you, in the end you’re more likely to. And that makes all the difference.
(H/T Jezebel)
See, now that quote just doesn’t make sense. For a start, Scarlett preferred Ashley -this was the point of all the tension in the story. Secondly I’m not convinced you can draw Ashley good, Rhett bad guy. They’ve both got a lot of points where they are nasty chaps, and both got redeeming moments.
VK,
If anything, Rhett actually is the one who more closely fits the “Nice Guy” stereotype: he is a friend to Scarlett through a succession of two husbands, two children by said husbands, the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction. He is financially and emotionally supportive of her. Even once he proposes to her, he claims it’s just because he wants her physically, and he never admits that he loves her until he no longer does. He does the precise bullshitty “Nice Guy” thing of expecting Scarlett to catch on to his true feelings for her and to reciprocate them without his actually communicating those feelings, because dammit they’re clearly soulmates. He claims he couldn’t tell her the truth because she’s such a stone-cold bitch.
In contrast, Ashley Wilkes is the “bad boy” who mostly feels only lust for Scarlett, kisses Scarlett while still married to Melanie, and whom Scarlett adores because of a long-lasting teenage fantasy about a blond knight rather than because they have any real emotional connection.
I think the rather illiterate author quoted in Jeff’s post confuses the two because she goes for the obvious cultural markers of Nice Guy (Ashley is light-complexioned, obeys social norms — e.g. by fighting in a war that he believes is hopeless — and is very overt about liking music and poetry) and Bad Boy (Rhett is dark-complexioned, funds a brothel, disregards social norms).
I don’t really blame the Nice Guys for their asshattishness. They were sold a false bill of goods by society – they got a mishmash of feminism and whining patriarchal women to somehow create this bizarre construct of what a man should be to be successful with women, and they tried to be that.
They tried to be sensitive and chivalrous and all that jazz, and ended up being a pathetic little door mat… and then were shocked and bewildered when they found out that no woman is sexually attracted to a yes-man.
Now, the difference between a normal guy and a “nice guy” is how they responded to that. A normal guy realizes how pathetic he was, and takes it in stride to simply be stronger person. A “nice guy” gets bitter and hates women for rejecting his attempts to suck up to them.
We all make mistakes – the difference is what happens when we stare them in the face. The nasty bloggers we see online are the ones who cling tenuously to the idea that doing exactly what they think women want them to do means that women will automagically love him, no matter who or how many people from how many walks of life have told him that he’s being an idiot.
Stubbornness will always lead you to trouble.
edit: that being said, anybody who uses the term “child-man” to describe men who choose not to settle down and spend the rest of their lives working a 9-5/6/7 job and raising children is a hateful patriarchal bigot in just as many ways as the MRAs they’re mocking. They’re just a more conventional variety.
I agree with 95% of this post, but I just have to comment to register my annoyance with this Nice Guy stereotype. The angle for this being a feminist issue is that when guy complains because a woman won’t date him, but prefers assholes, he is assuming that women “owe” him sex because he was nice to them. This interpretation doesn’t make sense, and I think it perpetuates the problem.
Person A is attracted to person B. A and B become close friends. B rejects A’s romantic overtures and chooses person C. A thinks C is a jerk. A gets upset at B. This is not sexism. This is human nature. Now, if A generalizes his or her complaints about B to B’s entire gender, yes, that is sexism. But the original A being upset about B is just emotional defensiveness. A more emotionally mature person than average will just feel sad about the rejection but move on without anger. The average person, however, will get angry.
Even the generalizing part is something that the average person will do after this has happened to them more than once. Yes, men do this frequently. So do women. “Why do guys always go for the blond bimbos / bitches?” is its own cliche. I can even think of at least one time each when I heard a gay man and a lesbian generalize this to their own sex, although this seems a lot more rare, presumably due to the “wait, I’m one of them” problem.
It seems to me the correct approach is the one mostly taken in this post, and explain that everyone has different desires, you just need to keep looking until you find someone with compatible desires, and call them on sexist generalizations. I would also add that if you keep chasing after people who have similar issues that prevent them from being your match, the problem is less likely to be the entire other gender than it is to be you and how you are going about trying to find potential partners.
But to label the initial “A is angry at B for liking C” as sexism rather than just emotional immaturity 1) makes it more difficult to help A resolve their issues because the cause has been misidentified, and 2) provides the misogynistic assholes who blame women generally an opposite foil who dismisses the real problem. It escalates the battle of the sexes rather than deflating sexism by pointing out that this is all about individuals looking for individual fulfillment.
NiceGuys are just a single segment of People Who Feel Like They Were Mistreated. Perhaps the most defensible niceguy complaint is that they are the target o’ the moment. that’s my theory, anyway ;)
Everyone here has probably heard a gazillion people of both sexes complain about how someone led them on. How the poor soul gave their potential partner just what s/he said s/he wanted, and still got dumped or ignored. Or how said potential partner turned out to want something different. Or changed his/her mind about the situation once the poor soul had given him/her what s/he wanted.
nice guys, normal Mistreated People, I think they’re the same thing at heart:
(A)”I wanted more emotion and I thought she loved me but after we slept together over the weekend it seemed like she was just using me for sex, led on by a fake promise of love”
is not really especially different from
(B)”I wanted more sex and I thought she was hot for me but after I spent my weekend giving her emotional support it seemed like she was just using me as a shrink, led on by a fake promise of sex.”
And it’s not especially different if you reverse both (or one) of the sexes in the above examples.
And perhaps I am alone in this, but I have seen plenty of people in category (A) whine, cry, and spend days/weeks/years complaining to other people about how they were entitled, dammit, to be treated differently. And our gender roles make (A) much more acceptable for women. [not a good thing, of course. But true, I think.] Similarly, our gender roles make (B) much more difficult for women to say.
And I notice that 1) we categorize people sort of negatively no matter what, and 2) the B category is ‘worse.’ A, and female? you’re just being a whiny girl who should have known better. B, and female? you must be a slut. A, and male? you don’t have any complaint, dude, you got LAID! B, and male? You’re just an entitled Nice Guy. And so on. (NOTE: this is my attempt to summarize society’s characterizations. They’re not my characterizations.)
But in ALL of those examples, the thing that ‘justifies’ the complaint is, at heart, arguably the same feeling of being entitled to something, if that feeling exists. that entitlement doesn’t just exist in NiceGuys.
So while I feel as much (or as little) sympathy for a nice guy (B male) as I do for anyone else, I don’t generally like to label them. they’re no better or worse than anyone else.
I think Sailorman just explained my point much better than I did.
“B rejects A’s romantic overtures and chooses person C. ”
This is the problem with the descriptions that Sailorman and Decnavda are putting forward: they claim that Nice Guys and their female counterparts actually do state what they want and are simply expressing their hurt that when they did so, they got rejected. That’s different from the situation Jeff dwells upon, which is the Nice Guy who never overtly says, “Hey, I like you as more than a friend — will you go on a date with me?” Or for the stereotypically female equivalent, “Hey, I like you as more than a hookup buddy — will you go on a date with me?”
However, here’s the problem with equating friendship and sex when it comes to whether someone was getting “led on”: our culture does see sex as belonging properly to an intimate monogamous relationship (if you have sexual relationships with multiple people at once, you’re out of the mainstream), whereas friendship is less cabined; we are expected to have multiple friendships at once. We are taught that sex ideally is experienced in a loving relationship; we’re not taught that friendship ideally is experienced in a sexual relationship.
