We had the long thread (which I started) about the problems genuinely nice, but socially inept, guys. My conclusion was that being a decent person doesn’t preclude us finding female companionship, but it isn’t enough. Even being decent and nice looking may not be enough. Some of us just never learned to flirt or read signals. I was lucky enough to meet someone who was both willing to make the first move and highly compatible with me. The bottom line is that being nice doesn’t keep us from finding someone, but by itself it’s not necessarily enough.
There is one difference between a nice guy and a “nice guy”:
The nice guy isn’t afraid to make a move early on.
Yeah, true enough. But I’m asking to you seriously consider the proposition that what we (in general – “society”) consider sexy in a male-bodied person is different from what we in general consider sexy in a female-bodied person. And that a lot of the characteristics bundled in the latter overlap with what might be described as “nice”, and fewer of them overlapping with the former. Especially if some of what “niceness” means is lack of sexual pushiness, sexual aggression, attempting to do stuff to actually make sex happen. (And yeah, that’s what the Nice Guys™ are often referring to when they talk about it and about girls/women preferring the other kind of guys. the Bad Boys™, if you will).
Which means in general we aren’t so wrong about the observation. We do live in a world of gendered expectations.
The world expects it to work like this: boy meets girl, boy attempts to make sex happen if girl is cute, girl attempts to strike a balance between rejecting the guy outright and spreading her legs outright if boy is cute, slowing things down so as to allow proximity and time a chance to let feelings develop. So she can have boyfriend.
There’s no point of entry in that scripted scenario for nice boys.
^^^^ yeah, that.
Or, to rephrase it with different value judgments, a no-quotation-marks nice guy is sexually forward and makes moves and stuff. Which is not an expectaton of nice GIRLS, you may notice.
Why do people over complicate women? Ask yourself what it is you want in a relationship and think about how you can provide what a woman might want in a relationship and act accordingly.
I knew what I didn’t want and that was sufficient to narrow down what I did want. Showering and the ability to sincerely listen, and pecs that flex, did the rest. And what is a “nice” guy? Someone who is superficially courteous?
Apparently it’s short hand for sexually aggressive jerks with few social skills who don’t think women are actual people and who go around blaming women for running away in terror from them. Kind of “players” but without any social skills to hide their misogyny.
Not REAL nice guys. Most women like real nice guys, even if they are slightly socially inept. Particularly if they have pecs.
My extrapolation from the behaviors and quotes attributed to Nice Guys is that they are NOT sexually aggressive guys until they get pissed off and start complaining that girls / women don’t like nice guys. The complaining tends to coincide with some really klutzy and unsophisticated attempts at sexual aggression, combined with anger and bad attitude towards the women they’re trying this behavior with.
Once again, the identification of Nice Guys wasn’t from the inside (people creating a social movement of Nice Guys and explaining their agenda) but instead from the outside (women describing the phenomenon of Nice Guys as they experienced them). I think some extrapolation isn’t unreasonable here.
I thought this was interesting on the subject of nice guys.
I believe you have that backwards. These men self-described themselves as “Nice guys.” I don’t think very many women are aware of this label. I personally had never heard of it before reading this board. Women just call these guys “jerks.”
And they are sexually aggressive- they think if they do x, y, and z the woman OWES them sex. That is a lot more sexually aggressive than some guy making a pass and getting turned down and calmly accepting being turned down. Women don’t mind guys that ask and then accept rejection-that’s not aggressive, it’s just communication. It’s the guys who EXPECT it or who won’t take NO for an answer that are being aggressive.
They’re sexually passive-aggressive. They’re bitter and resentful of women for not having sex with them, even though ironically if they were just more direct and assertive they’d have a lot more romantic success.
I’ve always felt a hallmark of “nice guy” syndrome is clinging to a particular woman after there’s long since clearly been no chance of anything romantic happening. That’s where the aggressive resentment comes in. Romantic rejection is a normal part of life for people, but most of us move on to another partner instead of being angry that any given one won’t fuck us.
