On Being a Nice Guy

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Because I am one. Yeah, that kind.

I accept all the criticism of us as well-placed, even though I know the discussion hasn’t been about me, personally.

“Eww, why do you choose to ally yourself with and identify with Nice Guys?”

It’s not like politics, where you pick a self. You’re born with some characteristics, and you’re not just them and you’re not just your experiences, it’s both. But when the description nails you pretty well, yeah, you’re a representative sample of the ones they’re talking about, it’s kind of senseless not to accept that external observation as part of your identity.

I do a lot of thinking about identity, in part because I’m a very self-immersed narcissistic person, but also in part because it’s a shared identity. Maybe collectively we aren’t at our best because we haven’t got our shit together like the gay dudes and the lesbians and the transgender women and the radical feminists and militant dykes and transgender men.

I think I do fit under genderqueer. A lot of XX-typical female people grew up shaped by the inclination to be a nice girl. It’s a shared identity, I saw it in 2nd grade and wanted to be a part of it.

Identifying with that and trying to shape myself towards that and the resultant ways in which I interacted with everyone else… doesn’t mean I’m a genuinely nice person. I think I’ve been some of the awful things we’ve been said to be, that my behavior hasn’t been all that benign or warm or supportive. I think I’ve gotten better, though. But I’m still one of the male kids who latched onto the nice girl notion of how you should ideally be, because it made so much sense.

Yeah, nice guys.

For my own part, it didn’t make me resent my physiology. Oh, I thought about it, just like I thought about doing sex with people of conventional male bodies, because if you’ve already paid the price of being thought of as such, why wouldn’t you? But, no, it’s not that, it’s not wanting to be female. Whether as surgically modified or as perceived and received as. No, I want them to understand me as that while accepting that I have XY-typical morphology and that I’m okay with that.

(And someday, dammit, I’m going to get sufficiently good at saying all this shit in words. I’ve only been at it for 45 years…)

2

A “Nice Guy” in modern internet parlance is not a guy who is nice. It’s pretty much synonymous with incels. “Why is she dating that asshole when I am such a Nice Guy!?” I really don’t see how your description of yourself fits in with that group.

3

I’m (not enthusiastically) thinking I have growing-up roots in common with incels. (Hence “Yeah, that kind”) I’m basically trying to be a non-horrible incel, but the description hits REALLY close to home.

4

Have you ever been tested for anti-social personality disorder perchance?

Incels have a lot of overlap with autism spectrum disorder too. I think a study found roughly 40% of incel men are on the autism spectrum.

Nice guys are generally either guys who are very entitled and resentful, or they are guys who know they are invisible since they do not cross the unwritten threshold of attractiveness people need to meet for potential partners to care about your personality.

5

Imagine a cluster of male (i.e., XY-typical) kids who all tune in to the “how to be” vibes connected with nice girl and like it, as if it’s calling to us. It makes sense. It seems right.

Imagine us trying to implement the recommendations, which are basically the role instructions, for how to human be, because this is the voice that makes sense to us. Except that we’re perceived as male, boys. And everything gets interpreted different.

The bias or prejudice against us for violating standards is tiny when compared to what gender-noncompliant women had to deal with, except that we are more easily rendered irrelevant. Nobody had to control us, we could just be ignored. But women had to be controlled

6

Entitled: Both. I am flouncy, convinced of how much freaking attention people bloody well SHOULD be paying to me, because i’m fucking brilliant and also kinda cute (even now), but my entitlement is anarchic, I’m not buying into any structure that puts people above others, or at least I think I’m not.

Resentful: Oh hell the fuck yes. You aren’t required to agree, but yeesh are you unwilling to listen? I have tales to tell!

Know they are Invisible: Oh hell yeah, totally. I’ve spent 45 years trying to become vislble. To have at least a ripple. OK, maybe I sorta managed to have a ripple. Once or twice over the 40 years of trying. I want freaking more.

7

I could be wrong but I get the impression you feel you have a lot of interesting, intense characteristics that should put you on people’s radars, but you aren’t on their radars. Not so you can be superior to others, but because personality gives you a depth, breadth and intensity that most people lack.

Out of curiosity are you talking strictly about romantic interactions, or are you talking about life in general?

8

Life in general. Romantic was a propelling experience but then I tried to talk about it socially, and it wasn’t my only issue, and attempting to discuss the other issues is also part of the frustration picture.

