Dr. NerdLove explains that fear is what’s ruining your life, not women.
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One thing you learn quickly in the dating advice business: some topics are more or less evergreen. And with the recent explosion on social media, it’s a good time to talk about one of my favorite topics: Nice Guys. After all, what better way could we ring in a new year than by looking at some old issues?
But first, some context:
Over the last week or so, I had several people forward me links to this comment from MIT Professor Scott Aaronson’s blog about growing up as a nerd terrified of women and trying to be a Nice Guy and how this meant that nerds couldn’t be keeping women out of STEM1 fields. As is the nature of the Internet, this immediately was an opportunity to comment on the topic. Many people had some interesting and thought-provoking comments to share; Laurie Penny focused on the tricky topics of intersectionality and privilege while Amanda Marcotte discussed the problematic subtext of his complaints. Of course, this too becomes its own invitation to comment as Scott Alexander rode to Professor Aaronson’s defense ((And believe me, Alexander’s got enough bullshit for me to handle in a future column. Also, bro do you even link?)) , criticizing Penny and Marcotte in turn.
So I thought, hey, why not join in the fun?
Flippancy aside, my purpose isn’t to add to the criticism per se; instead, I want to talk about some of the underlying attitudes at play here regarding nerds, entitlement and dating. Both Aaronson’s complaints are excellent examples of what I hear from nerds and self-described Nice Guys all the time. Critically, they’re held forth as reasons why Nice Guys deserve a break instead of the opprobrium they receive and why it’s unfair for women to treat them with disdain, with a dash of nerd victim culture and privilege for flavor.
So let’s dive back into the Nice Guy debate, shall we?
Fear Leads To Anger. Anger Leads To Hate. Hate Leads To Suffering
The long and short of Aaronson’s comment is fairly simple: Nerds are Nice Guys (as opposed to guys who are nice) they’re unfairly maligned by society because the world is cruel and mean and unfair. Aaronson, for example, explains that because he’s a nerd, he was at a disadvantage when it came to talking to women. Why? Because he was terrified.
Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them—even if I couldn’t understand how.
This is an incredibly common complaint that I hear from men, especially Nice Guys: they’re scared. I’ve lost track of how many men have told me that they’re terrified of making a mistake, of being called a creeper or – as in Aaronson’s example, somehow ending up being thrown in jail because that’s how law works.
In fact, they’re so terrified that many decide to quit talking to women entirely. Aaronson, however, took his fear to the next level:
My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.
[…]
At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself.
While I can sympathize with the emotion – I’ve had all the same worst-case scenario nightmares when I’ve approached women I like – the cold truth is that this anxiety is self-inflicted. The problem isn’t in the desire, it’s in the belief. At their core, these imagined nightmares are about ego protection. All these over-the-top consequences – the mockery, the social expulsion, even being jailed – are ways our brain protects us from the fear of rejection. Don’t get me wrong: the discomfort and anxiety that Aaronson and so many others feel is very real – our bodies respond to imagined fears the same way they respond to real ones. The heart palpitations, the way your hands start to shake and your vision starts to narrow… these are all the physical symptoms of fear. However, the reason we have these anxieties is because they keep us from attempting what we really fear: getting rejected by someone we’re attracted to. These unpleasant fantasies provide convenient and plausible excuses for why the person suffering from them can’t and and shouldn’t approach someone. We dislike the sensation of being afraid and so we come to avoid the situations that might trigger them… literally becoming afraid of being afraid.
Part of what makes it so stressful and torturous to Aaronson and the many others who suffer from this anxiety is that they live in a world of impossibilities. They’ve bought into the dating binary: you’re either good with women or you’re not and there’s nothing you can do about this. All of those little fears and anxieties get reinforced by confirmation bias – looking for proof that they’re correct for feeling this way. Case in point:
Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.
This is similar to what I call the Dr. Google effect – if you’re sick and enter your symptoms online, Dr. Google will inevitably tell you that you have cancer. By looking for information without context to interpret that information or being aware of where to look, you get results that are unhelpful at best and terrifying at worst. Aaronson found information without context – in this case, the writings of Andrea Dworkin and other radical feminists – and took it as further confirmation that he was a horrible person.
The problem is that he – like many other nerds and Nice Guys – took all the wrong lessons from what he read.
Why You Gotta Make This Personal?
