Confessions of a Former Nice Guy

There's been a small burst of blog posts lately regarding the phenomenon of "nice guys;" it started with this post regarding a couple of Aussie guys who, apparently, teach techniques of talk, body language, and so on to men who've had no luck on the dating scene:

So, these guys think they are teaching men how to be “natural” with women. It couldn’t be that they’re teaching men how to be sleazy and dishonest? Why is it that teaching men to be confident with women is automatically about tricking women into thinking the man is something he’s not - smooth, suave, charming? Then again, the whole thing is about performance - gender is one big long performance, an imitation that really has no original in the first place, and why shouldn’t we just learn to be different at it? I dunno, maybe because nothing is honest in this world anymore! Nobody knows how to be honest with one another! At least, not when it comes to sex.

The post got quoted far and wide, and got its author, Thinking Girl, a lot of heat, as she explains:

It’s drawn over 300 comments, many of which are from pick-up artists defending their actions and some of which have been vilely misogynistic and meant to intimidate me and other commenters on the thread....It’s been linked in many places all over the web, including many pick-up artist message boards and online forums in North America and Europe (you can only imagine what they have written about me there). It’s resulted in hate email, and even a request to appear in an academic documentary about the PUA industry.

Now, I’m not writing about this here to give my post any more publicity or to debate the topic any further, or to draw any sympathy. I’m writing about this because it is a first-hand example of what kind of bullshit tactics are used against a female feminist writing on the internet about male privilege. Because that’s what the post boils down to: I’m saying that PUA uses an approach that reinforces harmful gender roles on women in order to get laid, and doing so indicates male privilege and is therefore unethical. Yes: I, a lowly feminist blogger, who must be a butt-ugly hairy lesbian feminazi who is stupid and hates men and clearly just needs a good deep-dicking to turn all that around and make me salivate and beg for more, have dared to question the god-given right/biological need/good intentions of the Nice Guys (TM) who have TRIED being sweet and kind and respectful but goddamn it that just doesn’t work with you selfish bitches who want to keep all that sweet pussy to yourselves and only share with the Bad Boys (TM) who treat you like dirt anyway. I have called it like I see it, and pointed out that this practice is misogynistic and relies on male privilege. And for that, I get a shitstorm. Don’t question the god-given right/biological need of men to get laid, and its correlative, the duty of women to submit by shutting up and putting out, bitch. It’s all about rights and duties.

Amanda Marcotte elaborates:

I’m mostly posting on this because we now have a new batch of people wondering what Nice Guys® are, and this gives you an idea. They’re misogynists who think they are nice and hold womankind universally accountable for not giving them their due rewards by lining the streets as they walk with our legs spread.

As an ex-Nice Guy ® (TM), all I can say is: ouch.

When I was younger, I was one lonely lonely guy. I don't believe I actually ever thought that I was owed anything by anybody, and I don't think it would ever have occurred to me to take classes, for pity's sake, but being told repeatedly that I was just a friend, or like a brother, or the kind of guy a woman would marry but not the kind she'd go out with (and yes, I heard every one of those things multiple times over the course of many years) -- well, after a while it did get pretty tiresome. I knew it was all bullshit, but I remember wishing for a bit of honesty. "Seriously, do I smell bad or what? If I know, then maybe I can do something about it." Having been raised by my mom and my grandmom, I knew better than to do something stupid like blame women as a group for my own failure to connect. Nonetheless, I did get kind of bitter.

But that was when I was still in my late teens and early twenties, and still kind of an emotional wreck from when I was younger than that (long story). Most likely, I was just radiating damage signals for all to see, and the various responses I've mentioned were just standard ways of brushing me off gently. At least, that's what I'd like to think at this point. And to be honest, I knew at the time that I was a wreck inside even if I didn't want to admit it, and I knew that this was the reason nobody wanted to be in a relationship with me. But what I didn't realize was that the solution to the problem was that I was looking in the wrong place.

I didn't figure this out until I read Robert Bly's book Iron John (this was when that short-lived "men's movement" thing was starting up). I had read a lot of Bly's poetry as an undergraduate, so I read this book too. A lot of it seemed pretty silly to me, but there was one passage that struck me like a hammer to the forehead. What it said was, the Woman With the Golden Hair does not exist. What Bly meant by that was, a lot of men are looking for their anima -- the term Jung gave to the feminine side of a man's personality. But what a lot of men in a patriarchal culture do not understand is that the anima is part of them, and is not to be found in another person. This is because men in a patriarchal culture are taught precisely that they don't have an anima: that there is nothing feminine about them, or if there is, that it is a bad thing and must be suppressed. Unfortunately, what this means is that a lot of guys who are a bit of a mess (and who isn't, really?) tend to project their anima onto the women they see around them.

The reason that this hit me was that I suddenly realized what I was doing wrong: I wasn't reacting to women as if they were real people. Instead, I was reacting to them as if they were the missing part of myself.

Yes, yes, I know. It should have been bloody obvious, right? Well, it wasn't, at least not until then. And that, oddly enough, is one thing about patriarchy. It's a system of thought so ubiquitous you don't always realize you're in it. Even when you've been raised by a couple of strong and smart women, it still shapes your thinking and behavior.

Anyhow, that was the step that led me to start to figure out some stuff about myself. It took a while, of course, and I don't mean to say that I'm particularly enlightened, but at least I learned how to stop making that particular mistake.

As to the PUA described in Thinking Girl's original post, I think the biggest problem is that what they seem to be teaching is, as TG says, fakery. It's just surface stuff: changes in external behavior without ever getting to the essential step of reacting as people to other people. It's not that behavioral training is a bad thing; all cultures have manners and standards of behavior, and there is a decorum for all situations. If we as humans were never artificial, we'd actually be pretty disgusting. The problem is in mistaking external behavior for the thing that it's supposed to convey: respect for your fellow humans. And that, I think, is the really insidious nature of the sort of thing that TG is talking about.