It seems to me that certain attitudes towards self-identified “nice guys” already assume that this hypothesis is false (and other hypothesis that might make the complaints of these guys sound more reasonable).
Can we do a bit more groundwork-laying before we dig into this?
When you read this letter from a self-described “nice guy,” does he sound to you like a reasonable person with a justified gripe? Or does he sound to you like an asshole who’s looking to blame women in general for the trouble he’s had getting laid, probably because he’s an asshole?
Because I think it possible that we are talking crosswise: you are saying “I know for a fact that there exist truly nice guys who have trouble with the ladies,” and I am saying “I know for a fact that the ‘women won’t date nice guys’ complaint is often heard issuing from the mouth of guys who actually aren’t nice at all”—and it is entirely possible that both of these statements are true at the same time.
This helps me understand your stance on the complaints of self-identified “nice guys,” but it doesn’t really help me agree with it. How representative do you think that you and your friends are of the general female population?
Well, this is a bit No True Scotsman, isn’t it? I don’t doubt that there exist women who are only attracted to jerks, the same way I don’t doubt that there exist men who will only date bitchy ladies. Tastes vary widely in matters of romance. Where I start to object is when I hear people making categorical assertions about What Women Want, when such assertions contradict my own experience and observations.
The Herold & Milhausen survey you linked is interesting, and thank you for the citation. There are of course other surveys in which women overwhelmingly indicate that they are looking for nice guys. This one is particularly interesting in that the researchers have been asking the same questions since 1939, and have found significant generational shifts in the traits women are seeking:
Women ranked “pleasing disposition” as significantly less important in 2008 than they have ever before. Pleasing disposition—presumably interpreted to mean being a nice guy—fell from a steady ranking of No. 4 throughout the second half of the 20th Century to a significantly lower rank of No. 7 in 2008.
So it may be true that women aren’t placing as much of a premium on niceness as they used to, but this study at least still finds that it’s a desirable quality in a mate. (Obviously surveys are prone to various kinds of biases, and I’m sure we agree that no single survey is going to provide a conclusive answer to this question, but it’s still interesting to look at what data we can.)
Feminist women touting the “Nice Guy(tm)” label seem to have the attitude that if they can catch the “nice guy” making one generalization that is a little too broad, then they can slap the “Nice Guy(tm)” label on him and disregard the meaningfulness of his experience
Or maybe we’ve just heard a lot of aggressive misogyny along the lines of the letter linked to above, and we’re objecting to that, not to the actual nice guys who are struggling with social awkwardness? I have only sympathy for the latter.
When you read this letter from a self-described “nice guy,” does he sound to you like a reasonable person with a justified gripe? Or does he sound to you like an asshole who’s looking to blame women in general for the trouble he’s had getting laid, probably because he’s an asshole?
He sounds like a confused person with a justified gripe who is now being an asshole (and so does Jeff Fecke, the author of that article). The “nice guy” has been taught a certain approach to female sexuality based on exchange: rather than understanding how to arouse female sexuality, he is taught to attempt to exchange some sort of platonic goods. This view of sexuality is extremely misguided, but it is ubiquitous in our culture among both men and women.
When the attempted exchange failed, he grew frustrated: “You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Of course, this notion is ridiculous because emotional intimacy and physical intimacy are not the same “kind” of good.
Where I part ways from Fecke is where he starts reading the Nice Guy’s mind:
Now, read the two paragraphs above, and you realize a few things. First of all, that Nice Guy®, who was willing to be a friend to a woman? He wasn’t nice, and he wasn’t her friend. He was choosing to feign niceness in the hopes of getting sex.
When Fecke says that the guy wasn’t “nice,” he is equivocating on the word “niceness” so that he can say that the guy lacks it. Believing in exchange over sex is misguided, but so many people believe in it that I don’t that we can say that they are all assholes. Unless he was actively trying to obligate particular women into sex in exchange for platonic favors, it’s too much of a stretch to accuse him of “antipathy toward this woman, and all women”. Merely feeling stiffed on the “exchange” makes the guy misguided, but not an asshole. (Analogously, women who feel stiffed after hookups that don’t turn into relationships aren’t entitled assholes; they are just misguided.)
There is also no basis for Fecke to say that he wasn’t her friend. There is no contradiction between being friends with someone, pursuing them, and feeling frustrated and resentful if they reject you, even to the point of not being able to still be friends with them.
Fecke goes even further:
There’s no crime in being attracted to someone who started as a true platonic friend. But if you’re actually a friend, you deal with that like an adult dealing with a friend. You tell them what you’re feeling.
Here Fecke manages to be both sexist and ableist at the same time. People who have high social anxiety, or who are non-neurotypical, may often have trouble making a move, yet according to Fecke, these folks aren’t acting like adults. Furthermore, the “wait and see” strategy that Fecke observes in “nice guys” is actually a common dating strategy for women, who apparently aren’t acting like adults in his view, either. Fecke is trashing men for having trouble taking the masculine initiator role, which is highly unfair; I expect people with a feminist background to know better.
Fecke does make a good point when he says “But if you never make your intentions clear, you can’t complain that your One True Love didn’t read your mind.” It’s not clear, however, that the “nice guy” was expecting her to read his mind.
The closing of the essay sounds assholish on the part of the “nice guy,” but it’s really hard to assess how assholish, because it depends on certain empirical questions that we don’t know the answer to. To me, it mainly sounds confused and defensive.
Let’s buy his argument that during youth, a disproportionate amount of female attention goes towards exciting men who make good short-term mates, but not necessarily good long-term mates. Eventually, when they are older, women who were using short-term mating strategies switch over to looking for a long-term mate, at which point they notice some guys that they didn’t notice before.
If the “nice guy” acknowledges that during youth women prefer exciting short-term mates, I’m not quite sure why he sounds so exasperated towards women and tells them to “get their head out of their ass” and “Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab ahold of it.” There is no contradiction between prioritizing excitement during youth, and later wanting a more stable, but less exciting long-term mate later in life.
I am skeptical of the claim by the “nice guy” that women would be better served by getting off the short-term carousel at an earlier age. How do we know? Women’s mating strategies may be a lot more instrumentally rational than he acknowledges. Ultimately, the “nice guy” may be resenting women merely for following a self-interested, but perhaps viable, mating strategy. But why should they do anything differently?
Both Fecke and the “nice guy” get it wrong when they start slinging blame. The “nice guy” seems to have some level of resentment towards women, though he shows glimmers of understanding why he fell short of their preferences. Fecke blames the “nice guy.”
In my view, the probably culprit isn’t the “nice guy’s” female friends, nor the “nice guy” himself: the culprit is the culture that brainwashed him into such maladaptive and self-defeating mating scripts and expectations. The “nice guy” didn’t wake up one day during puberty and say to himself “I’m going to try to pursue women in ways that fail miserably, and then resent them for it.”
Unless the “nice guy” took out his resentment on the women involved at a personal level (other than breaking off being friends, because that can be an understandable response to rejection for some people), then the primary victim of these scripts is the “nice guy” himself.
If so, Fecke’s disparagement of him is a form of victim-blaming. If so many men with certain temperaments and upbringings are getting trapped in these unrealistic and outdated scripts, maybe the main problem is with the brainwashing that they are subjected to (see this and this for examples from popular culture).
Those are my reactions to the article, and I’d be interested to know why you characterize it as “aggressive misogyny.” If there is misogyny, it lies in the exchange-oriented scripts (which I would also call misandric), and he is merely the confused pawn of those scripts.
Back to you:
Because I think it possible that we are talking crosswise: you are saying “I know for a fact that there exist truly nice guys who have trouble with the ladies,” and I am saying “I know for a fact that the ‘women won’t date nice guys’ complaint is often heard issuing from the mouth of guys who actually aren’t nice at all”—and it is entirely possible that both of these statements are true at the same time.
Well, that depends on how we operationalize “nice.” It’s possible that both of those statements are true of some population of guys, which is why I’ve been wondering about the ratio of the good sort of “nice guys” to the evil “nice guys.”
I don’t doubt that there exist women who are only attracted to jerks, the same way I don’t doubt that there exist men who will only date bitchy ladies. Tastes vary widely in matters of romance.
