My name is Ozy, and I was a Nice Girl ™.
I had tangled, unbrushed hair that fell limply to my shoulders; my skin was a pizza crust of acne; my glasses were unflattering; I wore stained and torn clothes. I slouched and spoke in monosyllables. I’d spent the last fourteen years reading instead of learning to socialize, which meant that I was familiar with the complete works of Plato, but not with the fact that other people were not interested in the complete works of Plato. In middle school, I’d had my first major bout of depression, which meant that I was too busy not killing myself to have friends. In fact, I spent several days in middle school without saying a single word to anyone and once was invited to a sleepover by a girl who forgot that I was coming and went over to her friend’s house instead.
In short, as high school began, I was ugly, depressed, and about a decade behind on social skills. I outline this not to incur sympathy but simply to explain where I’m coming from. When I talk about creepy people and Nice Guys ™, I talk about myself.
High school began with rather more social success: I was forcibly befriended by a cheerful, outgoing girl who liked vampire novels and bad TV. I trailed along behind her like a shadow to sleepovers, parties, water polo. In exchange for tagging along during her entire social life, I gave her unswerving loyalty in the face of all the complicated friendship dramas of high school.
Although at that point I had figured out I was queer, I went to Catholic school; a friend’s sister, when told a girl had a crush on her, said that “lezzies are disgusting.” So the only option for sex (and I did want sex—I have always been very high sex-drive, and masturbating to slash fanfic was getting old) was for me to get A Boyfriend.
Every boy I knew was assessed for the crucial signs that he liked me. Asked to borrow a pencil? He liked me. Looked at me? He liked me. Said something to me about what we were studying in class? Ohmigod he so totally liked me!
Of course, once I had determined that a boy liked me (which generally involved him existing in my general direction), I then decided that I was going to get his affection. Of course, this didn’t involve actually talking to him or anything. Instead, I would stare at him longingly. I would drop my pencil to get him to pick it up. I would time when I changed out my books and ate lunch so I could see him. I would “happen” to sit next to him in class. If we were outside of school together, (for instance, for a play) I would put on makeup, do my hair and wear a short skirt, and then wait near him for him to initiate a conversation.
My friend mentioned above had a harem of gamers, most of whom wanted to date her but were too shy to say anything. I was in love with all of them at one time or another: I laughed at their recitations of South Park quotes and quietly watched them play Brawl for hours on end and—yes—listened to them talking about the girls who wouldn’t date them or wouldn’t give them any more than a kiss goodnight.
One time I planned to randomly kiss a boy (we’d exchanged about ten words at this time) and say “your move.” I’m cringing writing this. Thankfully, I chickened out, so I don’t have to wear a bag over my head for the rest of time.
And then there was the time I (as a former middle-school rebellious pagan) did a spell to make the guy I liked break up with his girlfriend and date me (I’d never actually spoken to him either).
All I wanted, I told myself, was a nice guy who liked me and showered regularly—it didn’t matter if he was smart or entertaining or attractive. And I would treat him like a king, far better than those other girls: I’d have sex with him whenever he wanted, I wouldn’t require all sorts of presents to keep dating him, I’d compliment him constantly.
Most of my Nice Girl ™-ness was innocuous, if probably rather disconcerting to the boys who were finding themselves stalked by a girl in badly applied eyeliner. I was creepy, but harmlessly so. However, whenever I read the more misogynistic ends of the pick-up artist or men’s rights community, I cringe. Because if I had found that gender-reversed when I was sixteen or so, it would have made sense to me. Of course boys like assholes, that’s why I can’t get laid! Of course American men are fat, entitled and worthless, that’s why they treat me so badly! There’s nothing more seductive than an explanation in which it’s all someone else’s fault.
Instead, because they claimed that all women could get laid whenever they wanted (and that clearly was not true), I had discounted their explanations pretty quickly and instead drifted through life being confused and vaguely resentful.
The takeaway here is that being– a Nice Guy ™ is not a guy thing—it’s a people thing. Specifically, Nice Guy ™ is what happens when you get someone who is not sure how this whole “relationships” thing works exactly, who is petrified of rejection, and who doesn’t fully understand that people of the other primary gender are actually people and not some kind of complicated relationship-granting automation.
I think for a lot of people it’s a normal developmental stage on the path of figuring out how relationships work, and there’s nothing wrong with that (you get amnesty about any relationship mistakes you make before the age of 18). The problem is when some people of any gender get stuck there.
Note: I know I referred to myself as a girl all the way through this, but I am still nonbinary. Thanks!
—
I think one of the biggest problems with talking about Nice Guys™ (I’m using the term gender-inclusively) is that there are several different kinds of people who fall under the Nice Guy™ umbrella. Admittedly, some forms of Nice Guy™ will evolve into other forms of Nice Guy™, much like Pokemon, but if you don’t know your Charizards from your Charmanders, you’re just going to end up confused.
Therefore, I will now break down the four types of Nice Guy™ I have observed in the wilds of both meatspace and the Internet.
Stage One Nice Guy™, or the Pseudo-Nice-Guy™
A stage one Nice Guy™ is a person who for whatever reason behaves in a typically Nice Guy™-ish way, but without actually having the characteristic personality traits of a Nice Guy™. By “behaving in a typically Nice Guy™ way” I mean not asking people out, befriending people and then expecting romantic relationships to happen by magic, expecting all the problems in your life to be solved by Twoo Wuv, “joking” about how if the person they liked dumped their partner and went out with them everything would be perfect, observing that women only like assholes/men only like bitches… all that stereotypical shit. Not all people who do that are true Nice Guys™!
The stage one Nice Guy™ is usually somewhat socially awkward and highly afraid of rejection; they may be prone to some pedestalization of people they want to date, but not to extreme levels. Although their traits may pattern-match to those of the true Nice Guy™, they are usually not any more sexist or objectifying than the average person. They often make quite good partners if you don’t mind making the first move.
Stage Two Nice Guy™, or the Objectifying Nice Guy™
This is, in my experience, the most common type of Nice Guy™. According to this type, the people they want to sleep with ought to work according to a formula, and if the Nice Guy™ fulfills the formula, they ought to be able to date the person they desire. Common formulas include being nice, being physically attractive, being rich, and being willing to treat one’s partners “like a princess” or “like a king.” The stage two Nice Guy™ rarely asks people out, because they are still terrified of rejection; besides, as long as they fulfill the formula properly, people ought to be coming to them.