Due to these cultural biases (which I admit to agreeing with to some degree), a guy who expects that he should be able to trade his emotional intimacy (friendship) with a woman for physical intimacy (sex) comes off sounding a lot worse than a woman who thinks that her physical intimacy should be connected with emotional intimacy. I personally give my female friends a hard time for making such a mistake (“did he say he was going to call? then why is he obligated to call? if you really want to talk to him, you call him!”), but I think it is more excusable than the reverse. The reverse does come off as commodifying women.
Actually, PG, I think you are misquoting me; I am not making that claim at all.
I realize you’re not the type to do so intentionally, and I will explain: Both of my “example whiner” scenarios are based only on the wants and thoughts of the whiner and (intentionally) don’t mention whether or not s/he said anything about it to the other person. Recheck them and you’ll see what I mean.
Emotions are what they are. You can feel led on or misled* by someone even if they had not the slightest intent to lead you on. Their actions may put more of the blame on you, but your feelings are what they are. only the culpability changes, not the underlying emotions.
*Random comment: Almost forty years and my brain still thinks there’s a verb “to misle.” So I am constantly fighting against pronouncing misled as “MYsild”. Though in all honesty, “to misle” would be a great verb: “Stop misling me, you confuser, you!”
I think that some of the commenters here are missing the central point of the post.
The point is that most of these complaints that are coming from young men about dating and women would be solved if they opened their mouths and TALKED to the people they are trying to date. This would also solve the biggest problem that “Nice Guys” have, their feeling of not getting what they wanted from the women they encounter. If they told these women what they wanted, and accept what these women are willing to give them, or do not and move on, then their complaints would be null and void.
The point is that there seems to be this need to find a monolithic “single answer to end all questions” when no such thing exists re: communication between the sexes.
Sailorman,
I understood from “I wanted more emotion and I thought she loved me… a fake promise of love” and “I wanted more sex and I thought she was hot for me… a fake promise of sex” that the people you’re describing had some rational basis for thinking that their desires were reciprocated and that some actual promise, albeit one that was breached and thus was false, had been made. If you’re saying that they believed that someone felt and promised love/sex when no such promise had been made, then we are talking about people who are not merely emotional but actually irrational — they are claiming nonexistent promises.
I think that for every NiceGuy complaining that he spent a lot of emotional capital on some HotBitch who chose an Asshat over the NicGuy, there is a girl out there who is wondering why the NiceGuy is spending his emotion capital on the HotBitch (who is really just an Asshat) instead of her.
I think the question for the the NiceGuys is: “If you are devoting all of your energy toward pursuing this Bitch you describe, how are you any better than the Bitch, who you accuse of picking the asshole over you?”
The moral, of course, is to not date asses of either gender.
I was told by an ex-Playboy Bunny that not only does a nice guy finish last, he leans on his elbows in the process.
O.K., now in all seriousness – is the complaint here “I did all the right things, so why didn’t she have sex with me?” Because if that’s the process you’re working, then too bad for you.
“O.K., now in all seriousness – is the complaint here “I did all the right things, so why didn’t she have sex with me?” Because if that’s the process you’re working, then too bad for you.”
RonF — High five.
I love this post, Jeff!
(I don’t really have anything else to add.)
First: excellent post.
I used to have an otherwise quite good teacher who would periodically complain about this phenomenon of female friends complaining to him that there were “no nice guys” whilst ignoring the obvious “nice guy” sitting right in front of them. Unfortunately, none of us in the class felt able to suggest that if he let go of the bitterness and perhaps communicated an interest, his dating life might be a bit cheerier.
Second:
Awesome – I thought jokes about “misling” were only made in my family (decades after my great-grandmother told my grandmother she had been ‘MYsild’)!
To play something moving along the lines toward devil’s advocate however . . .
The quoted sentence above is, I believe, a fact. If we believe that the personal is political, then the men are all becoming immature or angry or whatever it is that is making them marry later and later, if at all.
Are men just suddenly irrationally angry (or rationally angry for some other reason)? Are men suddenly getting immature? What is it about society that makes men less willing than they were in the past to “settle down”?
First of all, great post, especially in the way that you continually try to break the generalizations away and emphasize how people (of both sexes) generalize their approach to dating and then get frustrated and then whiny when it doesn’t apply to every individual they meet and are attacted to.
However I would like to comment on this idea that was first brought up by Decnavda.
While I agree completely with their assesment of that particular scenario, I think what gets under NiceGuys craw more often is a slight variation, in which
Person A is attracted to person B, but is uncomfortable/uncertain how to verbalize it. Person B isn’t attracted to person A (or perhaps feels a certain closeness, but not to the extent that person A would want) — and a friendship develops, because there are similarities.
Person A MISREADS this (because as you’ve indicated — they didn’t openly communicate) as part of a process leading to a wanted conclusion, and begins a process of jumping through their own imagined set of hoops, assigning certain amounts of points and value to certain friend-like things they do as helping them move slowly beyond the friend zone towards the valhalla of dating/sex/validation/whatever.
Person B doesn’t say anything, even if person A’s motions are blantantly transparent.
Person B dates Person C, who is clear in their intentions — and also possibly the complete personality opposite of person A, who then feels betrayed and crushed by a rejection that technically never happened.
and worst of all, Person A continues to be the friend — lamely attempting to be “there for” person B more than person C, in some passive aggressive attempt to continue to be an available option once Person B finally figures it out, and eventually turns to them for true love expressed through sex — while at the same time projecting their own self-loathing for not coming out with their feelings earlier/being “burned” on all other people/genders who remind them of this whole bad soap opera.
I think a lot of times it’s not that men think all women are alike — it’s that a lot of men think women only see them a certain way, and to overcome that they must go through all sorts of machinations and deceptions to try to appear to be something else.
It’s this idea that you have to continually misrepresent yourself to appeal to someone (who never asked you to do this in the first place) that builds the resentment that I think both sexes probably feel over the expectations they think the other camp has.
It’s strange how we all want honesty in our relationships — but we’ve come to accept and maybe even expect anything but during courtship.
(sorry to ramble on so much) Great post!
THANK YOU! you pretty much stated all that i’ve though about relationships in a much more coherent way
This is a great post. I know a few guys who would benefit from reading this.
A lot of men aren’t, too — for example, I don’t even know where my triceps are, and I assume they probably aren’t toned
The back of your upper arm and no, they’re probably not, unless you’ve specifically worked on it. The triceps are pretty weak muscles in general.
Because I tone my triceps for no earthly being.
Good plan. Toning triceps is a waste of time for virtually any modern H sapiens who is not an athelete or a model. Unless, of course, tricep toning is your idea of a fun thing to do with your spare time, which it clearly is not.
PG,
Emotions are irrational with enough frequency that demanding rationality in emotion makes little sense. And it makes even less sense to demand rational behavior selectively; if you’re going to expect people to “think, and therefore feel differently” then you certainly can’t expect that of only men, or women, or As, or Bs.
Moreover, you seem to be ignoring the way that people actually communicate, in favor of your theory of how people should communicate. If you’re going to take a position that “anyone who fails to communicate all desires explicitly is therefore divested of any ability to complain about the consequences” (which you seem to be doing) then you should probably acknowledge that this is pretty much going to devalue a big section of the population.
Communication errors happen, right? Even in this thread alone, you misinterpreted what I said, based on an assumption that you made on your own volition. I.e. you decided that I said something which i didn’t actually say. Hey, no big deal; this happens all the time.
Which supports my point. Here, it is relevant because this is writing, which is much more reviewable, and it’s coming from you, who seems to be taking the position that miscommunication is all the fault of the person involved.