Tastes vary, but the distributions may not be the same shape depending on gender. Would you expect the same proportion of men or women to date assholish/bitchy people? If so, then your priors are different from mine. To resolve such a difference, we would have to talk about specific studies.
The Herold & Milhausen survey you linked is interesting, and thank you for the citation. There are of course other surveys in which women overwhelmingly indicate that they are looking for nice guys
The problem is that many of those studies involve checklist self-reports, which is an extremely crude for of measurement. From Herold & Milhausen:
What, then, is the answer to the question “Do nice guys finish last?” It appears that the measurement instruments used strongly influence the answer to this question. First, research findings to date proclaiming the popularity of kind, sensitive men have overemphasized women’s partner preferences obtained through checklists while neglecting to study their actual relationship choices.
[...]
One major limitation of the research on mating preferences is the use of checklist format questionnaires, which ask participants to rank desired characteristics (Botwin et al., 1997; Buss & Barnes, 1986; Regan, 1998; Regan & Berscheid, 1997). Herold (1974) suggested that checklist-type questions may be susceptible to a social desirability bias. As well, this
methodology may be artificial as it measures idealized partner characteristics rather than actual partner choices.
As you correctly observe, there is a problem of bias.
Or maybe we’ve just heard a lot of aggressive misogyny along the lines of the letter linked to above, and we’re objecting to that, not to the actual nice guys who are struggling with social awkwardness? I have only sympathy for the latter.
I’m not confident that those two groups of “nice guys” are always correctly demarcated.
If so, Fecke’s disparagement of him is a form of victim-blaming. If so many men with certain temperaments and upbringings are getting trapped in these unrealistic and outdated scripts, maybe the main problem is with the brainwashing that they are subjected to (see this and this for examples from popular culture).
It is worth adding that part of the ‘brainwashing’ process includes spending too much time in communities where more effective instrumental beliefs are stigmatised but where romantic advice is still given.
Those are my reactions to the article, and I’d be interested to know why you characterize it as “aggressive misogyny.” If there is misogyny, it lies in the exchange-oriented scripts
Yeah, no. This guy is ranting at an audience filled with imaginary women who have wronged him or someone like him, taking apparent pleasure in telling them all what shallow bitches they are (that’s the misogynist part) and how many men are “out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you” (that’s the aggressive part).
I give zero credence to the “let’s pity him because society screwed him over” argument. First, I observe that most men seem to to do just fine in the romantic arena, which is a big strike against the generalized-societal-brainwashing hypothesis. And secondly, if if he did have a run of bad luck, it’s no excuse for the way he’s generalized his resentment against women. Look, I got mugged by a black guy not too long ago. If I start ranting about how black men are dangerous criminal thugs, people are going to quite rightly perceive me as racist—my experience might go some way toward explaining my racism, but wouldn’t justify or excuse it. Same with this guy and his hostility toward women.
And yes, the fact that you see him as sympathetic or “the primary victim” in the situation tells me that we have radically different ideas of what “nice” really is.
Would you expect the same proportion of men or women to date assholish/bitchy people? If so, then your priors are different from mine. To resolve such a difference, we would have to talk about specific studies.
Yes, I would expect the proportions to be about the same, although this is a weak expectation and I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised to see some variance, on average, between the genders. I would be surprised by a really large variance.
The problems with self-reporting are well known (which is why I attached the disclaimers I did to the university survey) but I’m not sure the Herold methodology is such an improvement: in asking women to comment on the behavior of their gender in the abstract, it’s getting more at women’s ideas about other women than it is at what women really do. Best of course would be “study[ing their] actual relationship choices,” but that’s not what the survey you cited does. Do you know of any that do?
I don’t think it’s a surprise to either of us that we read the rant differently. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of an asshole misogynist? Yes. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of a genuinely “nice” person who is in a bad mood, who’s bark is worse than his bite? Yes, and I think that’s more probable. Could we say that the rant contains misogynistic ideas? Yes.
taking apparent pleasure in telling them all what shallow bitches they are (that’s the misogynist part)
He never refers to women as “bitches.” He refers to their preferences as “infantile,” which is insulting, but is it misogynistic? That depends on the definition of “misogyny.”
and how many men are “out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you” (that’s the aggressive part).
He is observing that there will be a bunch of cynical and resentful guys who women have ignored, and women will run into those guys. It’s unclear how much he is talking about himself, and if he’s not, then he’s not being aggressive: he’s just making an observation that follows from his previous ideas.
Even if he is talking about himself, he is rather vague about what he actually intends to do. Remember, this is a guy who thinks practically every guy who is more successful with women than him is a jerk, so his idea of being a “jerk” may be pretty mild.
I don’t think his language compels us to believe that he is out to get women. It’s a rant, and if we asked this guy whether he is out to unleash his cynicism and resentment on women, he would probably say “no.” I think his essay is a bunch of angry posturing, and I’m skeptical that he could back any of it up (based on observations of other guys making similar complaints).
I give zero credence to the “let’s pity him because society screwed him over” argument. First, I observe that most men seem to to do just fine in the romantic arena, which is a big strike against the generalized-societal-brainwashing hypothesis.
I said that it was particularly men with “men with certain temperaments and upbringings” who were vulnerable to that brainwashing. For instance, certain young men who are more introverted and sensitive are more attracted to notions of courtly love, rather than going to parties to make out with people while wasted. Furthermore, men who are less socialized disproportionately base their ideas off what the media and authority figures say about how romance works, which doesn’t always match up to reality.
The fact the well-socialized male extraverts can see through a lot of sappy shit in pop culture doesn’t mean that other guys can. The former sort of guy might hear this song and shrug it off, while a less well-socialized guy might hear it and start thinking of women as porcelain goddesses.
And secondly, if if he did have a run of bad luck, it’s no excuse for the way he’s generalized his resentment against women.
How does he know that he’s had a run of bad luck, or whether he is running into a larger pattern?
Look, I got mugged by a black guy not too long ago. If I start ranting about how black men are dangerous criminal thugs, people are going to quite rightly perceive me as racist—my experience might go some way toward explaining my racism, but wouldn’t justify or excuse it.
The problem with that analogy is that the preferences he observed in women weren’t as rare as you getting mugged. A better analogy would be if, when you were growing up, all or most of the black guys you tried to befriend ended up mugging you. Can you see why, at the time, you might have had trouble assessing that those guys weren’t representative?
Language like “infantile” aside, I have trouble seeing his views as analogous to racism. Is it really sexist to wrongly generalize about the preferences of a gender based on your experiences so far? I’m uncomfortable with that idea, because it fails to make clear how one can attempt to point out any pattern in a gender’s mating preferences without being sexist. Exactly what is the bar of evidence that we need?
Do you think women who generalize about men’s preferences are misandric? For instance, “men just like dumb blondes”, “men only care about looks”, “men only care about sex”, “men don’t like intelligent/strong women”?
And yes, the fact that you see him as sympathetic or “the primary victim” in the situation tells me that we have radically different ideas of what “nice” really is.
The reason I call him the “primary victim” of these outdated scripts is that he is obviously coming out the worst off, based on what we know. He never mentions taking any sort of revenge, or hurting anyone. Perhaps he victimized someone in the past, but we don’t know that. It’s possible that in the future the victim might turn into a victimizer, but again, we don’t know.
All we know is that partly due to misguided notions about female preferences, he has spent years failing with women without truly understanding why. These misguided notions are a reasonable error given the bullshit he was force-fed without any choice. That’s a sucky situation which deserves sympathy, and I’m not going to revoke that sympathy because of his horrible, horrible crime of ranting about that situation on the internets and trying to bolster his shattered ego by convincing himself that he’s too good for his female peers.
As for whether he is “nice” or not, some of the things he says in the rant aren’t “nice” (and could be interpreted as misogynistic, depending on how we conceptualize sexism and where our threshold for it is), but again, it’s a rant. As I’ve stipulated, the guy could be an asshole now, and it’s possible that his lack of success with women was partly due to him being an asshole in the past. Yet there is nothing in the essay that’s inconsistent with a confused, but generally nice person in a bitter mood… unless we want to risk the fundamental attribution error.