Many pick-up artists are stage two Nice Guys™ who acquired a new formula that involves actually making the first move.
Stage Three Nice Guy™, or the Entitled Nice Guy
The stage three Nice Guy™ deserves a relationship, and they are pissed the fuck off that they haven’t got one. Of course, they’re not going to ask people out or anything, because they just know that everyone despises them for being so nice and so successful. They have done everything right according to the formula, and since they still don’t have the romantic relationship of their desiring, clearly the problem must lie in all those people who are running about refusing to sleep with them.
It may be somewhat difficult to figure out the difference between a stage two and a stage three Nice Guy™. The big difference, I think, is in the response to being rejected. A stage two Nice Guy™ will respond by beating themselves up and trying to figure out what they did wrong; a stage three Nice Guy™ will get very angry. How dare someone not recognize how awesome you are and reward it with sex!
Stage Four Nice Guy™, or the Misogynistic Nice Guy
I say misogynistic, because I have only seen straight men ascend to this form. The stage four Nice Guy™ knows why he can’t get laid: because women are BITCHES and SLUTS and WHORES and FAT and UGLY and ENTITLED and he DOESN’T WANT THEM ANYWAY and he is going to get a woman from ASIA where they are OBEDIENT and know how to TREAT A MAN, or maybe a SEXBOT, and oh god he is so alone. Many of them infest or even write the more obnoxious pick-up artist or men’s rights activist sites.
—
One of the most common Nice Guy™ complaints is that women like jerks preferentially to liking guys who are nice like them. I think this notion is common enough that it deserves a little examination.
First, while some women do indeed dig jerks, so do some men, although in that case it’s usually called the “why men love bitches” problem. Admittedly, men tend to believe women like jerks for Mysterious Ladybrain Reasons, and women believe men tend to like shallow bitches because they have great tits, but that’s only minor cosmetic differences in the general trend. It’s not even reserved to the straights: a whole lot of queers have managed to fall hopelessly in love with homophobes. The digging of jerks isn’t a gender problem; it’s a people problem.
There is some scientific research on whether men or women like jerks. Unfortunately, most of this research ranges between mostly useless and completely useless. “Mostly useless” are the studies that ask people whether they’re attracted to jerks: that’ll get you what people think they’re attracted to, but that’s not always whom they’re really attracted to, as everyone can attest who’s ever seen someone swear up and down that they want a nice, reliable boyfriend with a good job and then proceed to chase after every brooding boy with a Daddy-doesn’t-love-me haircut and a guitar in a ten-mile radius. “Completely useless” are the studies that show that jerks (the disagreeable, those who have Dark Triad traits) have more sex partners, because that is almost certainly because people keep dumping them for being assholes.
Therefore, we are left with the anecdotal evidence for people dig jerks. There are a couple different explanations; more than one of these is probably in play in any given situation.
(Please note that none of these explanations are “women naturally dig jerks because EVOLUTION!” That is a terrible explanation. First, human children need a shitload of caretaking. It makes literally no sense for evolution to select for women to be attracted to men who are more likely to run out on them and leave them stuck with the kid, because the kid would be less likely to survive to adulthood; instead, it’d favor nice, reliable men who would help with the childrearing. Second, a disagreeable adult is likely to produce disagreeable children, which is a major net negative, because humans are social creatures and getting along with other people majorly increases your chance of survival. Third, the “sexy sons” hypothesis is begging the question: if women sleep with jerks because jerks are sexy and they want their sons to inherit the jerkishness and be sexy, how did jerkishness become sexy in the first place?)
The jerk has other good traits
I will admit, whenever I hear people complain about someone dating a complete asshole, I tend to assume the asshole looks something like Andreja Pejic.
Depicted: a woman who is almost certainly hotter than you.
Extremely hot female models aside, there are a lot of reasons why someone might date an asshole: she’s smart, he’s rich, she’s funny, and (yes) he’s hot as balls. I know the one time I ended up in a relationship with a Grade-A borderline-abusive asshole, he was an extremely cute feminist mathematician who taught me to stand up for myself and talked to me for entire days at a time, which made me overlook the whole “explosive rages, calls my friends Judas” thing.
As an aside: can we collectively promise ourselves that, if we ever find ourselves describing a relationship as “really good, except”, we will break up with that person immediately? The thing that follows the “except” is always completely fucking horrible. “It’s really good, except zie screams at me when I do things wrong.” “It’s really good, except sometimes he withdraws all my money from the bank and spends it on gambling, cocaine, and sex workers.” “It’s really good, except she thinks dressing up as Harry Potter to go to a con is silly and childish.”
They are both jerks
I think this is behind that whole Hot Chicks with Douchebags thing. It is actually, in fact, Douchebags with Douchebags. The douchebags are mating with their own kind! It should not be inherently more surprising that an asshole dates an asshole than it is that everyone I’m dating can recite all of Space Core’s dialogue from Portal 2 and hold in-depth discussions of the relative merits of turning the moon into a giant death ray.
Also, you may have not noticed that the person you want to date is an asshole because crushes can make people way non-objective like that.
The non-jerk has a thing for jerks
There are a lot of reasons why someone might have a thing for jerks! Some people absolutely love fixing broken birds—they’re the sort of people who will adopt a three-legged dog with diabetes just because it neeeeeeeeds them. Other people have some kind of bizarre possibly-Twilight-based idea that jerks are sexy. Still others have low self-esteem and think that jerks are all they deserve.
At any rate, if someone has a thing for jerks, it is probably a sign that you should not date them, because they have some serious growing-up to do.
The jerk is nice to them
This is what’s behind that stereotypical jock who throws nerds into lockers but still gets to date the hot chick. It’s not that she’s turned on by his locker-throwing-into ability; it’s because he doesn’t throw her into lockers. He remembers her favorite flavor of ice cream and always smiles at her when he gets a touchdown. Admittedly, this is somewhat shortsighted on her part (if someone is nice to you but not to the waiter they are not a nice person), but still fairly reasonable.
In fact, some people actually feel special when someone who’s normally a dick is nice to them: it feels like you’ve earned something.