So, then: if it is so simple to miscommunicate in writing about something which is fairly simple, how realistic is it to expect people to communicate openly and specifically about something (love, attraction, horniness, etc.) which is sometimes difficult to describe? How would you think that you and I (both lawyers) can be perfectly normal and have a miscommunication, but that 17 year old kids learning to be in relationships would not?
It just doesn’t make sense.
Sure; if it’s also too bad for the “i did all the right things, so why didn’t he love me?” and “…why didn’t she love me?” and “…why did s/he leave the marriage?” and pretty much everything else. It seems like a pretty unsympathetic viewpoint to me, but that is an entirely personal decision.
If you’re going to base your argument on rationality, it makes no sense to focus only on the example you gave (aka the NiceGuy example) which is “why didn’t SHE have SEX with (presumably male) ME?” Sure, we can all do what we want: you can deride NiceGuys and still be sympathetic to everyone else. But in that case, you can’t be surprised if the men involved feel like they’re (accurately) being singled out.
Perhaps because not just gender roles, but life roles, are becoming less hard-and-fast than they were 50-100 years ago?
There was a time when settling down, marrying, having a couple kids, getting a good career, etc., was just ‘what was done.’ It’s reasonable to assume that this would never have brought happiness and fulfillment to 100% of people, and maybe what we’re seeing now is that people are realizing that it won’t make them happy before they do it, rather than after.
—Myca
Sailorman,
I agree that emotions frequently are irrational, but why do you claim that I am “devalu[ing] a big section of the population” if I say that people’s irrational emotions don’t deserve to be treated with the same respect that their rational ones (e.g., anger at being lied to) do?
The miscommunication between us was based on your using the word “promise” and my assuming you meant the word literally when you didn’t. There weren’t really a lot of context clues indicating that you were using the word “promise” in a sarcastic, joking or otherwise insincere fashion. I don’t give people a hard time for feeling hurt if someone says, “I love you” or “I want to sleep with you” and later says, “Whoops, I didn’t mean that literally,” if there is a similar lack of context clues that the words shouldn’t be taken literally. Literalism is the default way to understand language.
With regard to men’s feeling “singled-out” about their complaints, I think the reason behind it has been noted already: the men seem to be deciding that the entire female gender (or just the part residing in the U.S.; talking to the guys looking for mail-order brides is a trip) is mistreating them. Are there equivalent websites and organizations by women to the ones noted above that say women don’t ‘deserve’ marriage and husbands?
What is it about society that makes men less willing than they were in the past to “settle down”?
Honestly, probably partly that it’s more socially acceptable for women to have sex with men before marriage. Within subcultures where it’s still not acceptable, men want to get married earlier. See, e.g., the kids from my high school who did not believe in sex before marriage, pretty much all of whom got married before college graduation; contrast those who did not hold such views, and who were more likely to delay marriage. Going outside the U.S., men in lots of Muslim cultures want to get married as soon as they can pay the bride price. Low income that disables men from marrying and creating a stable family unit (and having responsibilities thereto) is considered to be one of the many contributing factors to creating a population of recruits for terrorist groups in some countries.
Aside from that, there is the extension of education and the loss of good-paying blue collar jobs. The middle class used to just finish high school; now it goes to college, while the upper class goes to grad school. Waiting to get married until you’ve “finished education/training and can support a family” now entails waiting until you’re in your mid-20s or later. If a guy thinks he wants the kind of family in which his wife stays home with the kids at least until they’re old enough for first grade, then he naturally won’t want to start a family until he has an income level sufficient to support them all.
I agree with most of this post — it’s certainly true that a lot of “Nice Guys” are just misogynists thinking up excuses, and it’s also true that these men should just talk to their dates like adults.
But, I do think there’s a real and problematic phenomenon that is going on here. Feminists and other equality activists have done an enormous amount of work tearing down and deconstructing social systems, and rightly so. We haven’t done much of the parallel work of creating new, replacement systems. Sometimes this isn’t necessary, and sometimes it is. There’s a reason cultures tend to have pretty specific scripts for finding a lover and for transitioning from being lovers to being spouses/partners: those scripts are useful. They may or may not be strictly necessary, but they are very useful, and, as we can see, people do a lot of floundering without them. I mean, what do you think average people would do if in single generation we suddenly abolished most of our traditions and customs for coping with death? People would freak out. I think that’s what we’re seeing here.
My point: it’s legitimate to feel lost and confused when your culture doesn’t give you the tools you need to get through the major milestones of life. It’s legitimate to feel angry when your cultures gives you a set of tools that turn out to be useless and broken. It’s not legitimate to blame that on an entire gender — it’s not really anyone’s fault, and bigotry is never okay — but it is legitimate to be upset.
So, I think we should be concerned with making sure that new, just customs replace the unjust customs we manage to get rid of. If we don’t, new traditions will be innovated as necessary (and/or reclaimed), and they will probably be just as sexist as the old ones. This is already happening, actually, and overall I think feminists have been rightly disturbed by the results (see: the worst parts of the “seduction community”).
What I find great about the Nice Guys is the way they go from “all the women I dated/wanted to date were [unpleasant characteristic x]” to “women in general are [x]”. Me, I go from “all the men I’ve dated/wanted to date were [unpleasant characteristic x’]” to “my judgment sucks, and I need to stay single”.
Sure; if it’s also too bad for the “i did all the right things, so why didn’t he love me?” and “…why didn’t she love me?” and “…why did s/he leave the marriage?” and pretty much everything else. It seems like a pretty unsympathetic viewpoint to me, but that is an entirely personal decision.
If the object of doing “all the right things” was to get to the endpoint of sex, then I am unsympathetic. It treats the other person in the relationship as an object to be used to attain a specific aim. Person B may then decide to opt out of the relationship once they figure out that Person A is presenting a contrived set of actions and responses to attain a pre-determined end.
Now, if person A and person B develop a relationship based on an uncontrived set of actions, and then person B acts in a fashion completely unexpected by person A, I can see where Person A would re-evaluate their actions up to that point to try to figure out if something they had done prompted the change. But “I did everything right, why won’t you have sex with me” in the context presented above doesn’t sound like that to me.
Generalist me again, but I don’t see “sex” or “physicality” as something which necessarily needs to be in a category different from “dating” or “affection” or “interest.”
Can you clarify? RonF, you and PG seem (maybe I’m wrong) to be treating sex as ‘special,’ so I think you are implying it is significantly different to want/feel entitled to/complain about not getting sex than it is with respect to having someone like you.
I don’t see sex as magic or worthy of special consideration. And it certainly doesn’t seem “more important” than affairs of the heart. Personally speaking, I’ve certainly loved fewer people than i have had sex with, and I have been hurt more by being emotionally dissed than sexually dissed.
Sailorman, I think RonF is saying that it’s dishonest and unreasonable to treat a person like a machine — pretending you’re doing things (like, say, being kind or spending time with with someone) because you want to when really you’re manipulatively trying to get a specific, pre-determined result. The reasoning applies in the same way whether you’re acting like you love someone because you want sex or acting like you want to have sex because you want affection. It’s conniving, dishonest, and unfair, either way.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, Ron. : )
Daisy Bond,
I agree that people need cultural norms, but I’m not sure there are any tools for dating in the 21st century that will be as “useful” (in the sense of being highly prescriptive) as the ones that are gone. Pretty much the only advice I have for people who are dating today is as follows:
1) Be honest with yourself and others about what you want and what you have to offer.