Scott Aaronson is quick to remind us: he’s a feminist. He loves him some feminist literature. He reads lots of feminist books and radfem sites! Andrea Dworkin is his favorite author! But at the same time, he states that it’s those pesky feminists who made it impossible for him to not fear the womens. Scott Alexander, in his defense of Aaronson agrees (in between taking swipes at Marcotte’s appearance):
I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life. Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it. Sometimes they say it obliquely, referring to a subgroup like “bronies” or “atheists” or “fedoras” while making sure everyone else in nerddom knows it’s about them too.
Those poor nerds, put upon by the vicious feminists! Tricksy, tricksy feminists, making sex so damn scary and unattainable by nerds! Why, you might think they were jocks or something! Why can’t the feminists give nerds a break and recognize that nerds are innocentand harmless?
The problem is that Aaronson made the same mistake that many other nerds and Nice Guys have made: he misunderstood the point of what he was reading. Specifically: he wasn’t willing or able to step outside of himself and realize that not everything was about him. It’s #notallmen all over again – seeing everything as being about him instead of about what women go through.
You see this repeatedly whenever someone brings up, say, The Gift of Fear or the essay Schrödinger’s Rapist – there will inevitably be someone complaining that it’s unfair to them, that they’re not a rapist or murderer and how are they supposed to meet women? Aaronson complains about how seminars about sexual harassment made things worse:
You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.
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In short: “why do you have to make me feel bad about myself, I’m not a bad guy!” It’s#notallmen once more, the constant insistence that an exception should be made because reasons. It becomes about making their hurt feelings the center of the debate instead of hey, maybe people shouldn’t act this way. But the point of Schrodinger’s Rapist and other feminist writings isn’t that men are evil rapists and everything they do is unwelcome, it’s thatwomen live in a world where sex is used against them. It’s a basic benefit of being a man – men don’t experience sexual harassment or risk sexual assault the way women do. Despite his protests that being a nerd makes him one of the least privileged people in society (apparently in all of his feminist reading he never encountered the concept of intersectionality), being bullied in high-school or reading mean quotes about social misfits on Tumblr and Jezebel doesn’t equate with hundreds of years of systematic oppression. Being told that, hey, society teaches men to act in a certain way that’s incredibly shitty to women (and, frankly to men as well) isn’t a referendum about his worth as a man but a call to be better.
So what should he have done instead? Well to start with, he should’ve read some bell hooksinstead of Andrea Dworkin. But more importantly: Nice Guys like Aaronson need to take a step outside themselves and examine their behavior. Take that sexual harassment seminar: ok, now you’ve seen behavior that is considered harassing. Are you behaving in that way? No? Cool, then it’s not about you, now is it? But hey, let’s say you did do something uncomfortable or creepy… now what?
But that doesn’t work with the Nice Guy outlook.
Nice Guys Finish Last – And That’s Not Fair!!
See, the problem with Nice Guys – and something that’s embedded deep into Aaronson’s comment – is the deep-seated belief that they’re being “cheated” somehow. In Aaronson’s experiences, he’d been doing everything “right”… so why was it that other people are getting rewarded and he wasn’t?
All this time, I faced constant reminders that the males who didn’t spend months reading and reflecting about feminism and their own shortcomings—even the ones who went to the opposite extreme, who engaged in what you called “good old-fashioned ass-grabbery”—actually had success that way. The same girls who I was terrified would pepper-spray me and call the police if I looked in their direction, often responded to the crudest advances of the most Neanderthal of men by accepting those advances. Yet it was I, the nerd, and not the Neanderthals, who needed to check his privilege and examine his hidden entitlement!
This is the fall-back of many a Nice Guy – the lament that women love assholes, instead of Nice Guys like him. He’s been following the rules! He’s not playing grab-ass! He’s being nice! Shouldn’t that count for something?
Well… no. As I’ve said many times before: you don’t get a cookie for meeting what are minimum requirements for decent behavior. But he’s unwilling to examine that maybe the problem is what he is or isn’t doing. Aaronson has defined himself as a nerd… and therefore the “good guy” by definition. There can’t be anything wrong with his behavior. Those other guys – the ones that women are going home with – are “Neanderthals”. The bad boys. And believe me, Aaronson chose that word deliberately; he’s saying they’re brutish and crude, even beastial. They’re cavemen while Aaronson is an astronaut. He’s enlightened while they’re ignorant. They’re bad. He’s Nice.