It’s an emotionally abusive relationship
I hate to mention this one, because if your friend’s in an emotionally abusive relationship and your big reaction is “why is s/he dating that jerk instead of me?” you are earth-shaking levels of asshole. But nevertheless it is a possibility.
The jerk is not actually a jerk
Many Nice Guys™ have a skewed idea of what counts as “being nice”: as we shall see in a future post, a lot of times they interpret pedestalizing or supplicating behavior as being nice, and when a guy refuses to pedestalize or supplicate to women, they consider him an asshole. This is not being an asshole to women, though; it’s just treating them like a normal person.
In particular, there’s a certain kind of flirting I usually call the “performative asshole,” which can be done by men or women. (My girlfriend calls it Dom Flirting, and it’s true that performative assholery is pretty common as a means of signaling dominance in non-kinky spaces.) The performative asshole is a particular kind of flirtatious banter that involves friendly teasing, sometimes saying things that are often genuinely insulting (“I don’t know why I let you hang around. Must be because you’re cute”) with a smirk and a sense of irony. The key is that everyone involved knows that the performative asshole is not doing it seriously. You know it’s performative assholery because the other person will smile or laugh, instead of getting horribly offended. Performative assholes can be attractive for a couple reasons: they’re confident, they’re funny, they don’t take themselves too seriously, and they treat you as an equal and a friend.
Finally, some people will tend to think a person is a jerk because the “jerk” is dating someone that the person wanted to date, regardless of whether the “jerk” actually researches cancer cures in between volunteering at a library and saving orphaned puppies.
—
The majority of Nice Guys™ (once again, used gender-inclusively) are suffering from a common delusion: that the dating world is even remotely logical.
Unfortunately, this is not true. I’m sure everyone can think of an ugly, stupid asshole with a string of partners as long as your leg, and a sweet, intelligent beauty who could walk into a bar full of sailors of the appropriate gender just on shore leave and still not get a date. The dating world is fundamentally unpredictable and unfair, and a whole lot of who is romantically successful is based on sheer, stupid, random luck. Whether all your friends are paired up. Whether you skipped getting coffee and so didn’t meet the cute girl reading Sartre. Whether you happened to live across the way from the hot mathematician who plays the bongo drums. Whatever.
I think the distinguishing trait of Nice Guys™ (as compared to Pseudo Nice Guys™) is objectification. After all, without objectification, all you have is people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from the legitimate to the idiotic, adopt a dating strategy that’s unlikely to work and occasionally leads to awkward situations (for instance, attempting to politely reject someone who won’t actually make a move). However, people using ineffective dating strategies that occasionally lead to awkward situations is not actually a social justice issue; if it were, I’d have to be leading the Great Campaign to Get People To Stop Falling In Love With Their Fuckbuddies.
True Nice Guys™, as opposed to stage one Pseudo-Nice Guys who just happen to have a passive dating strategy, seem to regard dating as more or less like ordering something from a vending machine. If you put in the right sum of money and press the right buttons, then a relationship will be dispensed for you. This belief is, of course, incredibly objectifying: you’re not treating the people you might date as people, you’re treating them as objects that function according to a simplistic set of rules.
Nice Guys™ also generally regard people of the appropriate gender as being more-or-less interchangeable. When a boy texts you X, he will always mean Y. Always tease women, because that turns all girls on ever. But in the real world people are different. The most viable seduction tactic for me is to have a four-hour conversation with me, in which you explain to me several things I didn’t already know; the most viable seduction tactic for someone else is going to be dancing all night at a house club, arguing with them about NPR, seeming to be broken and in need of fixing, or wearing eyeliner. You simply cannot reduce the multiplicity of people’s turnons to “women like this and men like that.”
However, there is definitely a gendered difference in what inputs people decide the vending machine really ought to operate on. (For this bit Nice Guy™ is going to indicate actual dudes.) In general, Nice Girls™ tend to do What Men Want, and Nice Guys™ tend to do What Women Want. (I haven’t meant any Nice Guy™ Queers, but I would be entirely unsurprised by the existence of, for instance, a Nice Butch™ who does What Femmes Want. Objectification crosses all sexual orientations.)
Unfortunately, most of the Nice Guys™ and Nice Girls™ appear to be gathering their ideas of What Men Want and What Women Want from some unholy amalgation of romantic comedies and Disney movies.
In my experience, Nice Girls ™ tend to perform femininity. I had more than a few moments in high school where I was like “all right, I’m here, I’m wearing a skirt, I put the gunk on my face, now where are the dudes hitting on me?” Unfortunately, you cannot actually get a date with a guy by wearing a skirt in his general direction.
Similarly, other Nice Girls™ will act stupider than they are around guys, pretend to need help carrying things, or artificially speak in a far higher voice. Teen magazines like Seventeen are, in my experience, primarily directed at Nice Girls™ who don’t understand how relationships work, so things like “compliment his headphones—boys love electronics!” or “wear gold eyeshadow to appear flirty” will seem like good advice that is unlocking The Secret To Boys.
Most of the advice girls get about dating boils down to be passive harder. “Guys like the chase!” “Play hard to get!” “Here’s some body-language techniques to show him you’re interested!” Cosmo‘s whole weird thing about, like, smiling at him in the correct evolutionarily-programmed way from across the room and then he’ll come over and hit on you and he won’t even realize you did anything. However, while playing hard to get and smiling at him from across the room may have its uses, it works very badly if your problem is that your desired paramour has no idea you exist.
Why do women get this particular useless advice? Probably some combination of assertiveness being masculine (so women who make the first move are unfeminine), slut-shaming (if you actively pursue your sexual and romantic wants you’re clearly a slutty slut slut who sluts), and women as sex objects (so women’s big job in the sex/romance business is standing around and looking pretty).
Nice Girls™ do have a slight advantage in that they are more likely to be hit on and thus get a relationship, which is one of the major cures for Nice-Guy-ism. However, I do think it’s a mistake to conclude from this that being a Nice Girl™ isn’t painful the same way being a Nice Guy™ is painful. One of the problems with “be passive harder” advice is that you never get a clear rejection: is it that he doesn’t like you, or that he just hasn’t asked you out yet? And the silent rejection of being completely ignored can be just as harrowing and self-esteem-destroying as the blatant “no.”