In reality, most people appeal to a pretty limited range of their preferred sex. I’m not saying you’re wrong for looking at yourself and saying you’re not most women’s type. But if you think most men are widely appealing to most women, I’d say you’re mistaken. It’s not a binary your type vs. all other men thing. It’s your type vs. a whole bunch of different types of men.
I first heard about ‘Nice Guys never get the girl’ growing up in the 80s, and went through a stretch of identifying as one before coming to my senses in the early 90s. The term was circulating at least a decade before there even was a web, and at least two decades before the website. The concept is much older than you think, and while it probably gained popularity from the site, it’s NOT a recent invention. And yes, ‘nice guys’ self-identify, HBI didn’t come up with the term or even attach it to people.
Also, have you read the site in question? Because they make it really clear that the people they’re talking about are not actually nice at all, and I don’t understand why anyone would want to self-identify as the whiny, sexist, manipulative, unkind person they describe.
FYI Feminist women don’t generally like the kind of guys identified as “nice guys” on the HBI site, because such guys are extremely sexist. I think you have a disconnect going on somewhere.
This is all a lot like feminist women saying “When you folks go on and on about ‘bitches’, I’m pretty sure you’re talking about people like me”. I mean, I’m doing that. I’m recognizing myself (in a distorted way, but it fits) in the core elements of the description.
Of course people can deny the identification. “Oh no, I actually did NOT mean willful unapologetic assertive women who don’t take shit. I specifically meant the type of women who deliberately hurt people or who deliberately thwart other people because they enjoy doing so”. Or “What I mean by Nice Guys is not-very-nice guys who say they’re nice but act like sex is their just reward for god-only-knows-what”.
We’re all playing with something akin to an archetype here.
I can’t prove you really mean guys like me any more than I can prove that you’re seizing on the worst negative characteristics that we sometimes exhibit and refuse to see anything valid in the attitudes and statements that are attributed to us.
But fuckit. You’re talking about me. You are. The stereotype you’re pushing around is a negative caricature of me.
Let’s back out and look at the issue from more of a macro perspective - that is, let’s examine the “Nice guys finish last” issue not merely from a romance/relationship angle:
I once read an anecdote about how Prince Harry, during childhood, once finished last in a “race” with other children - the race was that the children were to be blindfolded and make their way through a maze/obstacle course. The reason that Prince Harry finished last was because he was the only blindfolded child who didn’t cheat by peeking.
There is also the well-documented phenomenon about how, in the office workplace, it is often people who step up and boldly promote themselves - even if a bit arrogantly or in a self-centered way - who will rise up the career ladder. The dutiful, quiet, humble, type who sits in the cubicle, doesn’t make themselves heard, and doesn’t promote themselves, isn’t likely to become a CEO or even rise up far much on the company ladder.
In other words, there is a certain logic to the notion that “Nice guys finish last.” If anything, circumstances logically make it so that nice guys will finish last. Someone who doesn’t cheat by peeking while blindfolded will, obviously, progress through an obstacle maze slower than someone who does, to use the Prince Harry example.
Hah! I was just about to post that. Spot on, I think.
Look, sure. Problem is, what you’re doing here is going about the whole thing bass-ackwards, if meeting a nice girls to ride bikes with is what you want. I won’t even respond to your argument, I’ll just cut to the chase instead, because I think I know what’s actually going on: You’re trying to logic women into having sex with you, and when the logic doesn’t produce results, you’re being all mopey about it.
That whole approach needs nuking from orbit. I mean, wholesale. Attraction works on the caveman level. This stuff is hard coded. It does not benefit from overthinking. There’s nothing less attractive than presenting someone with a theory and a power point presentation detailing why they should date you.
Just… be a person, in the world. Yes, maybe we do need to man up a bit, and be a bit more assertive and up front. Sucks to be us, I guess. In an ideal universe, we shouldn’t have to. But we’re probably stuck with this one.
