My name is Ozy, and I was a Nice Girl ™.
I had tangled, unbrushed hair that fell limply to my shoulders; my skin was a pizza crust of acne; my glasses were unflattering; I wore stained and torn clothes. I slouched and spoke in monosyllables. I’d spent the last fourteen years reading instead of learning to socialize, which meant that I was familiar with the complete works of Plato, but not with the fact that other people were not interested in the complete works of Plato. In middle school, I’d had my first major bout of depression, which meant that I was too busy not killing myself to have friends. In fact, I spent several days in middle school without saying a single word to anyone and once was invited to a sleepover by a girl who forgot that I was coming and went over to her friend’s house instead.
In short, as high school began, I was ugly, depressed, and about a decade behind on social skills. I outline this not to incur sympathy but simply to explain where I’m coming from. When I talk about creepy people and Nice Guys ™, I talk about myself.
High school began with rather more social success: I was forcibly befriended by a cheerful, outgoing girl who liked vampire novels and bad TV. I trailed along behind her like a shadow to sleepovers, parties, water polo. In exchange for tagging along during her entire social life, I gave her unswerving loyalty in the face of all the complicated friendship dramas of high school.
Although at that point I had figured out I was queer, I went to Catholic school; a friend’s sister, when told a girl had a crush on her, said that “lezzies are disgusting.” So the only option for sex (and I did want sex—I have always been very high sex-drive, and masturbating to slash fanfic was getting old) was for me to get A Boyfriend.
Every boy I knew was assessed for the crucial signs that he liked me. Asked to borrow a pencil? He liked me. Looked at me? He liked me. Said something to me about what we were studying in class? Ohmigod he so totally liked me!
Of course, once I had determined that a boy liked me (which generally involved him existing in my general direction), I then decided that I was going to get his affection. Of course, this didn’t involve actually talking to him or anything. Instead, I would stare at him longingly. I would drop my pencil to get him to pick it up. I would time when I changed out my books and ate lunch so I could see him. I would “happen” to sit next to him in class. If we were outside of school together, (for instance, for a play) I would put on makeup, do my hair and wear a short skirt, and then wait near him for him to initiate a conversation.
My friend mentioned above had a harem of gamers, most of whom wanted to date her but were too shy to say anything. I was in love with all of them at one time or another: I laughed at their recitations of South Park quotes and quietly watched them play Brawl for hours on end and—yes—listened to them talking about the girls who wouldn’t date them or wouldn’t give them any more than a kiss goodnight.
One time I planned to randomly kiss a boy (we’d exchanged about ten words at this time) and say “your move.” I’m cringing writing this. Thankfully, I chickened out, so I don’t have to wear a bag over my head for the rest of time.
And then there was the time I (as a former middle-school rebellious pagan) did a spell to make the guy I liked break up with his girlfriend and date me (I’d never actually spoken to him either).
All I wanted, I told myself, was a nice guy who liked me and showered regularly—it didn’t matter if he was smart or entertaining or attractive. And I would treat him like a king, far better than those other girls: I’d have sex with him whenever he wanted, I wouldn’t require all sorts of presents to keep dating him, I’d compliment him constantly.
Most of my Nice Girl ™-ness was innocuous, if probably rather disconcerting to the boys who were finding themselves stalked by a girl in badly applied eyeliner. I was creepy, but harmlessly so. However, whenever I read the more misogynistic ends of the pick-up artist or men’s rights community, I cringe. Because if I had found that gender-reversed when I was sixteen or so, it would have made sense to me. Of course boys like assholes, that’s why I can’t get laid! Of course American men are fat, entitled and worthless, that’s why they treat me so badly! There’s nothing more seductive than an explanation in which it’s all someone else’s fault.
Instead, because they claimed that all women could get laid whenever they wanted (and that clearly was not true), I had discounted their explanations pretty quickly and instead drifted through life being confused and vaguely resentful.
The takeaway here is that being a Nice Guy ™ is not a guy thing—it’s a people thing. Specifically, Nice Guy ™ is what happens when you get someone who is not sure how this whole “relationships” thing works exactly, who is petrified of rejection, and who doesn’t fully understand that people of the other primary gender are actually people and not some kind of complicated relationship-granting automation.
I think for a lot of people it’s a normal developmental stage on the path of figuring out how relationships work, and there’s nothing wrong with that (you get amnesty about any relationship mistakes you make before the age of 18). The problem is when some people of any gender get stuck there.
Note: I know I referred to myself as a girl all the way through this, but my pronoun is still zie. Thanks!
Dungone, your “obviously my own preferred norms of directness and transparency will solve many of these problems” just makes me think of this:
http://xkcd.com/592/
And as far as your friend with Anxiety disorder goes, I suspect the asymmetry of society’s gender expectations are making you miss something – for someone with mental illness and romance-problem-triggered symptoms, it can work both ways. Having to reject people can be just as awful as being a person experiencing or waiting on a rejection. I should know; I’ve personally had serious mental health episodes associated with both.
