Before I go any further, please note that this is a high-context post, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't read it if you haven't first read the linked post. If you're not going to click the link anyway, let me at least say for context that Scott makes a case - a case which is interesting but only partly compelling to me - that when feminist writers complain about "Nice Guys" as distinct from guys who are nice, the capitalization isn't doing any denotative work. Scott makes the case that the many feminist writers he cites are really just complaining about guys who are nice, and the Title Case Capitalization is serving as a very weak way to hide the fact. He also responds to feminist writers saying that yes, the capitalization is doing denotative work, and Nice Guys are a different category. It's a very thorough post with lots of reasoned arguments. When I say "Scott makes a case", it's more than just him stating an opinion and moving on. Anyway, the complaints in the many feminist blog posts that Scott cites mostly say that Nice Guys (or nice guys without capitalization, if Scott's analysis is to be taken seriously) are pathetic and deserving of mockery, and they complain too much about being lonely, and they feel entitled to sex from women, and they don't care about women as people, and they think that their lack of romance stems from women being mean or inconsiderate to them, and they might be rapists or terrorists.
It's quite a list of complaints, and it gets repeated from lots of different feminist writers. You might have noticed a split, where the first three symptoms were about Nice Guys being merely pathetic
(patheticness being that which elicits pity in the normal observer, like a starving puppy does) and the next four were about them being immoral and misogynistic. Scott doesn't mention the split explicitly, but he does talk about how feminists like to mock lonely men, and how this mockery is making men bitter. So that's sort of an explanation of the two clusters of complaints. Possibly not right, but it's something.
Let's get back to Scott's claim that the capitalization in "Nice Guys" isn't actually being used to point to a different group of people. It's partly compelling: I think it's plausible that heterosexual women, generally, aren't looking to date men who are nice. The statistics Scott presents in section VII of his post (Yes, section 7. It's a long post with lots of well-thought arguments.) make that point pretty clear. I don't know why criminality, drug consumption, violence, and disagreeableness of personality, among other factors, predict the number of sex partners for men, but those are the facts. Whether men with fewer sexual partners who aren't violent, disagreeable, criminal, et cetera, are viewed by women as pathetic or deserving of shame is not addressed by the statistics.
Scott's analysis is also partly not compelling: I think women who talk about Nice Guys, generally, do indeed make a mental distinction between Nice Guys and nice guys. To the extent that the Title Case Capitalization is a thin veneer used to hide the (embarrassing?) fact that they want nice guys to keep their distance in the domain of romance and sex and pair-bonding and reproduction, then this fact must also be hidden to them. It's entirely possible to be mistaken about your true beliefs, especially when the beliefs are embarrassing: believing a strategic lie is an unconscious evolutionarily selected-for method of convincing other people of the strategic lie. But it's not enough to say, "Women hate nice guys, and they know it, and the fact that they sometimes use a frustratingly similar but slightly different term can be ignored as malicious trickery". It's not malice, it's a real psychological distinction that they defend earnestly. So we can recognize that Nice Guys are a different group from nice guys, and it's the former group that feminist blogs insult for being bad, or we can recognize that women generally aren't looking to date guys who are nice and they don't know it: they're honestly mistaken and don't realize that the Nice Guys they hate deep in the hearts are the same nice guys they can't publicly endorse hating. If Nice Guys and nice guys are different groups, then it's of course also possible that women wish that both groups would keep their distance.
That's one thing I was looking for in the comments section of Scott's post: an analysis that takes seriously the fact that women believe Nice Guys are different from nice guys, whether or not women are correct in this. I didn't get far enough to find that. Instead, I found ... Joe. Joe was talking about how he's a nice guy. Joe has recently - sometime after he wrote these old comments on an old blog post I was rereading - he's recently been accused of abusing his girlfriends and disrespecting their consent in ways that look a lot like rape. I don't know Joe, and I don't think I know anyone he's dated, and I'd never heard anyone talk about spending time with him before the rape accusations, so I feel a little out of my element talking about him, which is why I'm giving him a pseudonym. But he is in my Online community, and I had heard his name before, and some people on the internet whom I consider friends are friends with him on Facebook. Which means he's Here: he's nearby in social cyberspace, and I can't ignore him.
So what the fuck? Usually, I shrug off comments I hear online that nice guys are abusive rapists because, you know, I have many of those risk factors for lack of sexual success (like not being a violent, criminal drunk) and yet I have very good evidence that I'm not an abusive rapist. But then here's Joe, and I can't ignore him. Is he perhaps not a rapist, and that's why people I think of as decent are friends with him? I hope so, but I doubt it. Is he a rapist who happens to be nice in some sense, like scoring highly on trait Agreeableness in personality tests? Maybe. Again, I've never met the guy. Is he unconsciously self-deceiving about being nice, in the way that the great evolutionary socio-biologist Robert Trivers theorized about? Could be. Is he consciously deceiving others into thinking he's nice because he needs victims for his evil desires? Could be that too. Sadly, I think "he's actually nice along some dimensions" is the best explanation of why he thinks he's nice, and maybe unconscious self-deception and conscious other-deception happen to be along for the ride in his head.
When I saw Joe's comments, I couldn't read any more. It felt like the mere example of his existence was lending great credibility to the claim "Guys who seem nice are secretly all immoral and misogynistic, and a step away from being rapists and terrorists". You know, the claim that Barrys are worse then Henrys. I couldn't shrug it off, even though no one has ever said any of these things directly to me, even though no one has ever called me a Nice Guy in a derisive tone, even though I've never really been dissatisfied with the amount of romantic attention I get, as these bitter entitled Nice Guys supposedly do. I don't date, but it's more because I don't want to. The fact that I don't date is also why I will be generalizing from kind of sparse evidence in this post.