2) Ask questions so you know what those others want and have to offer.
3) If you are too shy or embarrassed to be honest about yourself and curious about others, either use modern technology to conduct these communications, or don’t stress about dating until you grow up a bit.
4) Be safe with yourself and respectful of others.
5) (for heteros) Don’t sleep with a member of the opposite sex with whom you’d be horrified to have children.
But these aren’t really good “scripts”; they’re more like principles. They don’t tell who should do the asking out, or who should pay, or at what point you can fool around without being seen as slutty, or any of the other thousand decisions that go into dating, because their focus is on individuals rather than gender-based generalizations.
Sailorman,
RonF, you and PG seem (maybe I’m wrong) to be treating sex as ’special,’ so I think you are implying it is significantly different to want/feel entitled to/complain about not getting sex than it is with respect to having someone like you.
I can’t speak for RonF, but I think it is reasonable, based on still-existing cultural norms not only in the West but even more strongly in other parts of the world, to think that sex is different from friendship in that ideally one ought to have sex monogamously, whereas friendships can be had with many people at once. Therefore, as I stated earlier, there is a difference between “I offered friendship and assumed that is tied to romantic love” and “I offered sex and assumed that is tied to romantic love.” Even our “liberal” politicians say that sex ed ought to inculcate the idea that sex belongs ONLY in a loving monogamous relationship; I don’t know of anyone who says that about friendship.
I’m aware that lots of people on this site would disagree with me and the politicians about that mono-amorous conception of sex, but in that respect, I am more in the mainstream than those who disagree with me. All else being equal, it’s more rational for someone to think that mainstream norms (sex only where there’s romantic love) prevail than to think that non-mainstream norms (friendship only where there’s romantic love) prevail. Therefore it’s more rational to complain about not having romantic love with your lover (you see how even the terms muddle the point) than to complain about not having romantic love with your friend.
From my perspective, this is an a priori argument, hiding in semantics. When you say “manipulative” and “predetermined result,” you are applying that label only to specific behavior which you are arguing against. And I don’t think that makes sense.
So my comment about treating sex differently is because it is, well, treated differently. Let’s say Joe is hanging out with some gal and people ask him why. If he says his predetermined goal is “get ___ to like me,” people generally either think it’s sweet or they think he’s an inoffensive lonely person. But if he says the predetermined goal is “get ___ to have sex with me” then folks think Joe is a predator or the equivalent.
Similarly, if Joe complains because ___ didn’t love him even though he thought ___ did, he’s OK (possibly deluded, but normal.) but if joe complains because _____ wouldn’t sleep with him even though he expected ___ to, he’s a NiceGuy. Or worse.
The first one gets classified as “normal” and the second one as “manipulative.” And so on. But by classifying it as such, you are just arbitrarily doing so. It’s not any more manipulative to be nice in the hopes someone will have sex than be nice in the hopes they will like you (or have sex in the hopes they will like you.)
If you are LYING then it is a nasty thing, sure. but: a little balance? People white-lie in relationships all the time, whether it’s a professed interest in basketweaving to get someone on a basketweaving date, or an agreement to help with homework as an excuse to hang out with a crush. I will certainly say that this may not be ideal, but again, there is no particular reason to single out SEX and say BAD BAD BAD.
PG: our comments crossed.
We may be having a bit of semantic argument here, because I think you may be using “friend” in a more limited fashion than does reality. Every individual has their own line of where friendship crosses over into some display of romance or other attraction. It is possible (indeed, it happens all the time) that one person thinks they’re acting within the spectrum of ‘friend’ and the other party places that action inside the spectrum of ‘romance.’
Most of the wishing for sex stuff happens only when at least one party thinks things are inside the “romance” sphere. It’s not just “romantic love with your friend,” it is simultaneously “friendship with your crush.” If you choose to classify that as ‘friendship’ without acknowledging the overlap, then like Diane I think you are relying on a semantic argument to support your point.
I do agree that sex tends to be monogamous. But so does romantic attraction, to a large degree. I would also suggest that the people complaining about both romantic dumping and sexual dumping were focused mostly or entirely on a single person when they got dumped.
PG: that’s good advice, and you’re right that there aren’t any tools for available for people dating today that are highly prescriptive. I don’t think a reversion to either sexist or totally confining customs is a good idea, but I do think it’s telling that there used to be very specific rules for how to go about expressing a romantic interest and moving a romantic/sexual forward. That — and phenomena like the one discussed in this post — suggest to me that people want (need…?) traditions to follow in this arena. That further suggests to me that new traditions will eventually evolve to replace the old ones. My concern is that they are an improvement.
They don’t tell who should do the asking out, or who should pay, or at what point you can fool around without being seen as slutty, or any of the other thousand decisions that go into dating, because their focus is on individuals rather than gender-based generalizations.
Yeah. More specifically, my afore-mentioned hope is that we can have scripts that aren’t sexist. I have some half-formed thoughts on the dating scripts lesbians follow; nothing really concrete yet (I want to compare experiences with other people), but I do think I’ve experienced subcultural customs for dating that are both gender-neutral and useful. I think I recall you saying in a different thread here on Alas that you didn’t mind qualities being coded “masculine” or “feminine” as long as men and women have both have access to them — this relates to that. When I’ve been overtly hit on by women, I’ve noticed how suddenly, stereotypically, chivalrously masculine they sometimes become when assuming the role of pursuer. I’ve noticed myself do that, too. I don’t know if that kind of spontaneous role-assumption could work in a heterosexual context, but I hope so.
Not that that offers any hope for such persistently incorrigible people as the Nice Guys of this post, of course.
Sailorman: (and I’m not speaking for RonF, obviously) You’re right about people’s attitudes in general, for sure — people treat sex as a special act like no other, the desire for which is totally different from all other desires. But I don’t think I’m being inconsistent in the way you think I am. I’m talking about someone feeling outraged when their secret plan didn’t work out: whether it’s “I bought her dinner, she’s supposed to sleep with me now” or “I slept with her, she’s supposed to offer me a commitment now.” It’s the ridiculousness of treating a person like an equation, where you can plug in X and get Y, and about the dishonestly of acting like you’re, say, talking to someone because you want to talk to them (that is, she thinks you enjoy her company), when really you’re talking to someone because you believe talking is the way to get her to do your bidding.
Does that make sense…? I don’t think I’m setting sex apart here, though you’re absolutely right that people in general do, that Mr “I want — to like me” is going to be more positively regarded than Mr “I want — to do me.”
Sailorman,
Every individual has their own line of where friendship crosses over into some display of romance or other attraction. It is possible (indeed, it happens all the time) that one person thinks they’re acting within the spectrum of ‘friend’ and the other party places that action inside the spectrum of ‘romance.’
Could you specify what acts you think can be reasonably understood by one person to be obviously and unmistakeably those of romance (not “I wonder if she knows how significant it is to me to have her join my family for Thanksgiving,” but “I have said before that I’d only give Grandma’s ruby ring to the woman I love and want to marry, and now I’ve given it to her”), but would be reasonably understood by another person to be those of friendship? Pretty much all of my dating has been with guys who started as friends, but I knew when they were moving into the “romance display”: new physical closeness such as long rather than perfunctory hugs, and any kind of physicality from the ones who didn’t like touching people casually; significant uptick in compliments about my appearance; insistence on picking up the check even when we both knew I was making more money.
Most of the wishing for sex stuff happens only when at least one party thinks things are inside the “romance” sphere. It’s not just “romantic love with your friend,” it is simultaneously “friendship with your crush.” If you choose to classify that as ‘friendship’ without acknowledging the overlap, then like Diane I think you are relying on a semantic argument to support your point.