L:
@Danny: Ahh now see, that’s what I tried getting to in talking about Eagle33 a couple days back in the gender-nonconformity post before getting shut down. Where does victimhood end and perpdom begin? I’ll be interested to see where you go with that.
I finally got to making a post (after being pushed by a small exchange in part 3 of this series). The thing is though its not so much about victimhood/perpdom. Its more about the the feelings that CAN be generated by being a victim and feelings that CAN lead to one becoming a perp.
http://dannyscorneroftheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/12/spiral-of-despair.html
An application is not the same as an interview. Think of it like smiling at someone from across the room in hopes that they’ll come talk to you. At this stage, they may have intimated that they’re willing to talk to new people, but they did not agree to talk to you, specifically.
Yeah, I’ve even made internal job applications with companies where I didn’t get notice that I’d been passed over as an option. I’ve never received a clear rejection from a company I didn’t already work for. As far as calling back after a bad first date: I don’t think I’ve ever done that, but for a bad first date I always said, “You have my number; call me.” The- I think it was actually only one- time I actually was called I just went out with them for a second date. Every other date, I already had the girls number… Read more »
People are supposed to call you back when you don’t get the job? Really? Because I can think of only 2 calls I got back from jobs I didn’t get last summer (these are professional teaching jobs, not retail/foodservice) out of at least 20 applications I sent out to every public and private school I could find in three counties (that didn’t require me to go to a certain church or synagogue). Both calls were two months later, after the school year had started. @dungone: I fully agree with everything you wrote about urban sociopathy and ableism. People suck in… Read more »
@dungone, Yay, cross-posting. You’ve convinced that if giving explicit, timely rejections was the norm, then it would be a better system. Where I still disagree is on how to judge people who flake on a new acquaintance as a method of rejection: even if a different system would be better, I don’t necessarily think these folks are immature people merely for behaving according to present norms. First off, an employer would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn’t extend an offer as soon as possible. Even under the system I was proposing, you could still get back to… Read more »
Strangely, ambivalent women who do get back to me are actually capable of wasting far more of my time and energy than women who just flake completely after one encounter. I don’t think this is an either/or scenario. Someone who gives you the runaround presents an entirely different set of antisocial behaviors that have to be dealt with in their own way. It shouldn’t be that we must accept the lesser of two evils. Especially because, first of all, they’re two different people motivated very differently. The person who promises you dates and doesn’t follow through doesn’t give a crap… Read more »
Couple more things about the broader context of society, in response to Hugh Ristik, Urbanism and Sociopathy When you lived in a village with 300 other people and you went out on a date, you always knew how it turned out. The whole village knew. Also, things such as lying, stealing, backstabbing, and bad table manners were discouraged because it took a very short time for everyone else in the community to catch on. So there was a lot more cooperation and a lot less crass opportunism going on. But then we invented cities. A sociopath can easily take advantage… Read more »
@dungone, Just because people act a certain way doesn’t make it right. I agree. But if enough people are acting a certain way, then I think it might indicate that there is a coherent moral view behind it. In this case (rejecting someone after an initial meeting or one date by not calling back), there is a coherent case justifying it. Strangely, your argument reminds me a bit of some of the stricter feminist arguments about consent. For instance, the view that you should ask explicit verbal consent for everything, including the smallest touch! If that was the norm and… Read more »
Oh no… total fail on the font weight markup. Sorry about that.
So you could wait a day, two days, a week, a month, or forever, for that call. People generally don’t count on a single company to hire them. They go apply to a dozen, and then wait for a call from at least one. Exactly! That’s a horrible system, which is why it’s virtually unheard of for me, at least in my industry. It takes more work for anyone looking for a job, more stress, and employers suffer as well because they get more applications – they don’t get the benefit of the best way to filter job candidates there… Read more »
Looks like we wrote past each other since we commented at the same time. Let me address your comments directly: 1. The rejected person doesn’t know the reason for their rejection. They should never be given the reason, they should just be informed of the decision that was made. Giving a reason is actually bad. Inexperienced women give reasons, which is always an opening for the guy to fix the problem and try again. Jaded women who always cause a lot of additional grief for themselves are inexperienced women who decided to lie or to flake out after the first… Read more »
Likewise, when you interview for a job, they always call you back and tell you whether you got it or you didn’t. Here, the norm of HR departments or just ‘people who hire you’ is to say that they’ll only call those they pick for an interview (after applying), and if they pick you for an interview, same deal about calling you: Only if you’re picked. So you could wait a day, two days, a week, a month, or forever, for that call. People generally don’t count on a single company to hire them. They go apply to a dozen,… Read more »
