Another take on the "nice guy" conundrum

[vvvexation]

A comment (and addendum) I posted elsewhere--fortunately not a propos of anything in my life at the moment, but I've been chewing on it for a while:

Dan Savage had some scathing things to say once to a disabled guy who wrote in complaining that he couldn't get chicks--mainly because, as Dan pointed out, he was only looking for "hot" chicks and didn't seem to have considered dating disabled women for a moment. I've since been convinced that what all those guys who complain that women won't date them because they're "too nice" really mean is that beautiful, bitchy women won't date them. Maybe if they actually went looking for nice girls--and bothered to include shy girls, plain girls, and nerdy girls in that pool--they'd have better luck finding a few who genuinely like nice guys.

(Okay, so I have known some genuinely nice guys who can't seem to get dates. In fact, that description fits a fair number of my closest friends. But you know what? Absolutely none of them, to my knowledge, have trouble getting dates because they're too nice. Some of them have self-confidence issues, and some of them are just nerds surrounded by too few nerd-loving women, but niceness is definitely not what holds them back.)

Comments

[ladytabitha.livejournal.com]

Popping in via deyo... friend moominmolly made a great point:

I think that people who complain that Chicks Only Dig Nice Guys are explicitly playing with this dual meaning -- they don't get attention because they're pushovers, i.e. "nice", and then they complain that women don't like them because they're friendly, i.e. "nice". It's a dirty trap, and I've always found it manipulative. This is what I was trying to clarify above, by saying that "nice" had many different components.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Did she actually post this somewhere? I'd really like to see the context. I hadn't even thought about the "don't be that way, I'm just being friendly" definition of "nice"--if that's what she meant to refer to.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I posted it in a locked thread that I can't really relate the details of. :) But the background is something like this: there are a lot of guys who complain that Chicks Never Date Nice Guys!, and use this as an excuse to trash women and make themselves feel better. (This is distinct from the class of ACTUALLY nice guys who can't get dates despite having broad selection criteria, etc.) I think that part of the problem is exactly what you describe -- they have no objectivity about their own desires, and they don't realize that they're unconsciously excluding nice girls. But there is a particularly poisonous breed of guy who complains this complaint, and what they mean is something like "Oh, come on, baby! I'd let you choose where we go to dinner! That makes me a nice guy! Why won't you fucking date ME, huh?" when what these guys are lacking is (a) a backbone and (b) manners and friendliness.

Sorry if that was incoherent. It's been a long day, already. But I think what I was getting at is something between what uncledark said above and what vito_excalibur said -- "nice" gets conflated with "non-assertive", and "nice guys" should never be allowed to self-define. :)