So, I have trouble reconciling statements like “Could we say that the rant contains misogynistic ideas? Yes” and “I have trouble seeing his views as analogous to racism.” You seem to be saying that he’s stating misogynistic ideas but that’s really okay, reasonable, and ultimately sympathetic—which I don’t know what to do with.
This part, though, I understand:
I don’t think it’s a surprise to either of us that we read the rant differently. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of an asshole misogynist? Yes. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of a genuinely “nice” person who is in a bad mood, who’s bark is worse than his bite? Yes, and I think that’s more probable.
Your experience leads you to sympathize with him, and (from my perspective) to rationalize away the parts of his rant that are aggressive and threatening. My experience leads me to view him very unsympathetically, and (from your perspective) to zero in on the parts of his rant that sound the worst, and blow them out of proportion.
I could switch over to talking about what in my personal experience has led me to the views I hold, but I don’t anticipate you and wedifrid changing your views based on that story, and it would be painful for me to hear you sympathizing with the self-described “nice guy” from my own past (who in my view was a stalker, and made my life completely miserable for some time). At the same time I’m sure you have similar stories from your own past that have led you to the views you now hold.
So, to use the rationalist jargon, in the true sources of disagreement list, I’m chalking this up to “patterns perceptually recognized from experience.” I don’t know what to tell you except that I and many other women have observed that stalkers, misogynists, and other not-truly-nice-at-all guys often use the “women only date jerks!” line to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their own romantic failures, and to justify their continuing resentment and anger toward women in general. We use the “Nice Guys(TM)” label to refer to this phenomenon, not to play “gotcha” against reasonable & sympathetic dudes.
Your response, of course, will be to say that your own “patterns perceptually recognized from experience” lead you to believe that women often do seem to prefer jerks to nice guys, and the “women only date jerks!” line is therefore something a reasonable, actually-nice guy might often be heard to say. I will update my beliefs to assign a greater probability to the (previously not personally observed, and considered low-weight) notion that many women actually reward truly jerky behavior (as opposed to simple confidence) over truly nice behavior. I hope you will update your beliefs to assign a greater probability to the notion that when women talk about the Nice Guys(TM) concept that we are reporting honestly on our own experiences, as opposed to simply looking for ways to score rhetorical points off innocent men.
So, I have trouble reconciling statements like “Could we say that the rant contains misogynistic ideas? Yes” and “I have trouble seeing his views as analogous to racism.” You seem to be saying that he’s stating misogynistic ideas but that’s really okay, reasonable, and ultimately sympathetic—which I don’t know what to do with.
The reason you are seeing seemingly-conflicting assessments is because I am conflicted over exactly which aspects of the rant are misogynistic or not, and why. I could make arguments either way. If being insulting towards women is misogynistic, then some of his language (e.g. “infantile”) is misogynistic. If “unleashing cynicism and resentment” is a threat rather than an observation or impersonal prediction, then it would be misogyny. As for making generalizations about women’s preferences based on his experience that are wrong, I think it’s more tenuous to call that misogyny.
The reason I sympathize with him is that he had a life of romantic rejection due to bullshit that was fed him, and that he hasn’t actually harmed anyone (as far as we know). The primary person hurt by his misguided ideas about romance is he himself. If we did have information that he was intentionally attempting to hurt women, or that he had stalked someone, then any sympathy I feel would get extinguished pretty fast. Stalking is indeed outside my conceptualization of “nice” (and outside my schema of how self-identified “nice guys” behave).
Your experience leads you to sympathize with him, and (from my perspective) to rationalize away the parts of his rant that are aggressive and threatening. My experience leads me to view him very unsympathetically, and (from your perspective) to zero in on the parts of his rant that sound the worst, and blow them out of proportion.
I appreciate your summary.
I don’t know what to tell you except that I and many other women have observed that stalkers, misogynists, and other not-truly-nice-at-all guys often use the “women only date jerks!” line to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their own romantic failures, and to justify their continuing resentment and anger toward women in general.
I have no trouble agreeing with you on this point. The question on my mind from the start of our discussion is about the proportion of these not-truly-nice-at-all guys relative to the larger population of self-identified “nice guys.” If that proportion is low, then we should be less worried that the “nice guy” in the rant actually holds stable misogynistic attitudes.
We use the “Nice Guys(TM)” label to refer to this phenomenon, not to play “gotcha” against reasonable & sympathetic dudes.
The problem is that those phenomena are not always correctly demarcated. My worry is that reasonable and sympathetic dudes may make certain complaints that sound similar to complaints of genuine misogynists (e.g. “nice guys finish last”), leading certain feminists to fail to recognize them as reasonable and sympathetic, and instead classify them as “Nice Guys(TM).”
I hope you will update your beliefs to assign a greater probability to the notion that when women talk about the Nice Guys(TM) concept that we are reporting honestly on our own experiences, as opposed to simply looking for ways to score rhetorical points off innocent men.
I already believe that that when women talk about the Nice Guys(TM) concept that we are reporting honestly on their own experiences. The question is how representative those negative experiences are of self-identified “nice guys.”
If I hear more women complaining of being mistreated by self-identified “nice guys,” then I will update to higher estimates of malfeasance on the part of guys with that identification. At this time, however, I will maintain that, the base rate of men who self-identify as “nice guys” and who believe that women go for less-nice guys is just so high that it dwarfs the subset of those guys who also mistreat women. Here are some of the reasons why I believe that (or why I believe that I believe that), other than my own experiences:
Herold & Milhausen found that 56% of women in their sample believed that “nice guys finish last” sexually. If those women can hold that belief without being misogynists, then so can men.
Herold & Milhausen had a qualitative component of their study, where they asked women to explain their choice for or against “nice guys.” Some women had positive views of “nice guys,” and some had negative views:
Within the nice guy category, a dichotomy of two stereot ypical personalities emerged from the comments, with the women perceiving the nice guys as either losers or good guys. The losers were seen as needy, weak, predictable, boring, inexperienced, and unattractive. One woman stated, ‘‘Nice guys often don’t provide the drama and adventure women think they want.’’ The good guys, on the other hand, were seen as having such positive traits as good personality, high standards and morals, and politeness.
[...]
The nice guys and bad boys were also seen as differing in their styles of interact ing with women. The nice guys were considered to be far more passive with ‘‘losers’’ depicted as lacking confidence and unsure of themselves and good guys depicted as willing to wait for sex because they cared about their partners and treated them with respect. The women explained that nice guys had fewer partners because they were less forward in their interactions with women. One stated, ‘’To me, ‘nice guys’ aren’t as persistent or aggressive and don’t use sleazy tactics to add another notch to their bedposts.’’
As you can see, perspectives varied, but Herold and Milhausen don’t report that any of the women in their study were mistreated by “nice guys.” There are no complaints of unethical behavior by “nice guys,” no complaints of stalking, misogyny, or entitlement. The only ethical complaints are about “bad boys.”
Some women who spent time in the male sexual role (and who are presumably not jerks) anecdotally report some similar views to self-identified “nice guys.” Norah Vincent dressed up as a man for 6-months, and had a rude awakening in dating.
Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no
Vincent said the dates were rarely fun and that the pressure of “Ned” having to prove himself was grueling. She was surprised that many women had no interest in a soft, vulnerable man.
“My prejudice was that the ideal man is a woman in a man’s body. And I learned, no, that’s really not. There are a lot of women out there who really want a manly man, and they want his stoicism,” she said.
If we see men ranting, it could well be the same sort of momentary misogyny that Vincent contracted from dating straight women. Vincent’s experiences also convinced her to update her estimate of the amount of traditional masculinity that other women desire.
In her chapter of feminist anthology Yes Means Yes, Julia Serano describes her experiences with women while she was male-bodied:
Just as women are expected to fulfill the stereotype of being sexual objects in order to gain male attention, men are expected to fulfill the sexual aggressor stereotype in order to gain female attention. In other words, they have to act like “assholes.” Granted, this isn’t true in all situations. For example, in the progressive artsy, and/or queer circles I inhabit nowdays, men who act like “assholes” don’t get very far. But in the heterosexual mainstream culture, men who unapologetically act like “assholes” tend to thrive.
