Nice Guy™

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Not this BS again. That comic is hardly accurate at all, at least to most here. There are people who don't act on infatuation alone like other shallow people out there and who have to wait for anything worthwhile to grow in a more genuine way. It's not fair to make them out to be as*holes.

You're making them out to be manipulators when that could not be farther from the truth. There's no need for this mindless nonsense to be spouted on these forums; it's only going to make it much harder for those who don't feel comfortable dating or going at as fast a pace as others. So please take it somewhere else.

I came into this thread to stop this BS from spreading. It does not need any encouragement whatsoever. Painting less aggressive males as manipulators is incredibly sexist, and will only enforce gender roles even more so. I'm hardly being rude; I'm trying to save those who don't fit the male stereotype from unnecessary pain, and that means I have to start from stamping it out here.

Look At It From Her Perspective

You hear from the Nice Guys on a regular basis about how b*****s ain’t s**t, but it’s not very often that attention is paid to the woman’s side of things. After all, it’s worth remembering that there are two people involved in this situation. More if you want to include everyone involved in posting memes in the Nice Guy rants on Reddit.

This is one of the things that I especially liked about the Tumblr post: the reminder that while the Nice Guy is busy getting back-pats for unleashing torrents of butthurt, there’s a young woman out there who’s feeling confused and hurt when she found out that someone she trusted, someone she thought she could confide in and rely on was wondering how long he was going to have to put up with this emotional s**t before she let him get to second base.

As horrible as the woman’s “betrayal” may be for the Nice Guy, it’s worse for the person he’d been lying to; she’s not the one who accepted the offer of friendship under false pretenses, whose honest response of “I don’t feel that way about you” is met with a torrent of abuse, in person and online. She allowed herself to trust him, to share secrets and fears, to make herself emotionally vulnerable only to find out that he’s just trying to collect fuck-points. Meanwhile he’s the one getting the sympathy and support while she’s reviled for being a dumb castrating b***h who deserves the misery she will surely get when she realizes how much of a prize she missed out on.

I get that rejection hurts; I’ve been rejected more times than I can count and I’ve got the wangsty emo LiveJournal posts to prove it. But the Nice Guy’s self-involvement denies the fact that someone else has been hurt in this self-inflicted drama – and she’s been cast as the villain through no fault of her own.

Side note: yes, there are people out there who are users and manipulators. The fact that as*holes exist does not change the fact that the Nice Guy is a sh***y person for trying to hold onto a friendship only so he could f**k someone. And I say this as someone who has been The Nice Guy several times.

You are only assuming all that is true, as are those articles. It is extremely sexist to support the idea that males who are more comfortable with friendship first are only ever after sex or have some evil ulterior motive. Just because some act on physical attraction alone does not mean it is right for those who need something more substantial to start a relationship with. These articles are supporting the idea that it is somehow not right to try to be any different than your stereotypical sex craved as*hole.

This "Nice Guys" thing only exists because of the fact that males are expected to ask others out based only on shallow values and immediately, which does not work for everyone. That is what is sexist about it. Not all males work that way, and just because some prefer to be friends first does not make them manipulators. I think that the former sounds a lot more like something an as*hole would do. I know that I would be creeped out by anyone who would want to date me within only five minutes of knowing them.

Pifff, dudes! Take it outside!

There are various sorts of guys that people put in the category mentioned. Some of them are fake, and others seem quite genuine but misguided. The thing they have in common is that they go out of their way to exhibit "niceness" and rely on it to attract girls.

Criticism

Feminists and others have criticised many aspects of Nice Guy Syndrome, mostly arguing that in some ways Nice Guys (often now called "Nice Guys™" with a trademark symbol to distinguish them from men who happen to be nice people) are not actually good friends or nice to their interest.

Criticism as a relationship strategy

There are some aspects of the Nice Guy™ pattern that may be due to inexperience:

• romantically and sexually fixating on one person ("oneitis") before they express any mutual interest in you is simply a relationship mistake to which many people are prone and may improve with time, experience or self-examination
• Nice Guys™ seem to regard a man's relationship with a woman as successful or valuable only if it is romantic or sexual in nature, i.e. friendship is failure
• Nice Guys™ may view a relationship with a woman as the only possible source of happiness in their lives

Feminist criticisms

Some aspects are due to the different socialisation of men and women:

• women are culturally trained to be gentle when rejecting men sexually, thus "you'd be a great boyfriend for someone else" and "you're like a brother to me" may be signals that the woman knows of the attraction and is trying to gently let the man down and encourage him to find other people he is attracted to, rather than callous obliviousness

Some aspects suggest that Nice Guys™ view women in essentialist or sexist ways:

• nice guys seem to expect, at some point, sexual "payment" for their kindness and generosity; that is, their niceness is self-interested
• the self-interest is deceitful: if the man does not reveal his attraction and expresses willingness to support his friend with her problems, that it makes sense for her to treat his friendship as genuine and take the offered support
• the implicit trade of "niceness" (emotional support) for sex is a sexist generalization that women want closeness and men want sex, so they can trade one for the other
• Nice Guys™ regard women as in some ways moral guardians: that women should choose the nicest men for sex in order to reward them for doing the right thing
• some men continue to think of themselves as "nice guys" even as they spend their time using misogynistic slurs to describe their alleged best friends and dear loves
• some "nice guys" consider themselves heroes for not raping women or hitting them (see Feminist cookie)
• some "nice guys" do not see themselves as guilty of sexual assault because they were very gentle with their non-consensual groping, and they equate sexual assault as only being violent and forceful

Some aspects suggest that Nice Guys™ view themselves in essentialist ways:

• the insistence on being close friends and mutually emotionally involved before expressing any romantic or sexual interest may involve some distrust of heterosexual men's sexuality as inherently dirty or predatory

A feminist position on relationships and seduction strategies

Underlying feminist criticisms is the position that no one is owed love or sex, not for being a nice person, not for being a feminist, not for any other reason.

Loneliness and unfulfilled desires are tragic and painful but feminists argue that consent is the only ethical relationship underpinning, and that requiring mutual consent for relationships and for sex will mean that some people do not get their romantic or sexual desires fulfilled at any given time.

Positive aspects

Some Nice Guy™ analysis recognises problems with the structure of heterosexual relationships, including:

• the expectation that the man must always be the initiator and aggressor.
• the expectation that men and women can't be emotionally intimate, only physically intimate.
• the reality that some men like and are suited to close emotional relationships that aren't considered masculine.

Some feminist men identify themselves as former Nice Guys™. This can be due to the Nice Guys™ increased awareness of other men's unfairness toward female sex partners. A limit to this process is that it doesn't always lead Nice Guys™ to a symmetric increase in self-awareness.