I have no problem for someone’s wishing for sex. I’ve wished for a romantic/physical relationship with friends who had no interest in me whatsoever. The whole point of this discussion was that some people (“Nice Guys”) go beyond merely wishing, to feeling entitled to the sex, and to expressing anger toward both individuals and women as a gender for failing to pick up on and reciprocate that wishing.
I’ve honestly never been angry with a friend who didn’t reciprocate my physical attraction — not even the guy in my sophomore Spanish class whom I got a huge package of his favorite gum for his birthday — because 1) I have a good grip on where I fall on the totem pole of attractiveness and count it good fortune when any decent guy is attracted to me; and 2) I know I’m not entitled to someone’s sexual feelings. So I bought you gum and studied with you — that doesn’t entitle me to your undying love and devotion.
I can’t figure out whether it’s 1 or 2 that Nice Guys have a problem with. Do they think they’re so fantastically attractive that any woman in whom they show an interest ought to fall at their feet, or do they feel entitled by their “friendship” to get back sex? It seems to be mainly 2.
I don’t think I’m peculiarly noble; I have lots of grudges and resentments (I refused to “friend back” on Facebook someone with whom I had been friends in college but whom I later heard had made fun of me behind me back). It just seems bizarre to be angry with someone for not reciprocating physical attraction, unless your mindset is that physical attraction is merely a matter of reciprocity. I doubt the Nice Guys feel obliged to date every ugly girl who is interested in them.
There is still the background notion that, for female persons, sex is an inherently violative and degrading act to suffer (specifically it probably pertains to penetrative sex). And it’s a pretty ingrained belief which I think is prolific among many people across different gender and sexual ideologies. If “fuck” refers to sex, why is “fuck you” an insult and why does to “get fucked” mean to have something bad happen to you? In the heteronormative sense, fuck is a bad transitive verb which the male person does and which the female person receives.
Platonic friendship or emotional devotion or companionship are generally considered benign ends and mutually beneficial for the parties involved, even if one party did not initially plan to engage in those ends and was then persuaded to engage in those activities by the other participant(s). Persons who seek to persuade other persons to engage in those activities with them are usually not considered selfish or condemnable, at least not from the outset, even though these non-sexual interactions can and do have selfish components. Maybe people have an ego-best in monopolizing and consuming their friends’ time and devotion, and become resentful if they think they are receiving less time than the amount to which they feel entitled.
Sex, on the other hand, is not considered a benign end or activity for female persons. It is often considered to be an exploitive, non-mutual, damaging act that serves the ends and gratifications of the male participant. People have a hard time accepting that women would agree to participate in sex for the act itself, or that women sometimes consider the act a positive thing, not a negative thing which must be balanced out by positive things in the relationship. Women who openly profess that they find sex to be a good thing (with or without accompanying platonic and emotional devotion) can often be subject to pejorative stereotypes, as being morally bad (sluts) or being psychologically damaged and self-destructive (“she must have been abused as a child”).
If a female person agrees to participate, we have this assumption that she must have been sufficiently “compensated” with things like financial and/or emotional devotion from the male person, in order for her to agree to this degradation of her self. Or we have this assumption that she was manipulated into participating in sex through promises that the male person made in bad faith (i.e. insinuations that he loved her and wanted a long-term association).
If a male person has the predetermined goal of “getting _______ to like me” we might classify his actions as persuasion or friendly interaction, and his actions benign on face (though if he seems to only want conventionally attractive female persons to like him, we would be skeptical about his platonic explanations). If his predetermined goal is “getting ______ to have sex with me,” we are quick to assume he is using manipulation and bad faith, because his goal is not something we think a female would agree to in good faith, so honesty on his part does not seem tenable. He is classified as “predatory” because many would assume his predetermined goal is only for his benefit and will be at the expense of any female participant he tries to convince.
Sullen NiceGuys (TM) are considered to be frustrated, failed predators. I know patriarchy lauds “studs” and “assholes” for their sexual frequency, but that does not change the pejorative notion of sex as it applies to women. “Studs” are successful “predators” who are supposedly able to openly convince women to abase themselves frequently. In this “predatory” view, NiceGuys (TM) supposedly cannot compete openly to obtain sex from female persons because of whatever deficiencies and so their emotional interactions with women are considered subterfuge to achieve that same result. And let’s be honest, often they are just that, and the sullen rants we read from NiceGuys (TM) would seem to bear that out. Not to say that the “studs” and “assholes” that NiceGuys (TM) decry don’t also employ similar manipulation.
Ragtime @11 –
Yes, indeed.
Another wrinkle I’ve noticed is that often, men who fall into the NiceGuy ™ trap are solely devoted to pursuing women who are…
[sigh] OK, I’ll just say it
… out of their league.
Let me preface this by saying that I do not subscribe to hard-and-fast rules about who should date whom. The mysteries of the human heart are numinous and vast. The fact that an “obvious mismatch” can yield a life-long romance reminds me to honor how complex we all are, and to steer clear of reductive assumptions about people’s qualities and the qualities of those who match well with them.
However. Time and time again, I have seen Nice Guys ™ who lack basic social, life, and/or career skills carry the torch for women who are educated, employed, interesting, and capable (or, who are at the .01% end of the “ridiculously beautiful” continuum. Sometimes both!) I have seen guys who live exclusively on take-out eaten off of paper plates, who bounce from job to job and whose only hobbies are computer games fall for women whom, one might guess from looking at *their* lifestyles, would at least occasionally like to be cooked for, invited over to a place that has something to sit on, and perhaps taken out to an activity that involves conversation and shared experiences. I have seen guys who are still working on the “grownups bathe themselves regularly” thing decide that if a woman who takes a great deal of care in her grooming isn’t into them, it’s because she is a bitch who only likes “bad boys.”
I frequently see Nice Guys ™ who wouldn’t give the time of day to a woman who acts like they do, yet who feel absolutely entitled to date a woman who fulfills their fantasies even if they make few efforts to fulfill hers. And most models? Do not want to date guys who slob around eating Doritos for dinner in their stained t-shirts.
It does happen the other way around, but in my experience I see it less, and it’s often less vehement. It seems as if women, in general, seem to feel more responsible for guessing at and then trying to live up to the expectations and desires of the person they’re intersted in (I stress this is a generalization, and it is particularly a generalization about women who are not, shall we say, A-list – a category in which I absolutely place myself. The goals and motivations of perfect-10s are, often, a bit of a mystery to me, and of course are no more monolithic than for any other “type.”) Women who can’t “make him like me” seem more inclined to turn the anger inward, rather than outward, and to conclude “I’m not good enough.”
The media is somewhat to blame here, of course; for every “nobody Cinderella/Mary Sue plucked from mediocrity and delivered into the arms of Mr. Big” plot, there are dozens of both fantasy and real-life examples of chumps getting The Hot Girl. But I think there is also a very strong vein of gendered Nice Guy ™ entitlement running through this phenomenon, as this post and many of the comments here note. As I see it, the entitlement extends not just to “if I like a woman, she should like me back, particularly if (I’ve acted as if) I’m her friend,” but further, to “I deserve the woman of my dreams, not a woman who gives back about as much effort as I do.” I’ve seen guys with no friends and no social life fixate on women who are vivacious, outgoing, and connected, and apparently the expectation is that if SHE would just serve as his “ticket,” he’d soon be moving and shaking with the best of them, except that his history shows he’s been unwilling or unable to go develop a life of his own, so what does he have to bring to the party?