[...]
During my college years, I watched a number of “nice guys” transform into “assholes.” And when they did, women suddenly became interested in them.
[...]
…many men become sexual aggressors primarily, if not solely, to attract the attention of women. In fact, if heterosexual women suddenly decided en masse that ‘nice guys’ are far sexier than ‘assholes’, it would create a huge shift in the predator/prey dynamic.
Based on the Herold & Milhausen study, the “Nice Guys(TM)” discussed in the feminist blogosphere seems relatively rare. If 56% of women, Vincent, and Serano can hold certain views of women’s preferences that aren’t kind to “nice guys” without being misogynists, then so can men. P( “nice guy” genuinely mistreats women | he believes that “nice guys finish last” ) has got to be pretty low.
The relative rareness of self-identified “nice guys” who mistreat women (or men who believe that “nice guys finish last” and who also mistreat women) doesn’t make that phenomenon unimportant. This phenomenon is interesting, not because it is typical of self-identified “nice guys,” but because it is atypical, and we shouldn’t miss the exceptions just because of the rule.
The question on my mind from the start of our discussion is about the proportion of these not-truly-nice-at-all guys relative to the larger population of self-identified “nice guys.”
Okay, so we’re arguing over percentages—but I perceive guys like the nice-guy letter writer to be ginormous assholes, where as you view him as reasonable and sympathetic. So my population of jerks is obviously larger, because we define “jerk” differently.
In my personal experience, probably about 80 percent of guys who will express to me the sentiment “women only date jerks” are dudes who I perceive to be jerks (yet who are not having stunning success with the ladies). But I will be the first to acknowledge all the biases that are going into shaping that view, firstly the fact that these are men who think it’s a good idea to buttonhole women of their acquaintance with their complaints about women generally, which is quite a filtering mechanism right there. Still, it’s what I got.
I think you may be ascribing to me views that I don’t hold, given that a good deal of the material you’ve cited isn’t directly relevant to the original question. I don’t actually believe that “the ideal man is a woman in a man’s body,” so I don’t need to be convinced otherwise. I believe women are attracted to men, to manly qualities. I dispute that manly qualities = jerkitude, and I object to a model of What Women Want that is presented as categorical yet excludes huge numbers of real-life women.
I also want to circle back to a question you asked earlier and I skipped (because I perceived it as addressing views I don’t hold):
Do you think women who generalize about men’s preferences are misandric? For instance, “men just like dumb blondes”, “men only care about looks”, “men only care about sex”, “men don’t like intelligent/strong women”?
I think those statements are all wrong, at least as presented, although in each case it would be possible to formulate a more careful and sophisticated version that might be supportable. “There is a significant population of men that is primarily attracted to the ‘dumb blond’ presentation” or “Most men give physical appearance strong weight when choosing a mate.” I don’t know if they are insulting, although if you as a member of the group being characterized tell me that these statements (the original, or the reformulations) are insulting, then I will update accordingly. If a lot of men tell me the same thing, I will accept it as something close to fact.
But each of those original statements I can refute trivially, by looking at the world, just as I can refute the “women only date jerks” proposition. It can’t be true that men only like dumb blondes, because I know smart brunettes who are married. It can’t be true that women only date jerks, because I observe nice guys who are happily partnered up.
And as to whether it’s misandrist to formulate the statements in that way: it could be. It’s certainly wrong; it encourages a false and misleading view of the world; it encourages women to externalize their own failures, and to start viewing men as The Enemy rather than as a collection of human beings who are going to vary wildly from individual to individual. It’s on the road to misandry, at least. Basically, yes, I think it’s a good parallel.
Okay, so we’re arguing over percentages—but I perceive guys like the nice-guy letter writer to be ginormous assholes, where as you view him as reasonable and sympathetic.
Actually, I view the letter writer as sympathetic, unreasonable (see my rebuttal to some of his views in a previous comment), and somewhat of an asshole (though I think his assholishness is specific to the context of the rant, and is probably not the source of his troubles with women).
So my population of jerks is obviously larger, because we define “jerk” differently.
That’s probably true.
In my personal experience, probably about 80 percent of guys who will express to me the sentiment “women only date jerks” are dudes who I perceive to be jerks (yet who are not having stunning success with the ladies). But I will be the first to acknowledge all the biases that are going into shaping that view, firstly the fact that these are men who think it’s a good idea to buttonhole women of their acquaintance with their complaints about women generally, which is quite a filtering mechanism right there. Still, it’s what I got.
Interesting. Perhaps the context of the complaint makes a difference: guys who rant about women to a female acquaintance might be different from guys who rant to male friends in discussions of relationships, or from guys who rant on the internet.
I think you may be ascribing to me views that I don’t hold, given that a good deal of the material you’ve cited isn’t directly relevant to the original question. I don’t actually believe that “the ideal man is a woman in a man’s body,” so I don’t need to be convinced otherwise.
Very well, the Vincent quotes might not be relevant. The Herold & Milhausen study, and the quotes from Serano definitely are. If people who aren’t cis male are coming to some of the same conclusions as self-identified “nice guys,” then those conclusions should seem less exceptional, and shouldn’t get those guys so quickly tarred with the “Nice Guy(tm)” brush.
Obviously there is something going on that many self-identified “nice guys” are seeing, 56% of women are seeing, and Serano was seeing… yet for some reason, a certain segment of nerdy or feminist women aren’t seeing it, and I’m wondering why.
And as to whether it’s misandrist to formulate the statements in that way: it could be. It’s certainly wrong; it encourages a false and misleading view of the world; it encourages women to externalize their own failures, and to start viewing men as The Enemy rather than as a collection of human beings who are going to vary wildly from individual to individual. It’s on the road to misandry, at least. Basically, yes, I think it’s a good parallel.
I’m glad that I managed to get it across.
Anyway, have I answered your question about my views of the letter? Where there any other big issues that we were talking about that are worth pursuing at this time?
Obviously there is something going on that many self-identified “nice guys” are seeing, 56% of women are seeing
Well, 56 percent in one survey, when other surveys framed in different ways come out with contradictory findings. I accept the finding as data, but not as such conclusive data that we can make confident assertions about what a majority of women believe. As you pointed out in one of your followups, these women seemed to be talking about two very different definitions of “nice guy,” where one definition basically meant weak and whiny. Weak and whiny is a turnoff, for sure.
I think we agree that what you described as the exchange-oriented script of female sexuality is a misleading way of looking at the world, and can lead genuinely nice guys into frustration. And I think we’ve located the source of our disagreement regarding the Nice Guy(TM) syndrome—we both think it exists, but our different experiences lead us to different estimates of how common it may be. And I’m apparently harsher in my judgments than you are, which is also a contributing factor. Is that a fair assessment?
I do want to thank you again for providing the link to the Herold survey. Even though I don’t accept it as fact, I do accept it as evidence, and I have modified my estimates on that basis. Like I said, going into this conversation I would have put the percentage of Nice Guys(TM) among self-reported “nice guys” at somewhere around 80 percent. Now I’m pegging it at somewhere between 40 to 60 percent.
I would expect the same logic that leads you to conclude that it’s legitimate to attribute a negative judgment to the class of women based on my (non-universal, but pervasive and emotionally significant) experiences with women to also lead you to conclude that it’s legitimate to attribute a negative judgment to the class of soi-disant “nice guys” based on my (non-universal, but pervasive and emotionally significant) experiences with such men.
So I would expect you to accept siduri’s judgment that soi-disant “nice guys” are misogynists with the same casualness that you accept the essay writer’s assertions about women.
Instead, you contest the former and defend the latter.
I would expect the same logic that leads you to conclude that it’s legitimate to attribute a negative judgment to the class of women based on my (non-universal, but pervasive and emotionally significant) experiences with women
What exactly is the negative judgment that you think I think is legitimate?
So I would expect you to accept siduri’s judgment that soi-disant “nice guys” are misogynists with the same casualness that you accept the essay writer’s assertions about women.