The last time I felt overwhelmed by this topic was about a month ago, when, just like last night, I was worn out after a long day at work and I read something about relationships Online. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that? Anyway, a month ago I read a post in which a bunch of women said that nice guys are all pieces of shit. Feeling pretty bad about that, I started looking to into medications for reversible chemical castration, operating in a similar desperate impulsive headspace as a depressed person who looks into suicide methods. And don't you know it, the Wikipedia article on chemical castration starts out by saying "chemical castration is mainly used by the courts for rapists". Great. That's what I needed to hear. Not only am I a rapist for caring about niceness, I'm a rapist for briefly wanting to get out of the entire romance and sexuality game.
(In fact, chemical castration is not mainly used for rapists: the anti-androgens used for chemical castration are the exact same pills used for Male-to-Female transsexual Hormone Replacement Therapy, and they're also used for treating prostate cancer, and some other stuff. Instead of getting those pills, I went to a clinic and got a prescription for an anti-depressant, which I knew could also lower libido, though I ended up not getting the prescription filled for further reasons. But I'm fine. No worries.)
I couldn't bear to read any more comments after seeing Joe, but I could remember all sorts of other things, like that reddit post, that equally made me wonder whether, you know, everyone is incredibly terrible and we shouldn't be allowed near each other. In addition to remembering about * Joe the Rapist who thinks he's a nice guy, and * all the women on reddit who have been mistreated by Nice Guys, and * Barry, who is undoubtedly an actual nice guy with impeccable feminist credentials who's still going to die alone, and * Henry who beats his wives and extra-marital girlfriends but will never once be alone in all his adult life, I also thought about * a friend on twitter who dearly loves her boyfriend, also on twitter, who is a disagreeable insulting edgelord that drugs her, and * another friend on twitter who once wrote about the great time she had screaming in the back of a car while being violently fucked by a handsome sadist, who was "good for her", and finally I remembered, * that study which found that ugly men are judged as creepy while handsome criminals are not. I remembered all of this, all these horrible confusing facts, and I tried to draw them into a tidy theory. Usually when I try to explain things on this blog, I come up with like twenty candidate explanations and maybe one or two of them are good. I don't have a list like that today. I've got one guess:
Women like handsome disagreeable dominant men, regardless of whether they're abusive, and they don't like ugly submissive agreeable men, regardless of whether they're abusive. Women are more likely to see men as being abusive if they're not attracted to the men and they're less likely to see men as being abusive if they find the men attractive. Women still know when they're being hit, of course, even if it's a handsome dominant disagreeable man, but they don't come to the conclusion that it's wrong.Points in favor of this: It explains the case of those two women I know on twitter, who are/were very happy with being abused by handsome dominant men. It kind of explains why some abusive men, like Joe The Agreeable Rapist, get rightly ostracized for being abusive, while the wives and girlfriends of the Henry The Dominant keep coming back to him for another round in the boxing ring. It explains why women on reddit would more readily call out nice men, i.e. submissive or agreeable men, for being abusive than the dominant men they're attracted to, who might well be abusive at the same or higher or lower rates - the theory doesn't distinguish. And it kind of explains why I, average looking and concerned about niceness, but also sometimes aloof in a way that reminds you of your father, find myself under an average amount of romantic interest.
It's also fucking horrifying. Abuse should make a bigger difference to women than it seems to. It's horrifying that abuse happens, and it's horrifying that it's accepted. I hope that I come up with twenty candidate explanations that are more compelling than this, and they're all less horrifying, but for now, this is what I've got.
One small point against the theory is another woman I know on twitter who likes to beat, cut, and gag submissive men in the bedroom - with their consent, is my understanding - but still, that's one counterexample to the generalization of women liking dominant men.
Let's bookend the post with an explicit summary of the distinction between Nice Guys and nice guys: Guys who are nice are not abusive, necessarily, among having other nicer behaviors. It's not a bad thing to be nice, but it's not what anyone is looking for. Hard to believe, but consistent with all the evidence. Nice Guys™, in contrast, are those not particularly handsome men who are also submissive or agreeable, which traits women generally don't want. This second group probably starts out being malicious toward women at base rates for men, but they get called out for malice more than other men with equally evidenced guilt, either because * women feel disgusted by their looks and sometimes attribute the disgust to the man's character, or because * insulting people you're not attracted to is as common among humans as giving a little higher-than-merited praise to the people you find attractive, or because * Nice Guys become jerks in response to being bitter about being undesirable or insulted, or because * women are less likely to forgive Nice Guys for their malice when they make mistakes, or because * Nice Guys are less experienced at being decent because they have fewer relationships because they don't get into knife fights with other men in bars, the way that women love deep down, as much as they love men with strong jaws, men who command respect, and men who give playful insults that ambiguously demonstrate depth of affection through counter-signalling in a way that reminds us of addictive variable-ratio reinforcement schedules. Alternatively, Nice Guys™ are guys who are merely claiming to be nice out of some combination of conscious deception and unconscious self-deception, not because it's positively attractive, but because it's better than what they really are.
Edit: A friend points out that shamefulness is reliably unattractive, while shamelessness is reliably attractive. Further, they point out that the variance in shame seems to be more driven by personality than by having things to be ashamed about. From this, we can guess that the dispreference for shame is probably not an evidential dispreference (wherein the display of shame is seen as a sign of a personal flaw), but rather shame is the flaw itself: it's instrumentally or terminally dispreferred in mates, perhaps because showing weakness invites attack from others or because shame reduces value-capturing assertiveness.
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