Absolutely none of my frustration is (according to what I currently understand) the fault of a bunch of OTHER people That definitely 100% includes women, I’ve learned most of what’s relevant to me from women, and girls, originally, the people who made sense to me in 2nd grade.

I don’t blame any other group of culprit people instead, either. I think most people’s antagonistic behavior is situational, and the social structure we’re playing with pits people against each other. But part of social structure is how gender and sexuality are portrayed and shared.

9

I didn’t mean to ignore this bit earlier, but I wanted to reply to it separately. I’ve never been diagnosed autistic but I’ve been dubbed paranoid schizophrenic, manic-depressiv e (now known as bipolar disorder) schizo-dependentd schizophrenic, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality. So if you see what I mean, collecting autism is like collecting a new stamp for my stamp collection. Although I thought I’d get depressive sooner.

I’m part of NARPA, former part of Project Release, admirer of Network Against Psychiatric Assault and Mental Patients’ Liberation Front and a couple dozen other orgs and networks. I’m different but I’m only pathologically different if I decide such is the case. I’m allowed to embrace my difference.

10

Okay, that’s not characteristic of “Nice Guys.” Nice Guys are nice to women because they want to fuck them, and then complain when the women they are nice to aren’t interested in them. They believe that if you’re nice to a woman, she should have sex with you, and if she doesn’t have sex with you, she’s ungrateful/a tease/other gendered insult. Does this describe you?

11

Agree. The term “Nice Guys” has really, really undergone a generational shift since we all were first of dating age. With most of the change in the last e.g. 10 years. I suspect @AHunter3 is innocently using a now utterly antiquated and inappropriate definition of a very much current hot button term.

Since that word-horse is long out of the barn and now well into the next county, they will need a new term to describe what they really mean. Which is IMO something along the lines of:

    A harmless well-intentioned invisible doormat of a man trying to mimic the generalized agreeability they see going on within groups of socially cohesive women.

12

My husband is not at all a doormat, but he’s definitely been socialized the way a lot of women are socialized. Growing up he was expected to be his mother’s emotional confidante, and while he has close male friends, he seems to connect more easily and more frequently with women. It’s partly because his profession is very feminized so when he connects with colleagues, he’s usually connecting with women. Also among his age cohort with his cousins, he’s closest to the girls. Also, and I don’t think this is a coincidence - he connects especially well with autistic women.

Personally I think he makes a great companion and he’s very sensitive and people generally seem to adore him - I know I do. The only challenge is that he is so much the supportive listener he can be compassion fatigued within our own relationship at times. If his clients are in crisis I know he’s got nothing in the tank for me that week. But when I’m in crisis he comes through like gangbusters.

It’s funny because I’m the opposite. I’ve always perceived myself as more comfortable with men. Looking back I’ve always had some strong female friendships, but I’m really talking about my comfort level, especially with groups of women. It took me a while to get over my internalized mysogyny about what to expect from women.

13

Yep. It means something different today. Used to be “the opposite of a “Bad Boy”” the kinda gentlemen who women turn to after they realize that “Bad Bpys” are indeed- bad. (not all do - in time). (and of course the same goes for us males)

Look, incels are crazy. Myself and two buddies are perfect examples of why. None of use are good looking (best I got was a “kinda cute”) and all of us are kinda fat. Back in our day, we were all working stiffs (two of us have retired- and after one guy did have the luck to have a nice inheritance- long after his dating days). No one even drove a fancy car- I had a Saturn.

So, not Jocks. Not good looking. Not rich, or even close. No fancy cars. No “Bad Boys”. Not a “Chad” in the bunch. But all three of us had no real issues with dating (well, some dates were bad, sure, that happens) or “getting laid” or best- getting married. We were nice guys, we were nice to our ladies, and at least in my case “he makes he laugh”.

Thus, Incels are delusional. Sure if you live in your moms basement, shower once in a great while, and are rude and offensive- you are gonna strike out. But all of that is fixable.

14

No, I’m actually not. I encountered the current-era interpretation of “Nice Guys” when I read an entry on a popular blog called Heartless Bitches International over a decade ago. And I realized, in horror, that although some of the reprehensible behavior wasn’t applicable to me, a shitload of the complainy behavior and apparent attitude and so on was totally 100% me and that yeah, they were talking about males like me.