Even when he protests that he doesn’t mean to blame women or the Neanderthals for getting the sex that he didn’t, he still can’t avoid the dichotomy of “us vs. them” with its implied morality. OK sure, it’s society’s fault – we’ll get to that in a second – but he’s still equating the men who are getting laid with being beasts and unthinking brutes.
And that’s where things fall apart. He doesn’t consider that the so-called Neanderthals weren’t “breaking the rules” or “playing grab-ass” but flirting with the women they liked. While Aaronson and others were paralyzed by fear, those supposed assholes were actually makingapproaches. They were out there taking chances and risking getting rejected. That doesn’t make them Neanderthals; they’re just guys who’re choosing to go for what they want instead of letting fear hold them back.
But that doesn’t compute to Aaronson or other Nice Guys. They don’t dare. Better to find other ways, more enlightened ways… and constantly complain about the unfairness of it all when it doesn’t work.
Part of what makes this so frustrating is that Aaronson gets so close to a moment of understanding and misses it by this much:
So what happened to break me out of this death-spiral? Did I have an epiphany, where I realized that despite all appearances, it was I, the terrified nerd, who was wallowing in unearned male privilege, while those Neaderthal ass-grabbers were actually, on some deeper level, the compassionate feminists—and therefore, that both of us deserved everything we got?
No, there was no such revelation. All that happened was that I got older, and after years of hard work, I achieved some success in science, and that success boosted my self-confidence (at least now I had something worth living for), and the newfound confidence, besides making me more attractive, also made me able to (for example) ask a woman out, despite not being totally certain that my doing so would pass muster with a committee of radfems chaired by Andrea Dworkin—a prospect that was previously unthinkable to me.
I want to drive this home: the thing that changed for him was that he asked a woman out. He matured enough to stop looking at women as The Enemy who were looking for reasons to fuck him over and call him a rapist and just interact with them as though they were people. And yet even looking back on things, knowing he was wrong this entire time – he still can’t stop blaming others for the unfairness of his situation. He still blames “society” for teaching a subset of “unprivileged” men not to approach instead of taking responsibility for his own attitudes and beliefs – ones he still holds on to.
In the world of the Nice Guy, it’s the world that’s evil and selfish and needs to change.
And thus we come to the core of the problem with Nice Guys.
Nice Guys and Nerd Entitlement
Nice Guys, for all that they insist that they aren’t, are dealing with an over-inflated sense of entitlement. The Nice Guy outlook is about what they’re “owed” and how the world needs to change and conform to make their lives better without requiring that they change. Even in his complaints about how feminists made him feel bad for wanting to have sex, he’s focused on himself – he wants someone to make him feel better and validate his feelings rather than acknowledging that some behaviors are problematic and people need to try to address them.
Let’s go back to Aaronson’s complaint that the sexual harassment seminars didn’t provide him with clear-cut rules on when approaching someone isn’t sexual harassment. Of course, they couldn’t; the difference between welcome, consensual flirting and harassment is contextual, not binary. What works in some circumstances for some people isn’t going to work for everyone or in every circumstance. It’s on the individual to learn to adapt and change as needed. But by complaining that he wasn’t handed a consistent, universal rules-set2 is asking people to stop being people and start being social robots and the world doesn’t work that way.
Then there was this moment:
In a different social context—for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl—I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine.
He goes on to clarify that he wishes for a consensual arrangement not a return to when women were property, but for a series of rules and rituals. But this, too, is about avoiding what he ultimately had to do: grow, adapt and change. Instead, he’s asking for someone to provide him with a woman and that the current system isn’t what he’s “optimized” for. But again: that’s not how the world works. You either adapt or you don’t.
Then there’s this bit:
From my perspective, it serves only to shift blame from the Neanderthals and ass-grabbers onto some of society’s least privileged males, the ones who were themselves victims of bullying and derision, and who acquired enough toxic shame that way for appealing to their shame to be an effective way to manipulate their behavior.
OK, I’m going to say this with all sincerity to Aaronson and other nerds and Nice Guys: I’m sorry you were bullied. I’m sorry you may find relationships scary and confusing. I’m sorry you may not have the instinctual social ease that others may have. I’ve been there, I have done that and I’ve got the emotional scars to prove it. I understand that trying to figure out how to get better at dating can be confounding, frustrating and intimidating – that’s the whole reason why I created this site.
So with that being said: build a bridge and get the fuck over it.