Where did I say that I accept the essay writer’s assertions about women? I already stated that I think his views of women are misguided and oversimplified. The question is not whether I agree with the author, but whether his views of women’s preferences are so beyond the pale as to be misogynistic. I think the “nice guy,” Fecke, and perhaps siduri are all committing various sorts of errors, such as the availability heuristic, ignoring base rates, or the typical mind fallacy. I also acknowledge the potential of the availability heuristic on my part, when evaluating the qualities of “nice guys,” which is why I pulled up a bunch of evidence in my last reply showing other people different from me independently coming to some of the same conclusions about “nice guys” and women’s preferences.
The difference is that the “nice guy” is on trial for sexism, while the other two are not, which is why I’m trying to give him a fair trial.
Fair enough; perhaps I’ve misunderstood your position.
It certainly seemed that you were claiming that the essay-writer’s (1) assertions were legitimate, and that siduri and others were inappropriately censuring them, but reading through the whole exchange up to this point I feel like it’s become entirely muddled.
So I suggest we Taboo “misogynistic” and “sexist” here and unpack a bit.
You agree that the essay writer’s position is incorrect, but you nevertheless feel he’s being inappropriately accused of (“on trial for”) something, I’m not exactly sure what, that you feel entitles him to your public defense. Yes?
So, can you clarify what you feel he’s being accused of, and why he’s entitled to more support than he’s otherwise getting, without using those words?
(1) Edit: it occurs to me that there are two essay writers here, so this is ambiguous: I mean the self-identified man who wrote the initial essay that the quoted essay is quoting. That’s probably obvious, but I figured I’d clarify.
Same with this guy and his hostility toward women.
I take it you are referring to the guy mentioned here? I ask because I was expecting to see an example case that was, well, hostile against women. There certainly are people who fit that category.
It seemed to be a guy communicating in an aggressive masculine style. The sort of bluntness that is more commonly used when guys are showing ‘tough love’ to other guys. Complete with the bravado. The content was fairly circumspect as far as such things go. It seems more condescending than hostile. That it was a response to women complaining about their lot rather than purely a complaint about his own also changes the interpretation somewhat.
When I make aggressive exhortations on that subject it tends to be for the benefit of another guy, emphasizing their personal responsibility for their own success. That is, “quit being a pussy and stop whining” rather than “quit having internally inconsistent preferences and stop whining”.
I ask because I was expecting to see an example case that was, well, hostile against women.
“The nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle”—our nice guy seems to be speaking for himself here—”and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.”
Unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you. How is that not hostile???
Which part is not tenable? That the self-described nice guy is identifying with the hypothetical nice guy? How else would you interpret it? That he wants to tell you about nice guys because he’s a nice guy but by the time he gets to the end he’s no longer identifying with the nice guys he’s talking about?
Seriously, how else do you interpret it? Obviously he’s sharing in this “cynicism and resentment,” the whole missive is built around it.
People don’t threaten in the first person to unleash cynicism and resentment , at least without clear wryness or self mockery. That is incredibly jarring to imagine—particularly since he in no way claims to be speaking for himself anywhere in the message.
That the self-described nice guy is identifying with the hypothetical nice guy?
Only in a historical sense. He doesn’t appear to be identifying as a nice guy now. He is displaying none of the hallmark submissiveness that the nice guy persona is based around and is actively making assertions that he knows will prompt a certain subclass of women to attempt to shame him. ‘Nice guys’ notoriously (and almost by definition) let their actions be determined by fear of disapproval from women. Hence the unattractiveness.
Seriously, how else do you interpret it? Obviously he’s sharing in this “cynicism and resentment,” the whole missive is built around it.
He seems to be sharing cynicism and contempt. That is, the following seems to be a reasonable caricature:
“Are you serious? You’re asking why there aren’t nice guys? Of course there are no F-ing nice guys. Nice guys don’t get laid or in any other way treated well. Nice guys existing wouldn’t be a Nash Equilibrium. I am so much smarter than you—except for the thing where I interpret your complaint as a literal question that can be subjected to reason rather than verbal symbols used purely for signalling.”
Only in a historical sense. He doesn’t appear to be identifying as a nice guy now.
Right, which is why when he says “The nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle” I think he’s speaking for himself.
But in any case, you describe him as contemptuous and I’m happy to accept that characterization—contempt vs. hostility isn’t a hair I feel the need to split.
But in any case, you describe him as contemptuous and I’m happy to accept that characterization—contempt vs. hostility isn’t a hair I feel the need to split.
You would, I assume, ‘split the hair’ between women and ‘perpetration of a specific perceived hypocrisy’. It isn’t the class women he is judging here.
Lest there be the slightest hint of implied agreement here allow me to assert that in terms of (indications displayed here of) prejudice, hostility and generic unwarranted expressions of the contempt/resentment/anger towards a group of people ‘letter guy’ comes in third. Blog author and then yourself come in as greater culprits.
I don’t expect you to agree with any of that or even to consider my perception at all important, I’m just being clear that this is in no way a hair splitting disagreement.
Can we do a bit more groundwork-laying before we dig into this?
When you read this letter from a self-described “nice guy,” does he sound to you like a reasonable person with a justified gripe? Or does he sound to you like an asshole who’s looking to blame women in general for the trouble he’s had getting laid, probably because he’s an asshole?
Because I think it possible that we are talking crosswise: you are saying “I know for a fact that there exist truly nice guys who have trouble with the ladies,” and I am saying “I know for a fact that the ‘women won’t date nice guys’ complaint is often heard issuing from the mouth of guys who actually aren’t nice at all”—and it is entirely possible that both of these statements are true at the same time.
Well, this is a bit No True Scotsman, isn’t it? I don’t doubt that there exist women who are only attracted to jerks, the same way I don’t doubt that there exist men who will only date bitchy ladies. Tastes vary widely in matters of romance. Where I start to object is when I hear people making categorical assertions about What Women Want, when such assertions contradict my own experience and observations.
The Herold & Milhausen survey you linked is interesting, and thank you for the citation. There are of course other surveys in which women overwhelmingly indicate that they are looking for nice guys. This one is particularly interesting in that the researchers have been asking the same questions since 1939, and have found significant generational shifts in the traits women are seeking:
So it may be true that women aren’t placing as much of a premium on niceness as they used to, but this study at least still finds that it’s a desirable quality in a mate. (Obviously surveys are prone to various kinds of biases, and I’m sure we agree that no single survey is going to provide a conclusive answer to this question, but it’s still interesting to look at what data we can.)
Or maybe we’ve just heard a lot of aggressive misogyny along the lines of the letter linked to above, and we’re objecting to that, not to the actual nice guys who are struggling with social awkwardness? I have only sympathy for the latter.
He sounds like a confused person with a justified gripe who is now being an asshole (and so does Jeff Fecke, the author of that article). The “nice guy” has been taught a certain approach to female sexuality based on exchange: rather than understanding how to arouse female sexuality, he is taught to attempt to exchange some sort of platonic goods. This view of sexuality is extremely misguided, but it is ubiquitous in our culture among both men and women.
When the attempted exchange failed, he grew frustrated: “You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Of course, this notion is ridiculous because emotional intimacy and physical intimacy are not the same “kind” of good.
Where I part ways from Fecke is where he starts reading the Nice Guy’s mind:
When Fecke says that the guy wasn’t “nice,” he is equivocating on the word “niceness” so that he can say that the guy lacks it. Believing in exchange over sex is misguided, but so many people believe in it that I don’t that we can say that they are all assholes. Unless he was actively trying to obligate particular women into sex in exchange for platonic favors, it’s too much of a stretch to accuse him of “antipathy toward this woman, and all women”. Merely feeling stiffed on the “exchange” makes the guy misguided, but not an asshole. (Analogously, women who feel stiffed after hookups that don’t turn into relationships aren’t entitled assholes; they are just misguided.)
There is also no basis for Fecke to say that he wasn’t her friend. There is no contradiction between being friends with someone, pursuing them, and feeling frustrated and resentful if they reject you, even to the point of not being able to still be friends with them.