Nice Guys™, on the other hand, tend to use a couple of different inputs to the Great Dating Vending Machine. Some, especially older Nice Guys™, will tend to rely on their success: after all, they have a good job (often, for some reason, in IT), a college degree, a nice respectable middle-class lifestyle, some spending money… why, they just can’t understand why they wouldn’t be able to get any woman they wanted! Nice Guy™ rants on the Internet often point out the great injustice that is the unemployed DJ down the street getting laid more than they do, when he clearly has no prospects in life whatsoever.
However, for most Nice Guys™ that I’ve met, the input was pedestalization.
I had a very revealing conversation once with a Nice Guy™ online, who pointed out that he had brought a girl flowers every date, paid for dinners, and not even asked if she wanted to have sex. In short, he said, he was incredibly nice, he had done everything that women say they want, and he had still gotten dumped! I had to stop myself from responding “dude, I would dump you too.”
In general, Nice Guys™ tend to go for that white-knighting shit. They are so nice. They buy you things! They sing you romantic songs! They do every clichéd gesture of romance! They held you while you cried into their shoulders! They do you all kinds of favors and don’t ask you for anything in return! Don’t women get off on that? (Nota Bene: Roosh V’s Compliment and Cuddle is, unintentionally, the single best description of this mindset. Particularly since he seems to think that the attitude described therein is what feminists recommend for men. Roosh, you fail feminism forever.)
Let me be clear: I don’t blame Nice Guys™ for falling into this shit. I blame the culture that taught them that pedestalization is romantic and that all girls love Prince Charming riding in to save the day. Every damn Hallmark holiday in which you show your love for your unique, special partner who is like no one else in the world through buying the same expensive shit everyone else is buying. Every damn Tumblr macro about how you should put your girlfriend up on a pedestal and save her from the evils of the world. Every damn romantic comedy about earning the love of a beautiful woman, often via stalking. Pretty much anything having to do with diamonds.
Nevertheless, I have to be clear that pedestalization does not work. In general, people do not like to be supplicated to. Being like “I have done everything you want, Mistress! I ask only for the touch of your lips!” works well in BDSM scenes and fairy tales, not so much in real life. And while some women like all that Hallmark shit, a lot of women don’t, and ignoring the desires of your partner in favor of the desires of All Women Everywhere rarely ends well. Most people don’t want to be a plaster saint: they want to be treated as a person by their partners.
Many Nice Guys™, having realized that supplication and pedestalization don’t actually work as well as could be hoped, go to the complete opposite and start degrading women. After all, they figure, if women don’t want to be treated like princesses, they must want to be treated like dirt! Many misogynistic pick up artists take this route, which is why I classify many forms of PUA as a type of Nice Guy™-ism. The actions are different, but the mindset is the same.
To be fair, even misogynistic PUA often works better than supplication, partially because they approach tons of women, and partially because some of their strategies work for reasons other than the reasons that they think it works. For instance, the famous “neg” may be taken as friendly and flirtatious teasing, blunt honesty, a sign that he’s interested in her despite her imperfections, or even a straight-up compliment.
However, both degradation and pedestalization are the completely wrong. Gender egalitarianism ought to deal with the degradation/pedestalization problem the way sex-positivity deals with the virgin/whore dilemma: it doesn’t say virgins or whores are better, it says that the whole conversation is stupid because you can’t meaningfully judge people’s worth based on how much sex they’ve had. Similarly, the proper response to the pedestalization/degradation dilemma is neither “women are princesses” nor “women are ugly bitchy sluts,” neither “women are elves” nor “women are orcs”; the proper response is “I reject the entire premise of this conversation.”
Women are people, which means they are everywhere on the elf-orc spectrum. The proper response to women is not to worship at her feet nor to push her into the dirt, it’s to treat her exactly like you’d treat a person, except that this person usually has boobs.
skye said:
“I say misogynistic, because I have only seen straight men ascend to this form. The stage four Nice Guy™ knows why he can’t get laid: because women are BITCHES and SLUTS and WHORES and FAT and UGLY and ENTITLED and he DOESN’T WANT THEM ANYWAY and he is going to get a woman from ASIA where they are OBEDIENT and know how to TREAT A MAN, or maybe a SEXBOT, and oh god he is so alone.”
I have absolutely seen this from straight/bi women. It’s rampant on certain parts of tumblr: “men are trash, men are ugly and gross, but *god I really want some cock*.”
(Minor note: Andrej Pejic is Andreja now, and IDs as a woman.)
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Taymon A. Beal said:
Can a person believe that the fact that they can’t get a date is somehow unjust, and still be only Stage One? Or maybe even not even Stage One? Scott’s “Radicalizing the Romanceless” would seem to be arguing yes, but I’m curious what anyone else thinks.
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InferentialDistance said:
Yes. There is an entire class of Nice Guy™ who have swallowed the whole “be polite and pedestalize women” dating advice, without any malicious views. They’re frustrated at how ineffective the dating advice is at achieving romantic success, and they (in more modern times) oft get labelled as entitled Nice Guys™ for expressing their frustration. It is unjust that the system (re: dating advice) keeps advocating for behavior that fails to achieve the ends it claims. The just solution is to stop giving bad advice.
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Dread Lord von Kalifornen said:
There’s also an even milder version, (i.e. myself) who is frustrated but recognizes in some way that it’s still all on them.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I’m not seeing how. Mostly because of the implications of calling simply* not getting what you want “unjust.”
*simply here meaning without the fancy extras. Scott’s piece draws parallels with a poor black man perpetually impoverished, but the injustice there is a series of systemic problems; that injustice doesn’t really carry over into not being able to get a date.
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Daran said:
That one is immersed in a culture which depicts as romantic, behaviour which is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive is a systematic problem. The same can be said for dating advice.
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jossedley said:
IMHO, it is unjust, in the “life isn’t fair” sense, not “my romantic partners are to blame” sense.
Sexual attractiveness is incredibly unevenly distributed – yes, if you have your s- together, you can probably find someone who is into you, but I don’t know how to describe it except for unavoidably, undeniably unjust.
Not everybody is into tall guys and thin women with large breasts and symetrical facial features and high cheekbones and jaws, but to those of us in the middle of the bell curve, it certainly seems unfair to read people’s accounts of the time the really hot guy walked into the coffeeshop and flirted with them and realize that happens to hot people often, and to average people a couple times in our lives and with effort. And then you imagine what it’s like for people on the other end of the bell curve, who are romantically invisible to a very large fraction of the population.
