I don’t think that entitlements are by their nature bad. The real question is when it makes sense to be entitled and when it doesn’t. If I lent you a book than I can justifiable feel entitled to get it back. If I go to my doctor than I can justifiable feel entitled for the doctor advising me to do what he thinks is best for my health and not just what’s commercially best for the doctor.
In both cases the entitlement is towards a specific person. The person towards whom I lent the book has an responsibility to give it back, but if I don’t get it back I’m not enitled that Amazon sends me a new one.
If we look at the Nice Guy, he’s often does nothing when people violate his boundaries. He doesn’t want to create social conflicts and thus might retroactively label the book he gave a friend a gift instead of a loan. Books aren’t that expensive anyway and the nice guy doesn’t want the social conflict. On the other hand the nice guy, thinks that the fact that he let his friend get away with keeping the book means that the friend now owes him something else.
That produces a bunch of implied entitlements that are’t spoken about. Those accumlate and when the Nice Guy thinks he has enough implied entitlements and doesn’t got what he wanted, he feels bad. The solution isn’t to get rid of all entitlements but often for the Nice Guy to articulate what he wants and his boundaries much sooner.
In practice Nice Guy’s that are told to not feel entitlement often try to supress their sense of what they want. I don’t think that’s helpful.
The basic notion is of a person (canonically male, though not always) becoming frustrated when their attempts to transform a platonic friendship into a romantic and/or sexual relationship fall through, leading to rejection. Feminist circles have sometimes criticized these men as objectifying women, but as Dan Fincke points out, in many cases the men are trying to relate to them deeply.
That depends on what you mean with objectifying and relating deeply. Nicole Daedone writes in Slow Sex:
That one day in the kitchen changed my life. In Home Ec, we learned to cook by finding a recipe and following its instructions exactly. We were rewarded for this good behavior by getting a meal and a good grade. In my grandma’s world, we were getting into relationship with the food. Feeling it. Getting to know it. Learning how it wanted to be cooked.
My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.
In that world you don’t get a good meal because you dutifully do what the recipe says you should do. You don’t start cooking with a sense of what the final meal should look like but you develop that over the course of the cooking.
On the other hand in many case the Nice Guy often does try to follow a recipe and has a specific outcome in mind.
I don’t think that entitlements are by their nature bad. The real question is when it makes sense to be entitled and when it doesn’t. If I lent you a book than I can justifiable feel entitled to get it back. If I go to my doctor than I can justifiable feel entitled for the doctor advising me to do what he thinks is best for my health and not just what’s commercially best for the doctor.
In both cases the entitlement is towards a specific person. The person towards whom I lent the book has an responsibility to give it back, but if I don’t get it back I’m not enitled that Amazon sends me a new one.
If we look at the Nice Guy, he’s often does nothing when people violate his boundaries. He doesn’t want to create social conflicts and thus might retroactively label the book he gave a friend a gift instead of a loan. Books aren’t that expensive anyway and the nice guy doesn’t want the social conflict. On the other hand the nice guy, thinks that the fact that he let his friend get away with keeping the book means that the friend now owes him something else.
That produces a bunch of implied entitlements that are’t spoken about. Those accumlate and when the Nice Guy thinks he has enough implied entitlements and doesn’t got what he wanted, he feels bad. The solution isn’t to get rid of all entitlements but often for the Nice Guy to articulate what he wants and his boundaries much sooner.
In practice Nice Guy’s that are told to not feel entitlement often try to supress their sense of what they want. I don’t think that’s helpful.
That depends on what you mean with objectifying and relating deeply. Nicole Daedone writes in Slow Sex:
That one day in the kitchen changed my life. In Home Ec, we learned to cook by finding a recipe and following its instructions exactly. We were rewarded for this good behavior by getting a meal and a good grade. In my grandma’s world, we were getting into relationship with the food. Feeling it. Getting to know it. Learning how it wanted to be cooked. My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.In that world you don’t get a good meal because you dutifully do what the recipe says you should do. You don’t start cooking with a sense of what the final meal should look like but you develop that over the course of the cooking. On the other hand in many case the Nice Guy often does try to follow a recipe and has a specific outcome in mind.