If there was a norm in work culture that if you don’t hear back three days after an interview, you didn’t get the job? As long as people agreed on the norm, it could work. That’s an interesting comment. Maybe that could be a norm, but it certainly wouldn’t work very well and there are good reasons why it’s not the norm. First off, an employer would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn’t extend an offer as soon as possible. Especially in a competitive marketplace. My company routinely competes with companies like Google and Microsoft for qualified… Read more »
@dungone, Generally not calling someone back is not something I respect. If you want to meet an amazing person and have a relationship, you need to do some hard work and spend a lot of time and effort. It’s pretty fucking selfish to only spend that effort when it’s in your own best interest. Be courteous to others as well. But what I’ve been wondering, is why is it actually so bad to reject someone by not calling them back? And first, I should clarify that I’m only talking about cases where people initially met, or perhaps went out on… Read more »
In contrast, in dating culture, my intuition is that rejected people are more likely to lash out or try to badger the rejector into changing their minds, or criticize their reasoning You’d be surprised. Ironically, I just came back from interviewing a young woman who, sadly, won’t get the job. The director liked her so much, he wanted to HR rep to pass on some feedback about how to do better in the future. HR rep said yeah, no. Given the opportunity, candidates would love to badger an employer and debate the merits of the decision they’ve made not to… Read more »
@dungone @Hugh Tipping, I often compare dating culture to work culture. I hold work culture as my benchmark for mature behavior and I ask myself why dating culture should deviate from it. Work culture has norms that are efficient for work culture, while dating culture has norms that are efficient for dating culture. Work culture is a lot more regimented and impersonal: “it’s just business.” That’s a tougher attitude to take towards interpersonal relationships. In work culture, there are also norms for rejected applicants to take the rejection is a classy way. If they lash out, it could hurt their… Read more »
@Schala: I was referring to the Wii and games that I already own. >.> It would be kind of stupid to ask the guy I’m dating to buy a whole new console and games that I already have. And I’m certainly not asking for him to become a mindless Nintendo fanboy–I enjoy 360 and PS3 games too, I just don’t have the money to go out and get a 360 or a PS3, so instead I buy used Wii games that look entertaining. My boyfriend had a Xbox 360 “Arcade” when we met. I had a PS2 slim in white.… Read more »
@ The L I’d never be nuts enough to bark at someone for enjoying the eye-candy of their choice (Yelling at someone in public? Why that’s another way to make noise in public. Someone might look at me! Complaining to my girlfriend?! Doesn’t he know that if you do that she’ll totally know what he’s thinking? :O Noooooooo! Yeah, I was messsed up. ), but your ex’s refusal to see the reality contradicting his own self-pitying narrative sure sounds familiar. I used to tie myself in knots trying to figure out how some lady being into me must actually be… Read more »
Re: Nice Girls, I haven’t heard this in a while, but women used to say “She has a nice personality” to try to setup their boring unattractive friends.
Re: Nice Guys, the underlying implication is that they’re not very nice at all and get over-attached and display threatening or stalkerish behavior. The female equivalent is usually described as “the creepy girl” rather than “the nice girl”. The part about casting spells struck home and reminded me of a couple creepy girls. Also, weird glaring across the room, long rambling non-sensical letters/emails, hang-up phone calls (pre-cellphone), etc.
@ pocketjacks
That’s a surprisingly good suggestion you’ve made there and, I agree, a bit more equivalent to what’s happening i.e., one gender deciding what the other gender should be attracted to.
At the same time tho’, the women I hear complaining about how much their strength and intelligence is just too much for men to handle tend to have rather assertive type A personalities. Most of the complaints about women not liking nice guys seem to come from more passive, depressive types. Other than the cross-gender lecturing and control issues they’re quite different groups.
@The_L,
“We were passing by a store that sells cardboard cutouts, around the time one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out. One of the new cutouts in the window was Orlando Bloom as Will Turner. I said, “Oh. It’s Orlando Bloom.” He flipped his shit over a casual observation that the store had set out an Orlando Bloom cutout since the last time we were there.”
Yeah, that’s not normal behavior. You’re better off without him.
In re: the cardboard cutout story: OK, a lot of people seem to think that I was making some sort of mention about how attractive Orlando Bloom was. I was insanely clueless about social interaction and gender roles back then, but I did at least know enough to realize that that is very insensitive. So here’s the entire story, including some details that I left out that apparently turned out to be major. We were passing by a store that sells cardboard cutouts, around the time one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out. One of the new… Read more »
Ozy, you’re my favorite blogger here and I do believe this post was made with the best of intentions. However, I have to disagree with the fundamental premise of the OP, which is that socially constructed, problematic “Nice”-ness is gender neutral and that Nice Girls are the exact female equivalent to Nice Guys. The behavior that’s being derided as (non-)Nice refers to a specific way certain men have fell back upon to circumvent the need to lead the way to sex and relationships. Its history, no less its real world manifestation, is gendered; “Nice Guy” is a term that evolved… Read more »
Also, and perhaps more pointedly, I feel like these are the growing pains of most normal social behavior. “I like only the best stuff” extends to “I like this person, therefore they must be the best person.” And it sort of warps from there.