Yes, the only solution is for people to play the cards they’re dealt as best they can, but it’s certainly unfair, and IMHO unjust.
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stillnotking said:
When I experienced unrequited love (which may or may not be the same as Nice Guy syndrome), I never felt like the girl I loved was a vending machine, or like I was “entitled” to a relationship with her, or like she was an object. I just felt like it was massively unfair that I had such overwhelming feelings for someone who’d made it clear she would never return them.
Are there guys who feel that way about multiple women at a time? I can’t imagine. I didn’t even notice other girls when she was around. But maybe it’s a completely different thing. None of the Nice Guy modes of thought you describe are familiar to me.
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llamathatducks said:
Based on your description of your feelings, I would not classify you as part of the “Nice Guy” pattern. Even though you use the words “massively unfair”, you apply these words to your own feelings. I can totally agree that it’s really unfair that some part of your brain would decide that you must now pine after an unattainable person (I have felt this way many times myself, too). You didn’t say that it’s unfair that this person didn’t like you back, let alone that she “should” like you back.
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what is a man? said:
first off i wanted to register broad agreement. the stages of nice guy-ism do seem to correspond to the increasing pitch of desperation people pick up over the years. nice girls are quite real up to and including being friendzoned for years and elliot rogers levels of rage (although it comes off a bit more adorable than creepy). the slams on pua are a bit unjustified* although hardly unexpected since bad game is much sadder and goofier than good game is effective**.
aside from that one thing was a bit confusing. the term ‘treat X as a person’ is fairly ubiquitous but it’s never been clear what that’s actually supposed to mean. i mean the tone is obviously conveying the idea of treating them well but the term doesn’t actually give any useful hints on how to do that and most elaborations seem to just be ’empathize harder’. raw empathy doesn’t actually get you very far in terms of behaving properly and in fact is oftentimes a hinderance
even though saying respect or courtesy makes you sound like someone’s grandma it’s still better than giving vague or counterproductive advice. you can actually make a study of courtesy and conveying respect is easy once you learn to read expressions/body language.
*after all the hype from feminists about negging being this new form of misogynistic sith sorcery i was quite disappointed to find out it was just flirtatious teasing. literally that is exactly what it is, you say something outrageous while smiling to get a rise out of a girl and make her think twice about you
**to me pua is like chiropracty: it’s three parts placebo effect one part woo and one part medicine. and it is getting better now that the mystery nonsense about peacocking and canned lines is giving way more to systematized self improvement and mantras. it’s not exactly bringing back the agoge but still better than we ought to have expected
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Leit said:
(although it comes off a bit more adorable than creepy)
Spoken like someone who has never encountered a genuine, real-life yandere. *shudder*
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Nita said:
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Leit said:
It’s the zombie apocalypse problem. Sure, it’s cool as an escapist fantasy, but in real life you’re going to end up seriously damaged at best.
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a miserable little pile of secrets! said:
probably true. had a female ‘stalker’ before but it was low key and i’m fairly physically imposing
otoh i’ve never seen or heard of a woman who holds a candle to gay ‘nice guys’ in terms of ignoring lack of consent. one of the reasons i don’t smoke or drink to excess at parties anymore, you really need your full strength if someone tries to start something.
if it’s as bad for women dealing with straight dudes then us men win the creepy olympics
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Bugmaster said:
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with treating dating as a vending machine, as long as a). your expected output is not a lasting relationship, but short-term sex, and b). you have a reasonably accurate estimate of the proportion of women who are likewise looking for short-term sex (i.e., way, way below 100%).
At that point, you have a population of men who are looking for no-strings-attached sex (with women); you have a population of women who are looking for the same thing (with men); and you have a set of social traditions which makes it very difficult for the two parties to find each other — due to the general sex-negativity of the culture we all live in.
Thus, it makes perfect sense to develop a simple protocol which both parties can use to signal their desire to have sex with each other. It doesn’t need to be complex or emotionally deep, it can be as simple as SYN/ACK — as long as it is still socially acceptable enough to bypass the sex-negativity restrictions without turning both participants into instant pariahs.
That said, I’ve very little interest in this scenario myself, so I could be wrong…
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bem said:
My feeling is that there’s a distinct difference between “a simple protocol for figuring out if someone else wants to have sex with you” and “treating dating like a vending machine.” In the latter scenario, if you don’t mind extending the metaphor, if you go through the right motions and the machine doesn’t produce the thing you ordered, your conclusion is going to be that there’s something wrong with the machine–or even that you got cheated. Personally, I’ve seen this at play in both straight and queer circles: there are people who go through the appropriate motions and take rejection gracefully (if it comes), and then there are people who seem to have just decided that they’re going to grind through all the flirting levels until they get to sex, the object of their affection’s apparent interest (or lack of it) be damned.
(Yes, I mixed my metaphors a bit. Oh well.)
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veronica d said:
Isn’t this basically Tinder?
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Bugmaster said:
I’ve never used it myself, but from what I hear, yeah. It looks like, as usual, technology solves problems that society could not.
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LTP said:
You’d be surprised at the number of women on Tinder who explicitly say in their short profiles “not looking for casual sex”.
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Leit said:
Or, translated, “I want plausible deniability”.
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Henry Gorman said:
More generally, there are lots of conventions in online dating that people usually use as conventions to say “I’m looking for casual sex, but want to be able to audit people first and avoid social stigma.” On okCupid, I usually found that people looking for “short term dating”” usually wanted a person to have sex with. I also noticed that women usually tend to have sex more quickly than they say they will on their profiles– most who mark “6 or more dates” seem to have sex in three, and most who say “3-5” will actually have sex with you on the first date.*
It’s valuable to recognize that people have reasons for using these conventions, though. If you try to blow past the convention here, you also take away the social protections it offers and put the other person in a dangerous/uncomfortable social position. And in the rare instances when somebody isn’t using the codes, you might put them in a very awkward position indeed. So, if you want casual sex, just play along with the pretenses embodied in the codes, and then offer coded-but-plausible-deniability-protecting overtures of your own during the date (“Do you want to come in and have a drink?” is a widely recognized way of asking “Do you want to come in and fuck?” that allows the other person to bow out and change their mind more gracefully).