Being bullied doesn’t make you right, or better or morally superior. Being a nerd doesn’t mean that you’re holy. Just because you’re a geek doesn’t mean that you aren’t also an asshole. Being socially awkward isn’t an excuse and trying to play the Oppression Olympics doesn’t make it any better. No, life isn’t fair, it never has been fair and the sooner you stop expecting that fairness to apply to you, the sooner you’ll be able to improve.
Yes, we live in a society that tells men and women conflicting rules about sex and sexuality and that can be confusing. Yes, the rules about boundaries and consent are changing and we’re all trying to shake off generations of toxic lessons about gender and sexuality and it can be weird, confusing and intimidating. But blaming feminists for scaring you, bullies for bullying you or neanderthals for taking what you “deserve” isn’t progress, it’s whining. Stop blaming others for what, at the end of the day, are your choices. You and you alone are responsible for your life and to make it better.
It’s time to stop talking about fairness and niceness. It’s time to be good. It’s time to be strong.
It’s time to build your new life.
–
Originally appeared at Paging Dr. NerdLove
So I’m going to flip this on its head: Let’s talk about the hate and disdain for Nice Guys. I think there is much too much anger and hatred here for men who are already suffering due to severe social issues and many underlying problems casually dismissed in this article (such as autism, social anxiety and mental disorders). Has it occurred to you or the sneering masses content to label men who are like this as inferior that perhaps this attitude actually contributes to the problem? By dismissing their concerns and treating them badly, you further dehumanize those who are… Read more »
“even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser” See, you gloss over this and then go on to patronise about “imagined fears”, but when I was 13, I asked out a beautiful girl in my tiny, 100-pupil school. She said no. I said, “aww, okay” and went about my business. Now, I considered her a friend, so I tried to put on a brave face, and every time I saw her around school at breaktime (which was often, like I said, a tiny school), I’d just smile, and say “Hello!” Generally wouldn’t… Read more »
and I’m not even one of those “Nice Guy” twats
Being bullied doesn’t equate with thousands of years of systematic oppression. No, it doesn’t. But most people don’t live for even hundreds of years. History notwithstanding, to be bullied is to be harassed and some of the ways in which I was bullied were in fact sexual harassment and sexual assault, and I’m not alone here. Remember that Gawker ass saying that bullying should be brought back? He may have not been serious, but could you imagine that he said bring back domestic violence in response to say, alcohol prohibition? The world is waking up to the fact that its… Read more »
@Erin, I don’t get comment notifications for some reason so I usually don’t see replies lately. Don’t take it as me avoiding anything, I only noticed your comments because I read the article again after facebook GMP page listed it again. This site really needs a better comment system. Ok when I say some, I usually mean a few, eg 5-10 out of a hundred. When I say many it may be 15-50. If I say most it usually means 50-99%. BUT I don’t always adhere to this rule but it is usually correct, so I hope that lets you… Read more »
Problem here is if it were “Nice Girls” we were talking about, the response would not be: “Build a bridge and get the fuck over it”, it would be: “Let’s discuss all of the ways that society (read: MEN writ large) has disadvantaged you, how it should change in order to remove that disadvantage, and how it should apologize for disadvantaging you in the first place”. Men, as humans have understood them in social contexts for the past umpteen millennia, are “do-ers” and women are “be-ers”. Men are defined by their actions (id est: earning capacity), women by their intrinsic… Read more »
Mark, we wouldn’t even talk about “nice girls” in the first place. Have you ever seen an article on GMP address “nice girls” to begin with? Most men aren’t exactly clamoring to talk about or understand what “nice girls” go through themselves. Most men care about the hot girls they can’t get, not the hot girl’s more realistic experiences (how many men touch her without consent and what impact that can have) with men or the nice girls’ experiences of sitting at home or in the corner of the bar too while their prettier counterparts get all the attention from… Read more »
“Most men care about the hot girls they can’t get, not the hot girl’s more realistic experiences (how many men touch her without consent and what impact that can have) with men or the nice girls’ experiences of sitting at home or in the corner of the bar too while their prettier counterparts get all the attention from both “jocks” (who are more bold) and “nerds” (who stare from afar at them) alike.” And making a comment like this – as a male, about women – is enough to get you tarred with the “entitlement” brush. Notably, you aren’t. “And… Read more »
“Most men care about the hot girls they can’t get, not the hot girl’s more realistic experiences” Most, as in the majority of men? Didn’t you get annoyed at me for generalizing assuming I meant the majority of a group. Whilst “many” can be taken multiple ways, “most” IS clearly a majority of a group. Now do you have evidence to backup the assertion of most men caring about a hot girl they can’t get? See you’ve applied a negative behaviour to the majority of a group based on what? It’s a negative generalization, and it’s bigotry. “And most men… Read more »
Please DNL. Tell me about this concept of intersectionality.