Fecke goes even further:
Here Fecke manages to be both sexist and ableist at the same time. People who have high social anxiety, or who are non-neurotypical, may often have trouble making a move, yet according to Fecke, these folks aren’t acting like adults. Furthermore, the “wait and see” strategy that Fecke observes in “nice guys” is actually a common dating strategy for women, who apparently aren’t acting like adults in his view, either. Fecke is trashing men for having trouble taking the masculine initiator role, which is highly unfair; I expect people with a feminist background to know better.
Fecke does make a good point when he says “But if you never make your intentions clear, you can’t complain that your One True Love didn’t read your mind.” It’s not clear, however, that the “nice guy” was expecting her to read his mind.
The closing of the essay sounds assholish on the part of the “nice guy,” but it’s really hard to assess how assholish, because it depends on certain empirical questions that we don’t know the answer to. To me, it mainly sounds confused and defensive.
Let’s buy his argument that during youth, a disproportionate amount of female attention goes towards exciting men who make good short-term mates, but not necessarily good long-term mates. Eventually, when they are older, women who were using short-term mating strategies switch over to looking for a long-term mate, at which point they notice some guys that they didn’t notice before.
If the “nice guy” acknowledges that during youth women prefer exciting short-term mates, I’m not quite sure why he sounds so exasperated towards women and tells them to “get their head out of their ass” and “Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab ahold of it.” There is no contradiction between prioritizing excitement during youth, and later wanting a more stable, but less exciting long-term mate later in life.
I am skeptical of the claim by the “nice guy” that women would be better served by getting off the short-term carousel at an earlier age. How do we know? Women’s mating strategies may be a lot more instrumentally rational than he acknowledges. Ultimately, the “nice guy” may be resenting women merely for following a self-interested, but perhaps viable, mating strategy. But why should they do anything differently?
Both Fecke and the “nice guy” get it wrong when they start slinging blame. The “nice guy” seems to have some level of resentment towards women, though he shows glimmers of understanding why he fell short of their preferences. Fecke blames the “nice guy.”
In my view, the probably culprit isn’t the “nice guy’s” female friends, nor the “nice guy” himself: the culprit is the culture that brainwashed him into such maladaptive and self-defeating mating scripts and expectations. The “nice guy” didn’t wake up one day during puberty and say to himself “I’m going to try to pursue women in ways that fail miserably, and then resent them for it.”
Unless the “nice guy” took out his resentment on the women involved at a personal level (other than breaking off being friends, because that can be an understandable response to rejection for some people), then the primary victim of these scripts is the “nice guy” himself.
If so, Fecke’s disparagement of him is a form of victim-blaming. If so many men with certain temperaments and upbringings are getting trapped in these unrealistic and outdated scripts, maybe the main problem is with the brainwashing that they are subjected to (see this and this for examples from popular culture).
Those are my reactions to the article, and I’d be interested to know why you characterize it as “aggressive misogyny.” If there is misogyny, it lies in the exchange-oriented scripts (which I would also call misandric), and he is merely the confused pawn of those scripts.
Back to you:
Well, that depends on how we operationalize “nice.” It’s possible that both of those statements are true of some population of guys, which is why I’ve been wondering about the ratio of the good sort of “nice guys” to the evil “nice guys.”
Tastes vary, but the distributions may not be the same shape depending on gender. Would you expect the same proportion of men or women to date assholish/bitchy people? If so, then your priors are different from mine. To resolve such a difference, we would have to talk about specific studies.
The problem is that many of those studies involve checklist self-reports, which is an extremely crude for of measurement. From Herold & Milhausen:
As you correctly observe, there is a problem of bias.
I’m not confident that those two groups of “nice guys” are always correctly demarcated.
It is worth adding that part of the ‘brainwashing’ process includes spending too much time in communities where more effective instrumental beliefs are stigmatised but where romantic advice is still given.
Yeah, no. This guy is ranting at an audience filled with imaginary women who have wronged him or someone like him, taking apparent pleasure in telling them all what shallow bitches they are (that’s the misogynist part) and how many men are “out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you” (that’s the aggressive part).
I give zero credence to the “let’s pity him because society screwed him over” argument. First, I observe that most men seem to to do just fine in the romantic arena, which is a big strike against the generalized-societal-brainwashing hypothesis. And secondly, if if he did have a run of bad luck, it’s no excuse for the way he’s generalized his resentment against women. Look, I got mugged by a black guy not too long ago. If I start ranting about how black men are dangerous criminal thugs, people are going to quite rightly perceive me as racist—my experience might go some way toward explaining my racism, but wouldn’t justify or excuse it. Same with this guy and his hostility toward women.
And yes, the fact that you see him as sympathetic or “the primary victim” in the situation tells me that we have radically different ideas of what “nice” really is.
Yes, I would expect the proportions to be about the same, although this is a weak expectation and I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised to see some variance, on average, between the genders. I would be surprised by a really large variance.
The problems with self-reporting are well known (which is why I attached the disclaimers I did to the university survey) but I’m not sure the Herold methodology is such an improvement: in asking women to comment on the behavior of their gender in the abstract, it’s getting more at women’s ideas about other women than it is at what women really do. Best of course would be “study[ing their] actual relationship choices,” but that’s not what the survey you cited does. Do you know of any that do?
I don’t think it’s a surprise to either of us that we read the rant differently. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of an asshole misogynist? Yes. Could it be consistent with the thoughts of a genuinely “nice” person who is in a bad mood, who’s bark is worse than his bite? Yes, and I think that’s more probable. Could we say that the rant contains misogynistic ideas? Yes.
He never refers to women as “bitches.” He refers to their preferences as “infantile,” which is insulting, but is it misogynistic? That depends on the definition of “misogyny.”
He is observing that there will be a bunch of cynical and resentful guys who women have ignored, and women will run into those guys. It’s unclear how much he is talking about himself, and if he’s not, then he’s not being aggressive: he’s just making an observation that follows from his previous ideas.
Even if he is talking about himself, he is rather vague about what he actually intends to do. Remember, this is a guy who thinks practically every guy who is more successful with women than him is a jerk, so his idea of being a “jerk” may be pretty mild.
I don’t think his language compels us to believe that he is out to get women. It’s a rant, and if we asked this guy whether he is out to unleash his cynicism and resentment on women, he would probably say “no.” I think his essay is a bunch of angry posturing, and I’m skeptical that he could back any of it up (based on observations of other guys making similar complaints).
I said that it was particularly men with “men with certain temperaments and upbringings” who were vulnerable to that brainwashing. For instance, certain young men who are more introverted and sensitive are more attracted to notions of courtly love, rather than going to parties to make out with people while wasted. Furthermore, men who are less socialized disproportionately base their ideas off what the media and authority figures say about how romance works, which doesn’t always match up to reality.
The fact the well-socialized male extraverts can see through a lot of sappy shit in pop culture doesn’t mean that other guys can. The former sort of guy might hear this song and shrug it off, while a less well-socialized guy might hear it and start thinking of women as porcelain goddesses.
How does he know that he’s had a run of bad luck, or whether he is running into a larger pattern?
The problem with that analogy is that the preferences he observed in women weren’t as rare as you getting mugged. A better analogy would be if, when you were growing up, all or most of the black guys you tried to befriend ended up mugging you. Can you see why, at the time, you might have had trouble assessing that those guys weren’t representative?
Language like “infantile” aside, I have trouble seeing his views as analogous to racism. Is it really sexist to wrongly generalize about the preferences of a gender based on your experiences so far? I’m uncomfortable with that idea, because it fails to make clear how one can attempt to point out any pattern in a gender’s mating preferences without being sexist. Exactly what is the bar of evidence that we need?
Do you think women who generalize about men’s preferences are misandric? For instance, “men just like dumb blondes”, “men only care about looks”, “men only care about sex”, “men don’t like intelligent/strong women”?
The reason I call him the “primary victim” of these outdated scripts is that he is obviously coming out the worst off, based on what we know. He never mentions taking any sort of revenge, or hurting anyone. Perhaps he victimized someone in the past, but we don’t know that. It’s possible that in the future the victim might turn into a victimizer, but again, we don’t know.