*My sample here is mostly well-educated feminist, high-sex-drive women with an intellectual or artistic bent, since that’s the group I selected for on okC. I also saw some guys through the site, but in that sort of case, you can just be straightforward about the sex stuff.
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leave me alone i don't believe in blogging said:
The whole broken discourse is rooted in the assumption that men can’t be (physically) attractive. As an attractive man (that always feels embarassing to type…), I always argue that physical attractiveness eclipses all else in dating, sex, etc. No, I’m not a “PUA natural” (the category certain people try to shoehorn attractive men into), my social range is from antisocial to awkward, and yet I get hit on nonstop by women and men alike.
When I experienced an unrequited crush, *every single time*, it was a *mutual* crush and I had just absorbed too many “men can’t be attractive” memes to understand this. (I was so bad that I actually once answered probes from my crush about whether I had a girlfriend in a way that made it sound like I did.) Fortunately, I grew out of this nonsense after high school…
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Given a quick google search for “attractive men,” how often women themselves talk about how attractive men, how often disney shows *explicitely mention* the attractiveness of the love interest, how often women’s love interest in media in general are described as attractive, I don’t think this is a meaningful trend.
At best, the attractiveness of men isn’t held up as the most important value (actually a good thing, I think). At worst, there are whole constructs about what an attractive man looks like.
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Nornagest said:
It’s not a hard “men can’t be attractive”, certainly. I think a more accurate way of putting it would be to say that the American (Western?) cultural assumption is that male attractiveness exists, but it’s circumscribed in ways that female attractiveness isn’t, and in particular it doesn’t function as a positive asset.
That is, you can be ugly, and that’s a bad thing. And there are certain mythical creatures like Jude Law (maybe dating myself here) who are hawt. But men along the spectrum of physical attractiveness typical of everyday life should not expect to look good enough to compensate for any flaws in personality or life circumstances or general demeanor, or to make showing off for a partner or a potential partner worthwhile. The ordinary male physique is something to hide. Getting hit on for it is right out. If a girl says you’re cute, and you aren’t walking off the Olympic field or a movie set, she (or so says culture) says that to everyone with a pulse.
This is, of course, false; but that should go without saying.
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LTP said:
” I always argue that physical attractiveness eclipses all else in dating, sex, etc. No, I’m not a “PUA natural” (the category certain people try to shoehorn attractive men into), my social range is from antisocial to awkward, and yet I get hit on nonstop by women and men alike.”
It’s interesting how one’s vantage point and experiences changes one’s perspective. I’m also a physically attractive guy (in a nerdy, hipster way), and I’ve never been hit on. I also have pretty bad social phobia and trust issues. I’ve always considered social skills to be the most important part of dating and sex.
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nydwracu said:
Do you wear glasses?
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Ghatanathoah said:
I frequently wonder how I managed to escape all these Nice Guy traps, since so many people who seem fairly psychologically similar to me seem to fall into them. When I started dating my strategies were a hodge-podge of “treating her like a person” and “pedestalization.” Evidently I must have hit upon a level of pedestalization that wasn’t severe enough to be annoying.
I can think up a couple of reasons as to how this might have happened. The first was that my feminist principles prevented me from pedestaling anyone just because she was a women. Most of my pedastaling was about how she was a terrific awesome person. When I complimented women I tried to make sure all my compliments were somehow based on something she actually did.
Secondly, I really like money and I really like having free time. That put a brake on any urge to express pedestalization through buying dinners and gifts (also I had been taught from an early age that paying for everything because you are the man is Sexist).
Also, while I subscribed to the “let a friendship develop into a relationship” model, I knew intellectually that there was some point where I’d actually have to make a move. Gradual evolution could only take me so far. So I did make a move, eventually.
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name left out said:
“Women are people, which means they are everywhere on the elf-orc spectrum. The proper response to women is not to worship at her feet nor to push her into the dirt, it’s to treat her exactly like you’d treat a person, except that this person usually has boobs.”
This is really, really hard. Men *don’t* treat women they’re interested in like “other men with boobs.” There’s a massive difference there and I can see it but replicating it is astonishingly hard and the consequences for failing – shit, even getting near enough to try – consistent of a large present containing only miserable guilt and social opprobrium.
I might be in one of these categories, presumably stage two? I tried to talk to women I was “interested” in a time or two in college, but got turn-off emotional signals and felt terrible about it for months and was very sure not to do that again.
I never had the idea that “all women are bitches,” because you can’t blame someone for.. not liking you, that doesn’t make sense, but I do have the internalized self-hatred in spades – nobody is / has been interested in me, therefore I am a walking trash heap. I’m trying to work into being a better person, but it’s a little haphazard because of both personal failings as a human being and.. well, being so bad off in so many ways I don’t know where the hell to start.
Without real-world examples to work from, picking it up for media is hard because there are so many different cultures which have no relevance to any situation I’ve ever been in and most of it I can’t even parse.
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Siggy said:
For an example of a gay Nice Guy rant, some months ago I was musing over this one.
There seems to be a lot of pedestalization, combined with body image issues. He spends a lot of time talking about how his body isn’t as perfect as those of the guys he likes. There’s a photo of him too.
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Ginkgo said:
He’s what called a bear cub and he’s whining that Bellami Boys don’t go for him. Tough shit. He needs to get real and go for guys that look like him.
Good catch, Siggy.
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Sniffnoy said:
For once, I’ll skip the “obligatory” comments, because holy hell have I said enough about this.
(Mostly I’m just kind of interested to see what Ozy eirself has to say about this sequence these days.)
But I will make one comment, on a point others have picked up on, since it’s something I actually haven’t said that often:
Women are people, which means they are everywhere on the elf-orc spectrum. The proper response to women is not to worship at her feet nor to push her into the dirt, it’s to treat her exactly like you’d treat a person, except that this person usually has boobs.
In most contexts, this is exactly the right advice — women, are, in fact, people, unsurprisingly. But there’s a problem here.