Is that the theory that makes me unable to understand what opression is like, despite my home country being a colony for over a century?
Is that the theory that lets feminits tell me that I don’t know what opression is, despite that my grandfather fought a war for 7 years to be able to elect his own governement?
Short version, pithy edition:
If you NEED her, you don’t deserve her.
Would love to see O’Malley do an article on female entitlement, specifically for drinks, dinners, unpaid labor and engagement rings. What are the odds?
Right. Just like seeing Limbaugh espouse a pro-choice point of view. the “doc” knows who butters his bread.
Unpaid labor? You mean like how 99% of men expect women to pick up after them and maintain their house like their mommies, right?
Most men actually don’t pay for any of that shit, but it’s hard to tell for those that don’t go on dates or be in relationships.
This may be hard to believe, but most men can actually cook, clean and pick up after themselves. They don’t NEED anyone to do it for them. That is part of being an adult. They also don’t want to be seen as just appliances or ATMs. Just as women do not owe men sex, men owe them nothing to begin with.
Generally in the stereotypical nuclear family, the man pays more money into bills and thus her “picking up after him” is still paid labour. Or you could say she gets privileges of cheaper rent/bills, he gets privileges of someone “mummying” him.
The basic false premise of this article is the conflating of definitions.
But it’s so much more fun writing a flippant diatribe telling pople to take responsibility for the bullying they’ve endured themself, than to try and understand that noone’s really saying that we shuld deserve cookie for meeting minimum requirements for decent behavior.
Nerds don’t define themselves as good guys because they are nerds. Good guys usually define themselves as good guys because they earnestly try to avoid doing demeaning things to others. This may or may not intertwine with whatever definition you may have for a nerd.
I use to call myself a nice guy because pretty much everyone called me a nice guy. Honestly I can be a bit of an asshole though but I am nice to those that deserve it. I wonder how many “nice guys” call themselves that because they’re told they are by pretty much everyone?
Guess all these nice guys should just man up then eh Harris?
Sheesh, talk about a privileged jerk who has no clue of what many “nice guys” (a.k.a. punching bags) have had to endure their entire lives because they actually listened to people, believed their bull****, and then tried to live up their impossible expectations and double standards.
So Schrodinger’s Rapist is sacrosanct (as usual), but being scared to approach women is worthy of mockery.
Consistency is nice.
It looks to me like “Schrodinger’s rapist” author is also overcome by fear, just like “Nice Guys”, which makes her also concentrate on her own needs and not treating the people she’s surrounded with as equally (but not more) worthy of having their needs satisfied and working on a compromise.
Hrrm I guess the Good Men Project denied my original comment. Interesting, maybe I’ll check again later.
never mind, this site is weird sometimes.
Got to love how Dr. Nerdlove facetiously manipulated and somewhat skewed the perspective of what could have been/is/was a genuine and sincere comment and cry for help. I’m not going to spend much time on this article, primarily because my brain feels like… well… bwoooussssshhhhboom… ya know? The article comes off as largely pretentious and slightly disingenuous, with a smidge of feminist ostentatiousness, with how the author was throwing around nerd and nice guy as semi-pejoratives and over generalizing, could not help but get those feelings; however, there a few great points. People, they friggin suck, in large amounts, not… Read more »
What frustrates me about this post (and most of the criticism of Aaronson’s comments that I’ve seen) is that I see a lot of good arguments against points that I don’t think Aaronson was actually making. If Aaronson were just another bitter “nice guy” tweeting “#notallmen” while demanding that the universe hand him love on a platter in exchange for being inoffensive, it might be reasonable to tell him to stop whining and get over it. But that’s not how I read his comments at all. After all, as he points out, he did that. He realized the mistakes he… Read more »
Morgan, “I find it somewhat tragic that in expressing that, Aaronson wound up being attacked as if he were the monster he had feared himself to be.” That’s petty much par for the course, isn’t it? A repented “sinner”, outing that in his teens and 20’s he and his friends used to grope and coerse women to do things they were hesitant about, and who now have had a “revelation” about how he really was hurting a lot of people, will be lauded as a role model by many feminists. Same feminists will go on to treat an ordinary but… Read more »
Dr Nerdlove
I guess you are not available for questions?