Functional grownup women don’t, generally, want a puppy dog or a worshipper or someone who just wants to bask in their sunshine. They typically want someone who brings something to the relationship.
The saddest part of this “Nice Guy ™” mess is how much of their own worst enemies these blokes are. It seems to me that often, they’re stuck in a self-perpetuating loop of chronic insecurity that leads to a lack of development and self-definition (insecure people often aren’t terribly personable, because personable people, by definition, exude a certain amount of confidence. Underconfident people often avoid the kinds of interactions that help you develop social skills. Those with a shaky self-concept frequently fail to try new experiences and develop strong skills or interests because it’s scary to have setbacks. And so on). The lack of a developed, congruent self furthers the insecurity. And both qualities drive off the very women of interest to the Nice Guy ™.
Who then get more and more upset over how unfair life is and how it’s all women’s fault, and the cycle goes on.
Nice discussion, but I’d just like to point something out. If there are any recovering Nice Guys (I have my issues with this term, but won’t revisit them here) reading this, the idea of,
… may be *basically* right, but must be applied with discretion. Don’t just come out of left field, trust me. There must at least be a period of,
… or some such.
I’d say that depends on how you define “athlete”. Anyone who regularly participates in strenuous physical activity that is not expressly of the lower body/core/aerobic variety (such as 10k long distance running) could probably use more upper body strength than they have currently. This is not just for obvious things like pickup hoops and martial arts, but also stuff like dancing. (How long could you hold proper frame for a smooth standard waltz?) This is, of course, not factoring in the how-awesome-do-I-look-with-my-shirt-off variable, either. ;)
“The goals and motivations of perfect-10s are, often, a bit of a mystery to me,”
You know, my best friend is a perfect 10. In high school, she was a beauty queen. I’m not a perfect 10, and never was. And really? We wanted the same stuff. There are some variations: I prefer men who are more intellectual; she prefers men who are extremely outdoorsy. But the core relationshippy stuff, we were always looking for the same kinds of things.
This isn’t true of every woman I know — a good portion of my female friends really aren’t interested in permanent relationships. The ones who aren’t don’t tend to look for the same things as the ones who, like me, seem to be more inclined toward pairing off in the long term.
But both categories of my friends — the monogamous and not — contain some women who are the height of the physical ideal, and others who aren’t. Because I used to be in the theater, I know a disproportionate number of singers, models, and dancers. Because I am a science fiction writer and a geek, I also know a number of socially awkward women, some of whom don’t fit social standards. There are a number of factors that differentiate what they want out of a relationship and a partner — but attractiveness is not the way to guess which woman will want which kind of thing.
I don’t mean to single out the above comment as particularly wrong. It’s just that I feel like I often see this expectation that The Beautiful want something different from The Not Beautiful, and in my experience, that’s not where the divisions lie.
Mandolin – I did qualify that quoted comment with an “often,” and immediately follow it with “and of course are no more monolithic than for any other ‘type.'”
With that comment, I was particularly thinking of the perfect-10 subgroup who do seem to trade on their social capital by expecting men to come to them, rather than making any accomodations on their part, the type that “Jeff from Middleburg” might have been referring to. (Still doesn’t explain why a self-professed “Nice Guy” would want someone so heartless… unless, my god, his motivations are just as base and impure as those of the “assholes” he despises!)
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I think the comments have really missed the point.
When feminists first started to complain about marriage, and men’s expectations within it, society responded by saying they were a bunch of ugly embittered harpies who couldn’t land a man. That’s a idiotic criticism – it may have been true, but it’s not relevant – you have to deal with the substance of someone’s complaint rather than going for ad homs. They were right despite being ugly embittered harpies.
Similarly when Dean in California says: “marriage… with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery”, saying he has a deap-seated hatred of women for not wanting to be with him, with roots probably going back to his childhood, is not an intelligent response. You have to deal with the substance of his complaint.
This is where I think you have a problem, because there isn’t a feminist case for heterosexual men to get married. In fact, the only people who seem to be saying that is a fantastic idea are the religious right and those selling mail order brides. I’m not sure there is there is actually anything substantive you could say to demonstrate that these people’s opinions are mistaken. Which is why the ad homs are being thown around.
P.S. No. I don’t really think early feminists were ugly embittered harpies. Sylvia Pankhurst was an absolute babe circa 1900.
james,
marriage… with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery
I’m pretty sure feminism is fundamentally opposed to Dean’s concept of marriage. Feminism supports women’s being able to suport themselves, their children and even their spouses if women want to do so; it does not support the “socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women.” It’s “the religious right and those selling mail order brides” who have this retrograde conception of marriage — not feminists.
Feminist marriage has a lot to offer heterosexual men: a partnership with a capable equal who can help you through the hard times, both financially and emotionally, who doesn’t perceive your interest in sex as a sign of moral degeneracy and who is unashamed of her own interest in sex.
“Sylvia Pankhurst was an absolute babe circa 1900.”
Which is what matters, of course.
Huh? What on earth are you saying?
The feminist case for heterosexual men to get married is pretty clear. As a heterosexual man, committing to a lifelong, equal, and loving partnership with my best friend and lover seems like a pretty sweet deal.
Now, the religious right has a stronger case to make, sure, as long as the heterosexual man in question values hierarchy more than he values equality … but that’s a pretty childish way to live, isn’t it?
—Myca
I don’t think most of the men we’re discussing were talking about “isms” or ideals when venting into a comment box. They’re just complaining about their own experiences. They didn’t become “isms” until they went online and started finding out about like-minded lunatics.
I don’t think the usual commenter is attacking feminism or patriarchal values. They’re just peeved off about miserable experiences and maybe looking for somebody to blame.
And really, I think for most people marriage used to be damned harder than it used to be. Destroying old roles while expecting greater emotional intimacy means that there is inevitably going to be a lot more clashing. I really can’t blame a man for choosing to avoid the whole mess.
@myca
I have to disagree – in an egalitarian world where there are no pre-set roles to fill out and every person is capable of filling their own, what does sombody need a partner for? I mean, a traditional relationship is obvious – a wife needs a breadwinner, a husband needs someone to manage the home. Now? Now there is no more practical need…. only an emotional one. And emotions are slippery, nasty, frustrating things that a lot of men would rather be rid of in favour of some easy sex, if they could get it.
The whole “my spouse is my best friend” thing is only really an option for people whose hobbies, interests, and personality are good at bridging the gender gap. So how do you handle that the things you’d love to spend your time doing, you’ll have to do with somebody else?
You want to tell a carousing, drunken, sports-watching and halo-playing frat boy that his future wife will be his best friend? Even if he’s a big believer in feminist ideals, he knows he’s never going to find that in a woman. His best friend is the person who he drinks, watches football, and plays Halo with – and if he tries to find that woman, he’ll have to claw through the other 30 guys who also are trying to find her.
Most men would make lousy friends for most women, and vice versa. The average guy finds women to be dull, prattling, and neurotic, and the average woman finds men to be brutish, insensitive, and perverted…. and they both think that they have terrible taste. This isn’t sexism, it’s marketing – completely different demographics here. A traditional relationship compartmentalized the roles so that this wasn’t a problem.
The point is that, after dealing with the opposite sex in miserable ways long enough, a lot of people, both male and female, wish they could take what they wanted from the other side and then just stick to spending their time with like-minded friends (who are generally of the same gender as them).
“I really can’t blame a man for choosing to avoid the whole mess.”