I think that there is another nice guy besides the “I do nice things and therefore deserve sex” nice guy. There is also the guy who thinks that being polite and respectful means not making sexual advances or being flirtatious.
Absolutely, a man should respect a woman’s right to say no. But it took me a while to understand that many women on a date do want the man to try something.
And a lot of women do like it when a man tries to charm them. The key is to respect their right to disengage from the conversation or the situation, not to avoid pursuing them altogether.
But some guys don’t get that. They give off a disinterested vibe, meeting smiles with a blank look, and women lose interest and move on. Or, at least, that was me for a long time, well before I stumbled into a happy marriage.
No.
I am not and historically have not tended to exert any more effort to get women to have sex with me than I perceived them to be expending in an attempt to get me to have sex with them. I wanted it to be equal in that regard. Part snobbery and part hatred for the way it feels to be told I’m making a sexual nuisance of myself, but whatever you wanna call it, that’s how it is and has been.
Like other Nice Boys™ there came a time in my life when I observed that Nice GIRLS were choosing from among boys who were expending more effort than they were to make sex happen; the nice girls were negotiating with those boys to get some sense that the boys really liked them as people, and weren’t just approaching them for sex, but it was always starting with the boy-person making some expression of sexual interest.
I accept that. But I’m one of the outlying points. Not all male-bodied people are distributed in the exact same space. Nor are all the female-bodied people. Instead it is like a scatter-plot. The boys IN GENERAL are more of what we call “masculine” and that includes a certain tendency towards taking sexual initiative. The girls IN GENERAL are in a direction we call “feminine”. I’m one of the outlying points. I’m not a caveman. I’m more of a cavewoman, albeit a male-bodied cavewoman.
You don’t have to approach girls with a powerpoint presentation because you, and they, can go with the socially endorsed gendered expectations and, by doing so, y’all don’t need to have a discussion beforehand.
I do. So do some of the female-bodied people who inhabit this world.
Yes I went through a bitter and vindictive phase, I admit it, I did. The only thing I can say in my defense THERE is that in my case it did not last long. But yeah.
On the other SIDE of that anger I discovered how to find women who ALSO aren’t going to hook up in any meaningful way without having exactly the kind of intellectual discussion you dismiss as unnecessary and counterproductive.
Radical feminists amongst them.
Nope. Thank god. I’m not a man. Never wanted to be one. I think I’d rather be dead.
Never more than 49% of the way across the sexual-initiative bridge for me. I only play with certain women. I’m not attractive in a meangful significant way to most of the others. Good thing it’s a diverse world and that I figured out what I needed to look for.
Speak for yourself 
Look… oh, how can I explain this? I need to sort out my thoughts a bit. Bear with me for a moment.
First of all, I’m happy for you if you’re doing good. Maybe you, in particular, don’t need to hear any of this. If you’ve found something that works for you. great. But I just want to use your post to illustrate a general point.
Right there, by saying what you’re saying in your post, you’re coming across as sexually passive-aggressive.
You say that you don’t want to be a nuisance, but just by bringing up the subject, you’re expressing interest in sexual matters. The end result is that you risk sounding like a stereotypical Jewish mother. “Oh no, I don’t want to be a burden. You guys all go out on dates. I’ll just sit here in the dark. Don’t worry about me.” It’s like you’re trying to guilt trip women into wanting to have sex with you. It’s not a great look.
Also: If you’re being too non-assertive, but still giving off a vaguely sexual vibe, it’s creepy. You go out of your way to not say or do anything explicitly sexual, but then, in a backwards sort of way, consciously or sub-consciously, expect women to respond sexually to that. So you go around waiting for that response, and get ever more frustrated when you don’t get it.
Like it or not: That right there is pretending to be nice, to get nookie. People do pick up on it. I know you’re maintaining plausible deniability, you can say no, I’m just sitting here minding my own business, but people do pick up on it.