When I read all this I started to wonder if all the men here on GMP that tell about their sexless marriage are also so called nice men that married with the deep conviction that marriage guarantees regular sex and when this does not happen they say the woman has libido problems…….
Silke,
Since “Nice Guy” seems to be the catch-phrase that sticks to just about any trait that is disapproved of by anyone, I’m pretty certain it’s freely available to use in any predicaments of your choice as well…
😉
Yes FlyingKal and maybe we should shift our attention to more pressing problems like the Islamic State and find out why it attracts so many Jihad warriors from all over the world ,and they are not nice guys and they look forward to lot of rewards for not being nice….
Yes, Silke. And I think there’s something to be said about the common flippant dismissals of “[expecting] a cookie for meeting wat are minimum requirements for decent behavior” while we routinely see people getting cake for not coming anywhere near meeting those same requirements…
FlyingKal I do not know where these nice men are., i have a feeling they are the ones that mean they have little success with women,or is not the ones that get regular sex? Is all this about sexual capital and not an issue about being nice or not nice. -Some men and some women have more sexual capital than others. Life is not fair and this is not about being nice or not but about being attractive sexually for others in the same society. Why do so many buy this analyses that niceness is what makes a woman turn… Read more »
Because too often the men are told “You’re such a nice guy, I want a guy LIKE you” whilst simultaneously get rejected. In part, because women tend to be less up front with what they want, it confuses some men. Too many women say they want a nice guy but fail to say they want a sexually attractive and confident man basically.
Silke,
You are contradicting yourself quite a bit there.
Either it’s best to be a bit naughty, OR it is not an issue about being nice or not.
Make up your mind now, you can’t expect to have it both ways…
Errr… so instead of being jealous for other people’s “cake”, maybe ask *THEM* (and not feminists on the net) for the recipe?
Actually what is missing in all these “nerds” lives is actually a mentor, someone decent or dare I say nice, to help show him that bridges can indeed be built and he very much can get over it. Sure he has to do the bridge building and the crossing, no one denies that but we all learn through interaction with other people. We learn from our parents, our teachers, our friends, from men, from women and even our enemies. He has a basic problem, no one showed him how to do these things and he’s afraid to take the first… Read more »
Telling them to help themselves when they don’t know WHERE or HOW to get help is useless though. Many might go to the pickup artists since they seem to have success with women, but then you’ll just see a flurry of feminists write articles on how bad PUA’s are and how bad these guys are for going to PUA’s.
For emotional/mental/etc. problems you get help by going to therapy. Which may be professional (therapist, psychiatrist, group, etc) or not (horse-riding, martial arts, yoga, meditation – and a million other things), or a combination of the two. Or you wait a long time (time heals, but slowly). PUAs may be bad for one reason – they put their needs (mostly, to have sex) above those of a women and artfully simulat paying attention to her to get what they want (so well, at least for a moment, she feels good). “Nice guys” put most of their needs below those of… Read more »
“It’s #notallmen all over again – seeing everything as being about him instead of about what women go through.” Because many feminists have a terrible habit of generalizing to be about ALL men. And many feminists seem to be clueless that simple changes in how they write articles can avoid most of the #notallmen, which leads me to believe they do it to stir up the pot instead of actually genuinely be concerned on certain issues. There’s a massive difference between saying women are cheaters, vs some women are cheaters. It really isn’t that hard to avoid generalizing about groups,… Read more »
are these men who are percieved as assholes “scoring” with the women they are being assholes to? are men actually seeing other men grabbing a woman inappropriately and that woman responding positively or are these men seeing a man be an asshole to a particular woman, then see that guy with a different woman? I’ve seen plenty of men be assholes to people… and yet are kind to their partner. Or are these guys that men are talking about actually getting positive responses from the same person they are groping and grabbing? Or are they seeing one individual get harassed,… Read more »
I’d say it’s a mixed bag. In school, some women seemed to enjoy it. But the thing is the asshole did a bad behaviour to woman1, woman2 would see this and STILL date him. It seemed to be that there was a lot of leeway of bad behaviour for some guys.