SiF, that comment would have been much better if you’d said “I really can’t blame *anyone* for choosing to avoid the whole mess.”
That said, I think it’s … um, weird and short-sighted to say that marriage is harder now. Harder for who? The women who have the right to leave if things get back? The women who can own property? The women who have a legal right not to be beaten?
Either you meant “marriage is harder for men now than it used to be” which would explain why you limited your statement about avoidance to men (but would mean that you really should have specified), or I don’t think you’ve really considered your historical argument.
Come on Mandolin – I’m just trying to make the point that the arguments people make can stand irrespective of the reasons for which they offer them.
PG/Myca – easy for you to say. You have to remember that Jeff from Middleburg, Florida is probably not talking about the sort of people who post on blogs like this. In your circles it’s probably pretty easy to snag a feminist. But in the world that Jeff inhabits, I would not be suprised if the women he encounters don’t measure up against those standards and these are the women he’s complaining about.
“Most men would make lousy friends for most women, and vice versa.”
Gah?
I can only assume that your’e generalizing from personal experience. Mine, I assure you, is very different.
Well, the subject at hand is men who avoid marriage. Yes, I can’t blame anybody for choosing to avoid marriage and being sour on the whole idea.
You’re right, that’s fair. The law has made things a lot easier for women, I’ll agree. But scrape away the legal oppression side and stick to the pure social business of roles, and I think that, for an imaginary, versatile person who comfortably could slip into either role, things are harder. Think of it like a job – the job market has only one role available for you, and you train for that job. You try to be the best person for that job. The expectations are clearly outlined.
Now, obviously, I’m not really one to talk – I’m a young man, so have neither lived in the time we’re talking about nor in the role of a homemaker.
The world was made up of square pegs and square holes. They fit together – anybody who wasn’t square made it their life’s goal to be square. For those who couldn’t do that, it was harsh and unfair. However, the fact that everybody was trying to be square meant that they fit together well.
Conformity has a function – it’s not senseless. There are good reasons why the army shaves every man’s head and expects them to wear a uniform. Conformity is cruel to those who can’t conform, but it does make life easier for those who can.
Yes, I am. I live in an industrial city, and used to live in a rural community. The men and women in places like this are very, very, very different creatures from each other. My point isn’t that all men are incompatible with all women, but that the average different enough that you could pair off all the perfect matches and then be left with the lion’s share being out in the cold for “best friends” on the opposite side.
I just want to make this clear: I’m not saying that ending gender roles in relationships is a bad thing. It’s a good thing.
But it isn’t necessarily the easier thing.
“I live in an industrial city, and used to live in a rural community. The men and women in places like this are very, very, very different creatures from each other.”
Again, you’re generalizing from personal experience. I doubt that all the women and all the men in both locales would agree with you. Unless you have some actual social data, you’re really just making an anecdotal argument, and since my anecdotes (I’ve lived in New York, Iowa, and several places in the Bay Area) contradict yours… well, it’s a wash.
Conformity has a function – it’s not senseless.
A very good point. The question is whether the utility produced by conformity outweighs the disutility. I don’t think the utilities produced by strict gender roles outweigh the disutilities because:
1) Unlike the military, you don’t get to choose your sex;
2) Unlike the military, you’re stuck for a lifetime with the gender roles attached to your sex;
3) The overall oppression of women put them in a highly disadvantageous situation even when they were doing well at the socially-prescribed job, because men could change what the job expectation was. Socially, women were expected to lie still and think of England, but if a man expected his wife to be a sex machine ready to fulfill whatever non-child-producing sexual desires he had, his wife had little ability to exit the marriage with her pre-marriage value. Instead, she’d be marked and shamed, either as a wife who refused to do her wifely duty or as the woman who lived with the pervert.
In other words, in a situation of gender inequality where one sex largely could get away with demanding a wide range of possible behaviors, it’s actually not that simple to form oneself into a square peg to fit the square hole.
It makes no sense to ignore social oppression when you’re talking about rigid social roles. In order to create “square pegs” and “square holes,” both genders had to be severely constricted, one much more than the other.
“A place for everything and everything in its place” as an unquestioned social good is an argument that can (and has been) made for slavery and caste systems.
Again, it seems to me that you’re arguing your conclusions without any real data, or history, to back them up.
Just to re-clarify so that I’m not marked as patriarchal – I think that the feminist process of breaking down traditional gender roles is a good thing. Freedom, equality, liberty – all that stuff is good. I just think that most people _do_ easily fit into the roles that society built them (less, of course, the oppression that had been built into the female role by the fact that the male role put them into a power position), and because of that most people find the modern ambiguity harder than they would without.
And yeah, I have no data to support that assertion. I just tend to think that the patriarchy is a force of nature as much as society, and so the patriarchal roles come naturally for people in the middle of the bell curve.
And to clarify further, I hate it. I despise the idea.
I’m just pessimistic.
in an egalitarian world where there are no pre-set roles to fill out and every person is capable of filling their own, what does sombody need a partner for?
Why should one only be able to fulfill those needs that are based on pre-set roles? I’m pretty decent at the working and supporting myself part of life, but really kind of depend on my partner to organize me. Before I got together with him, I had an unmet need which a partner could fill, albeit not a traditional one. Most people need or desire companionship, friendship, regular sex, help raising children, help conceiving children, continuity and all sorts of other things that a relationship can provide, whether traditional or not.
Everyone should be able to meet his or her own basic physical needs, so as not to be forced to rely on others and in some cases to have to submit to their abuse in order to get those needs fulfilled. I really like a society in which a woman can get a job almost as easily as a man (which is not just a sex-equal society, but also a society in which upper-body strength isn’t a prerequisite for most work).
Most men would make lousy friends for most women, and vice versa. The average guy finds women to be dull, prattling, and neurotic, and the average woman finds men to be brutish, insensitive, and perverted…. and they both think that they have terrible taste.
Now I’m not sure if my friends of the opposite sex are all somehow non-average, or if they have some murky motive for pretending to be friends with me. SiF, no wonder you’re pessimistic — you seem to live a Hobbesian emotional world.
Everyone should be able to meet his or her own basic physical needs, so as not to be forced to rely on others and in some cases to have to submit to their abuse in order to get those needs fulfilled.
I don’t think this is always going to be possible, and I feel slightly uncomfortable with the idea that having to rely on others is a bad thing. Yes, there’s a potential for abuse, but the abuse is the bad thing, not the reliance.
“I don’t think this is always going to be possible”
Seriously. Ableism.
I don’t know, I tend to think more that we’re just stuck in our roles, and not really free to change them as we think we are, rather than the Hobbesian notion of needing society to force our roles upon us. More Calvinist than Hobbesian, really.
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I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist.
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I don’t think this is always going to be possible, and I feel slightly uncomfortable with the idea that having to rely on others is a bad thing. Yes, there’s a potential for abuse, but the abuse is the bad thing, not the reliance.
I am not sure what you mean by “a bad thing.” I think self-reliance is a good goal even if it is not always achievable.
If a woman gets married at 14, has three kids and few viable wage skills, she’s going to be dependent on another to support her and those children. In a good society, the “another” won’t have to be a man; it can be a large social group that supports her, whether in becoming self-reliant or for as long as she needs it.
However, in the society we have of five-year welfare limits and barriers to employment for those with little education and the responsibility for child care, she’s more likely to have to rely on an individual person, probably a husband or boyfriend, or at best her parents or another relative. Due to that dependence, she will not be able to act independently of the demands of the person supporting her; she will be obligated to submit. The demands might be annoying but tolerable (living with her parents again, she has a 10pm curfew), or recognizably abusive (her boyfriend forbids her to have friends).