A major light bulb moment for me was when I realized just how downright threatening such an over-the-top non-threatening approach can come across, paradoxical as it sounds. There are women out there who probably still look over their shoulder, avoid dark parking lots, and have invested in pepper spray just in case, after meeting me. Not because I made any kind of explicit sexual advance towards them, but because I was being creepy. I was nice, polite, and maintaining plausible deniability at all times. But there was *something *going on. I was always sending out extremely vague and rather bizarre sexual signals. People do pick up on it.
The problem is that there’s a dishonesty about it. I’m not being nice just because I’m nice. There’s *some *hidden agenda. It’s not enough for them to confront me about it. And if they were to confront me, I would of course deny everything. But there is *something *there. And women can’t read my mind. They notice the dishonesty, but they don’t know how deep it goes, or what lurks in those depths.
*I *know that I’m no threat to them. I’m a nice boy. I just want to be their friend and maybe engage in some horizontal tango on occasion. That’s a fairly normal set of wants, right? If they don’t happen to be into that, I’m no danger. I won’t sexually assault them or anything. Heck, I couldn’t sexually assault a fly. Never have, never will. But *they *don’t know that. For all they know, I might be a serial killer.
Frankly, someone who is bluntly sexually aggressive is probably preferable to that for most women, by most metrics, even if they don’t like that person. Well, as long as said person backs off at a reasonable point after being rejected. If there’s an angry rhino in the room, at least you know what you’re dealing with. It won’t sneak up on you. You can take out your gun and shoot it in your head. There’s something respectable about that. But if there’s *some *kind of slithery creature hiding in your shoe, that’s different. The creature may know that it’s actually a kitten. But the owner of the shoe can’t tell. It could be a scorpion.
Actually, a couple more things:
I think it’s incredibly difficult for non-assertive “nice guys” to realize that they can be anything other than victims. Most likely, they’ve felt like the butt of the joke that is society and the world for their entire lives. Maybe they were bullied in school. Hence, everyone else must be to blame. All women, and all other men.
You guys are calling it misogyny, but I don’t actually think it’s that at all: It’s general misanthropy. It’s the ingrained attitude that other people, normal people, are the bad guys, the bullies, by default. It comes from a lifetime of being on the defensive.
For a “nice guy”, to come to the understanding that they themselves are the bad guys in the situation, that they’re the ones (passive-aggressively) doing the bullying this time, is a major leap. When you’ve always felt like a doormat, it’s very hard to see that you can come across as threatening, aggressive (or, again, passive-aggressive), or predatory.
And it’s so unbelievably frustrating. How can it be my fault?! Not only are everyone either ignoring me or walking all over me, but now you’re saying it’s all my fault?! Man, it’s tough. And it feels unfair. Because the only thing that “nice guys” really want is to be loved. They just really, really want to be loved.
But, yeah, “nice guys”: It *is *your fault. You’re the problem here. You, the weak, spineless one, is being predatory. The other people, the strong, confident ones, are your victims. Take a long, good look in that mirror. Think about it for a while. It’s a terrible thing, I know. But you need to face it.
How can this be possible? The thing is: You’re not actually weak. That’s the misunderstanding. When relating to women, you, just by being a man, is in the stronger position. At least to some extent, in a certain way. Or, even if it’s not factually true that you are, there is at least something deep and ingrained in the lizard brains of both men and women still whispering it.
And because of that, you’re a potential threat. Your first job is to diffuse that threat. It’s not actually true that you have to be “protective” for women to like you, or at least not to any extreme degree, beyond normal human levels. But you do have to prove that you’re safe. “Nice guys” are often doing the opposite.
So, yeah, maybe that’s an insight for you: You’re not actually weak. Now take that, stuff it in your pipe, and see if you can do something with it.
This +1. Nicely put.
Regards,
Shodan