One of the best responses ever.
Thank you, Archy. I tip my fedora in your general direction 🙂
I am not going to debate all the points in your response Archy, But you make generalization after generlzations even as you talk about how others make generalizations. It’s ridiculous.
Where? He was very careful to use qualifiers like ‘many’ or ‘not all’.
Umm…How does the use of “many” and “not all” eliminate generalizations? Saying, “Many men/many women”…is still a generalization! Saying “Not all men/not all women” is still a genearlizations! Now me? I think making generalizations are kind of necessary if we are going to have any kind of discussion around issues we personally feel are big social issues or issues we feel one gender or the other tend to perpetuate.While I don’t agree with Archy’s generalization around feminists, I would not attack him for the generalization. Instead I would seek to find examples that refute his belief instead of getting caught… Read more »
Erin, what’s your problem. You can’t change the goal posts just because you don’t like what the man said. I do have to wonder what your malfunction is as you seem to really need for men to be evil or some how bad.
Frank, I’ve been around long enough to witness enough of your comments that I’m not offended by your critique because you routinely show a lack of understanding in general and a penetrate to mock and put others down. As you’ve done above. But I’m going to give you an opportunity here to back up your comments. Show me in any of my comments (and lets be honest, I make many) where I say men are “bad” and or “evil”? Heck, I don’t even get most of your response. How am I trying to “change the goal posts”. Archy routinely talks… Read more »
In regards to Archy’s post, I believe that he has put in the qualifiers, so Erin, I think your argument itself there is a bit circular: You’re (over) generalizing yourself by dismissing the entire body of the comment (which does itself address broader generalizations than its own) as all hyperbole and nothing more, without the specificity. The key difference and the real points of contention lie there, in the specificity. ‘Not-all-blank’ is, yes, a degree of generalization; but it IS a much narrowed and qualified one, compared to ‘ALL-blank’ – which most certainly is broader and unqualified one. Qualification, is… Read more »
Mostly, I am having a hard time pinning down your exact perspective. You defend Archy’s comments around his qualifiers but later in your comments you talk about how it’s more important to “rebut generalizations more” often than not as to not fall into the trap of “reinforcing rhetoric, rather than to clarify, enlighten and contextualize.” So which is it? This issue of mine is specific to Archy. Archy often combats the arguments of others because of the generalizations they make. Yet when it comes time to make his own arguments, generalizations come out of the woodwork. I believe that you… Read more »
Oh come on. No, you shouldn’t expect that “good behaviour” or following feminists’ articles should give you anything at all with a woman X (it may score you some points with the particular feminist who wrote the article, though). Women aren’t the same. Also, “grabbing a women’s breast in public” and all that other stuff feminists wite isn’t sexual harrasment per se – it is harrasment _only_ if she doesn’t wish to be grabbed at that particular moment by that particular person. Most women want to feel desired (by men who they find attractive!) – and sometimes being grabbed in… Read more »
Oh lord, here we go again. Accusing people of entitlement, especially people who put others before themselves to begin with, is a good way to ruin what you are trying to accomplish. You aren’t helping, you cause people like me to pull away and tune you out.
Yes, how dare young men expect being nice and kind to women might pay off at some point with a desirable girlfriend or, god forbid, wife. We clearly need to tar and feather them before they expect that women will actually follow through on their insinuations that they want to be loved and respected by somebody that will treat them well. When all is said and done, there are probably some people that do pretend to be nice to get with women, but if women consistently punish all men because of that, then it’s not really the nice guys that… Read more »
Wow is right. If nice guys don’t get the message now they never will. This should be mandatory reading for every one of them. They say the best revenge is living well. I’m sorry, but the people who hate you aren’t worth revenge. Just live well. You’re smart. You’ll figure out how.
Wow. Well articulated. while trying to establish that he is NOT entitled, he proceeds to act in an entitled way. Like most young males, I went through a phase in my teens of inability to talk to the opposite sex. I was also bullied, and I was a nerd. Like most young males, I got over it. How hoorible it must be for this guy to never have made that personal growth at the right time and then have missed out on so much subsequently. For all his own flaws, my heart does go out to him. He does sound… Read more »
Oh, another Nice Guy article. Has it been three days already?
I’m glad to know more than one person is also underwhelmed by the repetition & the banality.
On the bright side, it’s getting so you can almost set your clock to it… so that provides a bit of utility there.