I’m not sure how ableism comes into this; someone who is disabled from being able to work generally is eligible for government assistance that isn’t time-limited, and therefore isn’t relying on a single individual.
I agree with the points made by the post. I believe people have a responsibility to overcome their own sexist and objectifying impulses and that men have to work harder on this, typically, than women. I think the quoted author and the men quoted in the quote are all jerks.
But I would like to pull out this tangent:
“It turns out that men and women are a lot alike. There may be minor differences, but nothing that can’t be figured out by asking questions.” (see also a few of the comments such as 9 and 29)
Asking questions is a behavior more accommodating to females than males, on average. See the works of Michael Gurian on this; allowing for overlap and “bridge brains”, women are more likely to feel comfortable solving problems and achieving goals by words and relationships than men are. Again, with all the necessary disclaimers, many men and boys will be more uncomfortable using verbal tools than nonverbal ones.
Where’s the mention that this could be difficult for men? And, in fact, that it might be beyond their control that it could be difficult?
Refusal to recognize this — insisting that “just ask her” is always a more effective and, in fact, more ethically correct strategy than any other — is like telling people who are thirsty they should “just drink the milk.” Yes, there are ways for lactose-intolerant folks to drink milk, but at least acknowledge their need for consideration, accommodation, and possibly a different approach.
[Gurian and his fellow researchers and coauthors might well take this further and say that the male tendencies toward process-focus and system-protection are reflected by a desire for a script like the traditional “man calls, man holds door, etc.” But that’s me free-associating, not something I’ve specifically seen in the three of their books that I’ve read.]
“3) If you are too shy or embarrassed to be honest about yourself and curious about others, either use modern technology to conduct these communications, or don’t stress about dating until you grow up a bit.”
I don’t think shyness is something that can be outgrown by sheer will. I’ve been shy all my life, and thankfully asexual pre-transition. If anything, I’m thankful for the patriarchal gender role component that makes men more likely to ask women out, or I’d never get a date.
Note that I do have a lot of baggage that caused or contributed to shyness, but it was there before it all. I remember being shy at seeing my god-parents as a very young child, and it wasn’t the first time I’d seen them.
For the segment of NiceGuys for whom shyness is the issue, its the role who’s at cause, putting them in a bind “you tell her how you feel, or you live alone forever, because she won’t hit on you”. While not as prevalent as in yesteryears by a pretty good margin, it’s still the expectation.
I’m not sure how ableism comes into this; someone who is disabled from being able to work generally is eligible for government assistance that isn’t time-limited, and therefore isn’t relying on a single individual.
You have more faith in the safety net than I do. In my experience, people tend to fall through the cracks, eg there’s a huge drive in the UK to reclassify disabled people as fit to work, without necessarily taking their needs or the potential availability of suitable work into consideration.
But I find the whole idea of self-reliance suspect. We all start our lives dependant on other people, and most of us are going to end our lives the same way. I think maybe we’d be healthier as a society if we could accept that a bit more.
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One thing I haven’t seen specifically addressed in the comments is the generational aspect of this. I’m assuming that most of the SYMs, by virtue of identifying themselves as “young,” are in their late teens to late twenties–they’re Millennials. According to some of the more popular generational writers, the Millennials have grown up without even knowing about the traditional gender roles and divides that those of us in previous generations grew up with. So why is it that they’re apparently having exactly the same experiences in the dating world of young adulthood that the Gen Xers and Jonesers (and to some extent, the Baby Boomers) did?
I don’t have any theories on this; I’m just curious. I would have expected today’s twentysomethings to have overcome some of this stuff. I would have expected the rise of geek culture and the greater acceptance of geekiness in both genders to mean that the kind of male geeks who typified the NiceGuys of my generation (Gen X/Gen Jones; I’m 42) would have more opportunities to get to know women who appreciate them for themselves, and therefore more opportunities for positive romantic relationships. I would have expected people who, as a generation, were more likely to have been raised in non-“traditional” families to have more flexible expectations of gender roles than the quoted SYMs do. I’m just surprised that so little seems to have changed. Maybe I watch too much TV, and assume that the Chuck-and-Sarah/Leonard-and-Penny dynamic is more common than it actually is. :-)
wow, I find this statement very sad.
Most men would make lousy friends for most women, and vice versa. The average guy finds women to be dull, prattling, and neurotic, and the average woman finds men to be brutish, insensitive, and perverted…. and they both think that they have terrible taste.
You cannot be serious. I’m a baby boomer, happily married for thirty years, and several guy friends from middle school remain close. I’m godmother to two children…kids of BOYS I went to school with. College brought other enduring friendships.
Good Heavens, back in the early seventies, we were figuring out that friendship between the sexes is not only possible, but desirable and necessary, and frankly, quite easily done. Food/ entertainment rituals and mutual assistance commitments continue to this day.
And I see the same thing happening with our three boys…all married, and still getting together with women friends from their teenage years…admittedly, beer blasts and concerts have given way to backyard BBQ’s and Euchre Night, and child sitting exchanges…
…but the fact remains…average men and women do seek out and maintain friendships with one another.
It’s more difficult to maintain friendship with a woman, because of the desire that exists despite the man’s will.But it’s an interesting exercise, nonetheless.Can we treat a woman friend just like a male friend? Yeah…but then the questions comes to shape “why??” The effort from the man’s side is bigger from that that comes from the woman, because of the physiological fact that men get excited more quickly than women.
Wish me luck, I have a friend for 5 years now (yeah, a woman) and I intend to remain a true friend to her.
Nick Kiddle: But I find the whole idea of self-reliance suspect. We all start our lives dependant on other people, and most of us are going to end our lives the same way. I think maybe we’d be healthier as a society if we could accept that a bit more.
PG: I am not sure what you mean by “a bad thing.” I think self-reliance is a good goal even if it is not always achievable.
I agree with both of you. NK appears to be concerned that the drive for self reliance leads to weakness of solitude, the separation of the strong from the weak, and a fear of asking for help. PG appears concerned that reliance upon others leads to weakness of ability and confidence in oneself, each concerned with the perils found in the opposite extreme. As with most things in life, these forces are functional when they balance one another. We are entitled to depend on others, because others are entitled to depend upon us. Both must be true is we are to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers.
A state of self-reliance, or true independence, one without attachment, is ideally never a goal, but it is a valid transitional state that is useful to achieve in between our youth (when we are most dependent) and our adulthood (when we must be our most dependable). At least, as I see it.
@PG – just so you know, I’m considering resuming our last discussion, PG. You and Daisy raised some pointed questions to me that I felt I left dangling.
Jeff, I’m… not sure why you feel the need to overplay the ease of dating in order to further demonize the “Nice Guy” here. “Nice Guy-ism” is unquestionably a misogynistic behavior with very little relation to the facts, but it’s a result of a world where people experience things that could be no more complicated than their inherent emotional nature requires as wildly complex due to the unseen influence of patriarchy and unequal gender roles. These roles influence both men and women towards behavior that alienates them from one another, and thereby strengthens the system — I don’t think it’s odd at all for people to draw the conclusion from this that communicating with romantic prospects is difficult.
Wait, what? Do people usually ask about sexual histories…ever? That seems very strange to me, for two reasons:
1.That’s kind of personal information, you know? None of your business.
2. I’m FAR more interested in my date’s sexual future, if you know what I mean.
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