Namely: Consider the clueless straight guy reading this (well, not this, but someone making that statement in a similar context, which people frequently do), who is not attracted to other guys. He does not attempt to flirt with them or otherwise become romantically/sexually involved with them. He has no idea how to do this. So to him, “Treat women just like you would anyone else” just reinforces all his notions of how he must never express attraction ever (or else he is being an evil creepy objectifier). It’s like, OK, this is what I should do normally, but how do I do that whole mating thing? It’s not by acting exactly as I would towards people I’m not attracted to. It seems the people saying such things consider flirting etc. a potential part of “just treating someone like a person”, but to a lot of people it isn’t. Now perhaps the right response is that these people have a wrong and overly restrictive notion of “treating someone like a person”, but if they’re among your target audience, you’re going to have to account for that.
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unimportantutterance said:
The best intuition pump for straight men would probably be “if a gay/bi man were to hit on me, what would be the least objectionable way for him to do it? “
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Nita said:
Er, that might result in optimizing for a pleasant interaction, but not for the intended outcome. Of course, if the other person is eagerly waiting for your invitation, pretty much any non-offensive approach will work, but it’s not always like that, unfortunately.
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Henry Gorman said:
Here’s my attempt a steelman/exegesis of “treat them like a person”– Remember that the people who you want to date have beliefs and desires and make decisions based on those beliefs and desires. Earning a person’s affection isn’t about checking off a bunch of boxes, accumulating a certain amount of merit, or completing their personal quest. It’s about sparking their sexual attraction and making them feel good in your company– ie: making them actively want to be in a relationship with you.
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confused said:
aside from the negative / positive associations of the words what is the actual difference between the former and the latter? is it inauthenticity?
i can’t imagine how i would be able to distinguish between someone ticking off my boxes or using my beliefs and desires to spark my sexual attraction, and making me feel good sounds like a personal quest if i’ve ever heard one. they just seem like rather academic distinctions
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veronica d said:
It’s the puzzle box thing.
Myself, I think I was guilty of the puzzle box thing, but many years ago. As far as I can tell, I no longer am.
But here’s the thing: I have no idea how I got from the one place to the other place, nor how to describe to people what it feels like “on the inside” to make the move. To some extent puzzle box behavior probably arises from neediness. But “don’t be needy” is pretty useless advice to someone who is hurting. Likewise, “treat her like a person” probably doesn’t help some guy having a hard time treating women like people. How does he know what that even means?
#####
My boxing coach used to tell me to keep my hands up and my chin down. But of course I wouldn’t, so he sent a big dude into the ring to punch me until I did. I got better at keeping my hands up and my chin down.
But yeah, learning to interact with women in a low-stress way, with give and take, with plenty of listening and mutual concern for feelings, *and* with sexuality, is a priceless thing. Puzzle box behaviors totally undermine this.
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Henry Gorman said:
I want to take up your question of “how do I get from one place to the other?” with the puzzle-box mentality. Like you, I also used to think like that. I can remember a couple of important things.
1: My puzzle-boxing was extremely compartmentalized. When I interacted with people who I was attracted to (who included people of both genders, since I’m bisexual), I had no trouble just applying a normal sort of theory of mind to them when the interactions had to do with anything other than romance or sex. I had no trouble working with people who I wanted to date or bang on school projects or talking to them about video games or anime, for example. The puzzle-box mentality only kicked in when I thought about trying to get them to date me.
2: The puzzle-box mentality went away when I started to alieve that people might actually want to date me or have sex with me for its own sake. For a long time, my alief was that women weren’t really interested in sex and that any guy I was interested in would be straight. This totally mystified relationships and sex for me, and led me to aieve that I somehow had to do something weird and outside the parameters of normal interaction to ever get love or sex.
Interestingly, this problematic set of aliefs didn’t match up with my beliefs– I knew that there were plenty of queer guys out there, who would become more available as I got older and more of my peers came out of the closet, and I also knew that women desired and enjoyed sex– I had read plenty of women’s writing about wanting and enjoying sex. But the bad aliefs were really, really persistent. They even survived the first few gay guys who I found attractive and who were attracted to me and women who wanted to date me and do sexy things with me without me having to do anything special. It was only through somewhat-prolonged experience with relationships that I overcame it.
It seems that if we want to fix this problem socially, we need to target the source of certain aliefs– particularly the one about women not really being interested in sex for its own sake. I think the best way to do that would be propaganda– supplying more substitutes for the winning-love-as-reward-for-narrative-achievement storyline. I actually really liked the way that “The Amazing Spider-Man” handled this. It was really clear that Gwen just liked Peter for himself, before she knew that he was Spider-Man and before he rescued her or anything. Their relationship would totally work even if it happened outside the broader narrative arc of the film. I would like to see more relationships in movies like this. It’s a socially healthier narrative and I think it tends to make for better art (because it makes it easier to get emotionally invested in the relationship).
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Sniffnoy said:
This totally mystified relationships and sex for me, and led me to aieve that I somehow had to do something weird and outside the parameters of normal interaction to ever get love or sex.
But to some extent this is true. I mean, if you’ve avoided all things romance/sex-related your whole life, then none of that is “normal interaction” for you; it’s something new you have to learn.
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Henry Gorman said:
It is a novel situation, but you actually can base the interactions on the same sort of theory of mind which you base other kinds of interactions on. So, the specific communications might be different, but you can continue to represent your interlocutor as a person whose behavior is governed by beliefs and desires (or whatever you normally do when you interact with people who you want to embark on some kind of cooperative venture with).
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Sniffnoy said:
Oh, sure.
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Sniffnoy said:
So, actually, rethinking this, now I’m wondering, do I have beliefs and desires? This is obviously related to my comments on the “good consent” thread.
Like, OK, there’s a trivial sense in which the answer is “no” (humans don’t actually perfectly implement the agent abstraction), and there’s a trivial sense in which the answer is “yes” (we can force it on anyway), but those are uninteresting. The question is, does it work well, is it useful?
At that level I’d say, yes, clearly I have beliefs; I don’t think that’s in question. But when it comes to desires… well, timescale matters.
See, when we talk about having “beliefs and desires”, implicit in this (at least as I understand it) is the idea that desires, or at least terminal desires are fixed; and if someone tries to mess with them, that is an attack on you; it’s morally wrong, and it must be defended against.
And when we take that into account… well, on a longer timescale, like month-to-month, I clearly have desires. On a shorter timescale, like hour-to-hour, I’d say rather that I have, I don’t know, call them “whims” — and other people are free to attempt to influence these by limited means (anything capable of changing an actual desire is still wrong), and this isn’t an attack on me; they only become fixed into desires after a process of decision making.