Spice Weasel is spot-on in saying that the incels blame women and that my disinclination to blame anyone is a distinguishing feature in my favor. But I think she’s oversimplifying in saying that the Nice Guys are only nice to women because they want to fuck them. I think most of us Nice Guys are nice to women because we like women and, oh, and also, we’d like to fuck them. Then we get resentful because the fucking happens with a different kind of guy who isn’t like the girls and we feel left out in the cold and we complain. (Yeah, that part is totally me and not just Them).

So examine the divergence: they tend to blame women; me, I grew up with feminism and understood the idea of rigid sex roles, and I blamed the same thing the feminists blamed.

But the things we’re complaining about is kinda the same stuff, me and the incel-ish Nice Guys. Really.

They come across as spectacularly nasty and hateful when doing manly male-role courting and flirting behavior, e.g. seduction as a carefully studied conquest game. Yeah, and in my own (brief and attenuated) attempts to try to make “act like a man, sexually speaking”, work for me, since simply being myself wasn’t working sexually, I, too, went into it with an attitude. “I shouldn’t have to do this. I am nice. The girls are nice. I like their bodies. They like boy bodies. Why the fuck do I have to pretend I’m more horny than they are, why am I supposed to mount a campaign, why do I need to pretend to be the gas pedal and her the brake pedal, this is freaking dehumanizing!”

There could be a more enlightened movement of us sissies, us male folks who liked the girl way of being in the world but also when puberty hit found female morphology sexually attractive. I haven’t managed to make that happen [ETA: yet], but it doesn’t have to be incel-flavored. We aren’t necessarily horrible reprehensible people, even if as a group we’re frustrated and sometimes bitter. And even if we’re not actually genuinely nicer people than other people.

15

Your authentic self is who you should be. Not someone you’ve curated.

Labels and calling yourself an incel will not help you with interpersonal relationships.

Spit that word out. And Nice guy, too.

16

But I’m trying to form a movement, not just cope individually. Individually, I have some friends and a great partner (as a poly person I’ve even had the experience of multiple concurrent partners of various greatness-itude, but COVID kind of halted that). I’m doing okay. But people like me go through some bad shit, especially when they’re coming of age, because there’s no healthy voice saying “Hey kid you’re not the only one, and here’s how it is”. I want to form a movement. Been trying since 1980.

I don’t seem to be particularly good at this but I’m determined to try. I promised it to myself when I was young and nothing made any sense, that if I ever figured out what I was up against, I was gonna fix it.

17

The best way forward is to grow up and accept the fact that women aren’t achievements you unlock like in video games.

They are fully formed human beings with just as much autonomy as you, and if they don’t want to have sex with you just because you are “nice” to them it’s not some crime against you.

18

Don’t call the movement in anyway Incels or Nice guys.

(It’s nice to be proud. It’s nice to be a boy..but Proud boys you don’t wanna align yourself with. See the rub?)

19

Replying to Zoobi there is none of what you said that I disagree with now, and I never would have disagreed with it as an earlier age. I liked girls. I liked women. I never blamed women for how things were set up.

I don’t like the hetero dance, the way it’s choreographed. I don’t like my role. I like her role better. I like the entirety how how to be a person, the way it’s presented to the girls. And I don’t like the equivalent set of instructions and suggestions the way it’s presented to the boys. I made that decision when I was seven years old. No. I’m with the girls.

Except that you don’t get to be with people unless it’s mutually acceptable that you be with them, and female people have reason to be wary of male people. You see sex before you can assess gender.

I’m not trans in the sense that most people think of as trans. So I’m already out there on the weird scale. Now I’m telling you that from my viewing angle — which is different from yours, — I seem to be in the same patch of experience as the Nice Guys (which is an external description, women describing us) and incels (which is an internal definition, from (ugh!) (us…) (to the extent that there is an “us”).

Clearly I see things differently than some of these who I’m claiming to be kindred. And I’m not claiming to have any scheme for getting them to recognize me as kin and listen to me. But for seeing how all the parts fit together, how people are shaped and the patterns of human behavior and whatnot, I think it’s useful to recognize me as being in the same constellation as the incels.

20

high five yeah, I can’t dissent with them and yet embrace their brand, and there’s always been the what do I call it thing where you’re running as your own brand. But yeah, fuck no I’m not waving their flag.