All we know is that partly due to misguided notions about female preferences, he has spent years failing with women without truly understanding why. These misguided notions are a reasonable error given the bullshit he was force-fed without any choice. That’s a sucky situation which deserves sympathy, and I’m not going to revoke that sympathy because of his horrible, horrible crime of ranting about that situation on the internets and trying to bolster his shattered ego by convincing himself that he’s too good for his female peers.
As for whether he is “nice” or not, some of the things he says in the rant aren’t “nice” (and could be interpreted as misogynistic, depending on how we conceptualize sexism and where our threshold for it is), but again, it’s a rant. As I’ve stipulated, the guy could be an asshole now, and it’s possible that his lack of success with women was partly due to him being an asshole in the past. Yet there is nothing in the essay that’s inconsistent with a confused, but generally nice person in a bitter mood… unless we want to risk the fundamental attribution error.
So, I have trouble reconciling statements like “Could we say that the rant contains misogynistic ideas? Yes” and “I have trouble seeing his views as analogous to racism.” You seem to be saying that he’s stating misogynistic ideas but that’s really okay, reasonable, and ultimately sympathetic—which I don’t know what to do with.
This part, though, I understand:
Your experience leads you to sympathize with him, and (from my perspective) to rationalize away the parts of his rant that are aggressive and threatening. My experience leads me to view him very unsympathetically, and (from your perspective) to zero in on the parts of his rant that sound the worst, and blow them out of proportion.
I could switch over to talking about what in my personal experience has led me to the views I hold, but I don’t anticipate you and wedifrid changing your views based on that story, and it would be painful for me to hear you sympathizing with the self-described “nice guy” from my own past (who in my view was a stalker, and made my life completely miserable for some time). At the same time I’m sure you have similar stories from your own past that have led you to the views you now hold.
So, to use the rationalist jargon, in the true sources of disagreement list, I’m chalking this up to “patterns perceptually recognized from experience.” I don’t know what to tell you except that I and many other women have observed that stalkers, misogynists, and other not-truly-nice-at-all guys often use the “women only date jerks!” line to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their own romantic failures, and to justify their continuing resentment and anger toward women in general. We use the “Nice Guys(TM)” label to refer to this phenomenon, not to play “gotcha” against reasonable & sympathetic dudes.
Your response, of course, will be to say that your own “patterns perceptually recognized from experience” lead you to believe that women often do seem to prefer jerks to nice guys, and the “women only date jerks!” line is therefore something a reasonable, actually-nice guy might often be heard to say. I will update my beliefs to assign a greater probability to the (previously not personally observed, and considered low-weight) notion that many women actually reward truly jerky behavior (as opposed to simple confidence) over truly nice behavior. I hope you will update your beliefs to assign a greater probability to the notion that when women talk about the Nice Guys(TM) concept that we are reporting honestly on our own experiences, as opposed to simply looking for ways to score rhetorical points off innocent men.
The reason you are seeing seemingly-conflicting assessments is because I am conflicted over exactly which aspects of the rant are misogynistic or not, and why. I could make arguments either way. If being insulting towards women is misogynistic, then some of his language (e.g. “infantile”) is misogynistic. If “unleashing cynicism and resentment” is a threat rather than an observation or impersonal prediction, then it would be misogyny. As for making generalizations about women’s preferences based on his experience that are wrong, I think it’s more tenuous to call that misogyny.
The reason I sympathize with him is that he had a life of romantic rejection due to bullshit that was fed him, and that he hasn’t actually harmed anyone (as far as we know). The primary person hurt by his misguided ideas about romance is he himself. If we did have information that he was intentionally attempting to hurt women, or that he had stalked someone, then any sympathy I feel would get extinguished pretty fast. Stalking is indeed outside my conceptualization of “nice” (and outside my schema of how self-identified “nice guys” behave).
I appreciate your summary.
I have no trouble agreeing with you on this point. The question on my mind from the start of our discussion is about the proportion of these not-truly-nice-at-all guys relative to the larger population of self-identified “nice guys.” If that proportion is low, then we should be less worried that the “nice guy” in the rant actually holds stable misogynistic attitudes.
The problem is that those phenomena are not always correctly demarcated. My worry is that reasonable and sympathetic dudes may make certain complaints that sound similar to complaints of genuine misogynists (e.g. “nice guys finish last”), leading certain feminists to fail to recognize them as reasonable and sympathetic, and instead classify them as “Nice Guys(TM).”
I already believe that that when women talk about the Nice Guys(TM) concept that we are reporting honestly on their own experiences. The question is how representative those negative experiences are of self-identified “nice guys.”
If I hear more women complaining of being mistreated by self-identified “nice guys,” then I will update to higher estimates of malfeasance on the part of guys with that identification. At this time, however, I will maintain that, the base rate of men who self-identify as “nice guys” and who believe that women go for less-nice guys is just so high that it dwarfs the subset of those guys who also mistreat women. Here are some of the reasons why I believe that (or why I believe that I believe that), other than my own experiences:
Herold & Milhausen found that 56% of women in their sample believed that “nice guys finish last” sexually. If those women can hold that belief without being misogynists, then so can men.
Herold & Milhausen had a qualitative component of their study, where they asked women to explain their choice for or against “nice guys.” Some women had positive views of “nice guys,” and some had negative views:
As you can see, perspectives varied, but Herold and Milhausen don’t report that any of the women in their study were mistreated by “nice guys.” There are no complaints of unethical behavior by “nice guys,” no complaints of stalking, misogyny, or entitlement. The only ethical complaints are about “bad boys.”
Some women who spent time in the male sexual role (and who are presumably not jerks) anecdotally report some similar views to self-identified “nice guys.” Norah Vincent dressed up as a man for 6-months, and had a rude awakening in dating.
From here:
From here:
In her chapter of feminist anthology Yes Means Yes, Julia Serano describes her experiences with women while she was male-bodied:
Based on the Herold & Milhausen study, the “Nice Guys(TM)” discussed in the feminist blogosphere seems relatively rare. If 56% of women, Vincent, and Serano can hold certain views of women’s preferences that aren’t kind to “nice guys” without being misogynists, then so can men. P( “nice guy” genuinely mistreats women | he believes that “nice guys finish last” ) has got to be pretty low.
The relative rareness of self-identified “nice guys” who mistreat women (or men who believe that “nice guys finish last” and who also mistreat women) doesn’t make that phenomenon unimportant. This phenomenon is interesting, not because it is typical of self-identified “nice guys,” but because it is atypical, and we shouldn’t miss the exceptions just because of the rule.
Okay, so we’re arguing over percentages—but I perceive guys like the nice-guy letter writer to be ginormous assholes, where as you view him as reasonable and sympathetic. So my population of jerks is obviously larger, because we define “jerk” differently.
In my personal experience, probably about 80 percent of guys who will express to me the sentiment “women only date jerks” are dudes who I perceive to be jerks (yet who are not having stunning success with the ladies). But I will be the first to acknowledge all the biases that are going into shaping that view, firstly the fact that these are men who think it’s a good idea to buttonhole women of their acquaintance with their complaints about women generally, which is quite a filtering mechanism right there. Still, it’s what I got.
I think you may be ascribing to me views that I don’t hold, given that a good deal of the material you’ve cited isn’t directly relevant to the original question. I don’t actually believe that “the ideal man is a woman in a man’s body,” so I don’t need to be convinced otherwise. I believe women are attracted to men, to manly qualities. I dispute that manly qualities = jerkitude, and I object to a model of What Women Want that is presented as categorical yet excludes huge numbers of real-life women.
I also want to circle back to a question you asked earlier and I skipped (because I perceived it as addressing views I don’t hold):
I think those statements are all wrong, at least as presented, although in each case it would be possible to formulate a more careful and sophisticated version that might be supportable. “There is a significant population of men that is primarily attracted to the ‘dumb blond’ presentation” or “Most men give physical appearance strong weight when choosing a mate.” I don’t know if they are insulting, although if you as a member of the group being characterized tell me that these statements (the original, or the reformulations) are insulting, then I will update accordingly. If a lot of men tell me the same thing, I will accept it as something close to fact.
But each of those original statements I can refute trivially, by looking at the world, just as I can refute the “women only date jerks” proposition. It can’t be true that men only like dumb blondes, because I know smart brunettes who are married. It can’t be true that women only date jerks, because I observe nice guys who are happily partnered up.
And as to whether it’s misandrist to formulate the statements in that way: it could be. It’s certainly wrong; it encourages a false and misleading view of the world; it encourages women to externalize their own failures, and to start viewing men as The Enemy rather than as a collection of human beings who are going to vary wildly from individual to individual. It’s on the road to misandry, at least. Basically, yes, I think it’s a good parallel.
siduri said:
Actually, I view the letter writer as sympathetic, unreasonable (see my rebuttal to some of his views in a previous comment), and somewhat of an asshole (though I think his assholishness is specific to the context of the rant, and is probably not the source of his troubles with women).
That’s probably true.
Interesting. Perhaps the context of the complaint makes a difference: guys who rant about women to a female acquaintance might be different from guys who rant to male friends in discussions of relationships, or from guys who rant on the internet.
Very well, the Vincent quotes might not be relevant. The Herold & Milhausen study, and the quotes from Serano definitely are. If people who aren’t cis male are coming to some of the same conclusions as self-identified “nice guys,” then those conclusions should seem less exceptional, and shouldn’t get those guys so quickly tarred with the “Nice Guy(tm)” brush.
Obviously there is something going on that many self-identified “nice guys” are seeing, 56% of women are seeing, and Serano was seeing… yet for some reason, a certain segment of nerdy or feminist women aren’t seeing it, and I’m wondering why.
I’m glad that I managed to get it across.
Anyway, have I answered your question about my views of the letter? Where there any other big issues that we were talking about that are worth pursuing at this time?
Well, 56 percent in one survey, when other surveys framed in different ways come out with contradictory findings. I accept the finding as data, but not as such conclusive data that we can make confident assertions about what a majority of women believe. As you pointed out in one of your followups, these women seemed to be talking about two very different definitions of “nice guy,” where one definition basically meant weak and whiny. Weak and whiny is a turnoff, for sure.
I think we agree that what you described as the exchange-oriented script of female sexuality is a misleading way of looking at the world, and can lead genuinely nice guys into frustration. And I think we’ve located the source of our disagreement regarding the Nice Guy(TM) syndrome—we both think it exists, but our different experiences lead us to different estimates of how common it may be. And I’m apparently harsher in my judgments than you are, which is also a contributing factor. Is that a fair assessment?
I do want to thank you again for providing the link to the Herold survey. Even though I don’t accept it as fact, I do accept it as evidence, and I have modified my estimates on that basis. Like I said, going into this conversation I would have put the percentage of Nice Guys(TM) among self-reported “nice guys” at somewhere around 80 percent. Now I’m pegging it at somewhere between 40 to 60 percent.
Also, I wonder if it would help if you and Hugh clarified what each of you mean by behaving like a jerk.
I would expect the same logic that leads you to conclude that it’s legitimate to attribute a negative judgment to the class of women based on my (non-universal, but pervasive and emotionally significant) experiences with women to also lead you to conclude that it’s legitimate to attribute a negative judgment to the class of soi-disant “nice guys” based on my (non-universal, but pervasive and emotionally significant) experiences with such men.
So I would expect you to accept siduri’s judgment that soi-disant “nice guys” are misogynists with the same casualness that you accept the essay writer’s assertions about women.
Instead, you contest the former and defend the latter.
Why is that?
What exactly is the negative judgment that you think I think is legitimate?
Where did I say that I accept the essay writer’s assertions about women? I already stated that I think his views of women are misguided and oversimplified. The question is not whether I agree with the author, but whether his views of women’s preferences are so beyond the pale as to be misogynistic. I think the “nice guy,” Fecke, and perhaps siduri are all committing various sorts of errors, such as the availability heuristic, ignoring base rates, or the typical mind fallacy. I also acknowledge the potential of the availability heuristic on my part, when evaluating the qualities of “nice guys,” which is why I pulled up a bunch of evidence in my last reply showing other people different from me independently coming to some of the same conclusions about “nice guys” and women’s preferences.
The difference is that the “nice guy” is on trial for sexism, while the other two are not, which is why I’m trying to give him a fair trial.
Fair enough; perhaps I’ve misunderstood your position.
It certainly seemed that you were claiming that the essay-writer’s (1) assertions were legitimate, and that siduri and others were inappropriately censuring them, but reading through the whole exchange up to this point I feel like it’s become entirely muddled.
So I suggest we Taboo “misogynistic” and “sexist” here and unpack a bit.
You agree that the essay writer’s position is incorrect, but you nevertheless feel he’s being inappropriately accused of (“on trial for”) something, I’m not exactly sure what, that you feel entitles him to your public defense. Yes?
So, can you clarify what you feel he’s being accused of, and why he’s entitled to more support than he’s otherwise getting, without using those words?
(1) Edit: it occurs to me that there are two essay writers here, so this is ambiguous: I mean the self-identified man who wrote the initial essay that the quoted essay is quoting. That’s probably obvious, but I figured I’d clarify.
Upvoted purely for “soi-disant”. I’m a professional writer and editor; it’s not often that I learn a new word.
(nods) I’m fond of it. In most contexts I use the more accessible “self-styled” instead, but the connotations are different.
I take it you are referring to the guy mentioned here? I ask because I was expecting to see an example case that was, well, hostile against women. There certainly are people who fit that category.
It seemed to be a guy communicating in an aggressive masculine style. The sort of bluntness that is more commonly used when guys are showing ‘tough love’ to other guys. Complete with the bravado. The content was fairly circumspect as far as such things go. It seems more condescending than hostile. That it was a response to women complaining about their lot rather than purely a complaint about his own also changes the interpretation somewhat.
When I make aggressive exhortations on that subject it tends to be for the benefit of another guy, emphasizing their personal responsibility for their own success. That is, “quit being a pussy and stop whining” rather than “quit having internally inconsistent preferences and stop whining”.
“The nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle”—our nice guy seems to be speaking for himself here—”and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.”
Unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you. How is that not hostile???
(I do not consider that to be a tenable interpretation of the words.)
Which part is not tenable? That the self-described nice guy is identifying with the hypothetical nice guy? How else would you interpret it? That he wants to tell you about nice guys because he’s a nice guy but by the time he gets to the end he’s no longer identifying with the nice guys he’s talking about?
Seriously, how else do you interpret it? Obviously he’s sharing in this “cynicism and resentment,” the whole missive is built around it.
People don’t threaten in the first person to unleash cynicism and resentment , at least without clear wryness or self mockery. That is incredibly jarring to imagine—particularly since he in no way claims to be speaking for himself anywhere in the message.
Only in a historical sense. He doesn’t appear to be identifying as a nice guy now. He is displaying none of the hallmark submissiveness that the nice guy persona is based around and is actively making assertions that he knows will prompt a certain subclass of women to attempt to shame him. ‘Nice guys’ notoriously (and almost by definition) let their actions be determined by fear of disapproval from women. Hence the unattractiveness.
He seems to be sharing cynicism and contempt. That is, the following seems to be a reasonable caricature:
“Are you serious? You’re asking why there aren’t nice guys? Of course there are no F-ing nice guys. Nice guys don’t get laid or in any other way treated well. Nice guys existing wouldn’t be a Nash Equilibrium. I am so much smarter than you—except for the thing where I interpret your complaint as a literal question that can be subjected to reason rather than verbal symbols used purely for signalling.”
Right, which is why when he says “The nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle” I think he’s speaking for himself.
But in any case, you describe him as contemptuous and I’m happy to accept that characterization—contempt vs. hostility isn’t a hair I feel the need to split.
You would, I assume, ‘split the hair’ between women and ‘perpetration of a specific perceived hypocrisy’. It isn’t the class women he is judging here.
Lest there be the slightest hint of implied agreement here allow me to assert that in terms of (indications displayed here of) prejudice, hostility and generic unwarranted expressions of the contempt/resentment/anger towards a group of people ‘letter guy’ comes in third. Blog author and then yourself come in as greater culprits.
I don’t expect you to agree with any of that or even to consider my perception at all important, I’m just being clear that this is in no way a hair splitting disagreement.