Intermediate timescales are intermediate — the shorter the timescale, the fewer desires and the more whims.
I’m not really sure where to go with this, but I feel like we ought to at least somehow be trying to account for this.
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Sniffnoy said:
Actually, really, rethinking, I’m not sure whether decision making can really be said to “fix whims into desires”, or whether it just fixes them into an intermediate category, “decisions”. (Which resemble desires in that other people shouldn’t try to mess with them, as I described to Nita; but quite possibly still resemble whims in other ways.) I don’t really have this model fully worked out I’m afraid.
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Corwin said:
why in all of the fuck didn’t I get to read that 20 years ago ;_;
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Lizardbreath said:
I’ve only ever encountered the Nice Guy™ meme online, not IRL. (I think I’m too old.)
And I encountered the meme by being informed by SJWs that I was a “Nice Guy™” who “didn’t see women as people” when um…
* I am not a guy (I am a gender abolitionist but have chosen to accept the label I was assigned at birth, making me a woman);
* I do, in fact, see other women (and everyone else) as people;
* I have never believed that “men ought to work according to a formula, and if I fulfill the formula, I ought to be able to date the one I desire.” (On the contrary, at the age of 9 I decided I would never be able to find the type of guy I wanted because such guys were too statistically rare, therefore I would plan to be alone all my life and find ways to be happy anyway; I was factually wrong–I did find guys I was interested in, and am currently living happily ever after with one of them–but I was wrong in an entirely different way than a “Nice Guy™.”)
So I’m very dubious.
I just don’t believe that whatever it was that made these young women decide that I was a man and a “Nice Guy™” actually had anything to do with the official definition.
I strongly suspect that this is a label that, in online SJW spaces at least, has mutated out of all resemblance to what it once meant.
If it did used to have a valuable meaning, then that’s a shame.
My mom, meanwhile, has always been sad-to-bitter that the guys she was interested in when she was young in the ’50s and early ’60s, guys she considered her equals, wanted better-looking, less-ambitious girls instead of her. So…I guess she could be seen as a type of Nice Girl™?
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Lambert said:
There is a lot in the blogosphere on what failure modes of attraction exist, but relatively little on what one *should* do. (I presume one thing would be to *actually ask them out* in a reasonable timeframe.)
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Nita said:
The problem is that the right answer depends on the situation.
I’ve seen posts along the lines of “I am suffering from severe untreated depression, unable to engage in any offline interaction, on the brink of homelessness and starvation — if only my secret crush noticed me!” (paraphrased). I think these fellas have more pressing matters to attend to than getting dates.
Then there are the guys who could make themselves way more attractive in a few months — a healthier lifestyle, properly fitting clothes, a new hobby or two, some social skills practice.
And then there are people like young Scott Aaronson, who need (better) therapy and to start asking girls out.
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Creutzer said:
But having a relationship really helps with depression and with finding the motivation to get your life in order. So caring about that is not actually unreasonable until you’ve noticed that you’re just not going to get a relationship until you’ve got your life in order, at which point you’ll just become more depressed. Or something like that…
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Nita said:
Emotionally, I understand what you mean. But in practice, most people are unable to create and maintain a healthy relationship while their life and mind are in the worst imaginable states. So, gradual improvement on all fronts is a better idea than waiting for the magic of True Love.
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Leit said:
@Nita
The rest of their lives may well be a shambles *because* of their lack of self-worth due to being unable to attract a partner. It’s a godawful vicious circle.
If you’re feeling less charitable, it’s also possible they’re following a script… we have a cultural image of a person who is alone and unloved, and our cultural mythology says that a person who broadcasts these signals gets… I want to say “help”, but that’s not quite right. Redeemed? in the end. Usually by a Manic Pixie Dream Girl™.
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Nita said:
Some people believe that you have to be completely happy on your own to be truly “ready” to enter a relationship. But I’m a gooey-hearted romantic deep inside, so I think that people who are “just” lonely need only occasional reality checks to avoid over-investing too quickly.
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Creutzer said:
Yes, those whose lives are going well enough so that they can afford to exclude anyone who is below a certain level of status as potential mates. This is then their rationalisation.
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veronica d said:
What are you even talking about? Do you folks apply the label status to *literally everything*?
It sounds like “status” takes on the role of “stuff I resent as an unhappy person.”
Which, status is real and it matters, but *being happy* or *having your shit together* are not exactly the same thing. They’re related, no doubt, but not identical. Folks are going to want to date other folks with their shit together, cuz when you date you take on your partner’s issues. It’s part of the deal.
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G. said:
I think this goes back to the problem that our society is really bad at giving people ways to meet their emotional needs outside of forming relationships. This is a problem because unmet emotional needs do a lot of harm, and also make it *harder* to form relationships. (Hence I think that society needs to get better at this, which will mitigate the problem).
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Bugmaster said:
@veronica d:
I think a more charitable interpretation of what Creutzer said (which might be wrong, I’m not Creutzer so I don’t know) would be something like this:
“People in happy committed relationships possess a privilege that lonely people lack. This privilege blinds them, and leads them to offer advice (such as ‘make sure you are happy on your own before trying to date’) which is not only unhelpful, but also sounds condescending”.
Compare:
“People with well-paying jobs possess a privilege that poor people lack. This privilege blinds them, and leads them to offer advice (such as ‘just learn to manage your money better, a penny saved is a penny earned’) which is not only unhelpful, but also sounds condescending”.
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Creutzer said:
I meant something rather more cynical, actually: that people telling others that they need to be happy with themselves first is a way of signalling that they’re more awesome and can afford not to bother with the unhappy ones whom they consider less valuable (to avoid the word “status”, which I admit was overly specific and used in something of an inflationary way). Unhappiness is certainly not the same as not having your act together (example: myself), but I’m pretty sure one is widely used as a proxy for the other. Maybe it’s the typical mind fallacy, maybe it’s the cultural narrative.
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Nita said:
@ Creutzer
Interesting theory, but some of these people refer to personal experience, e.g., “I used to make bad relationship choices and treat my partners in unhealthy ways because I was terrified of being alone, but then I learned to be happy on my own, and my subsequent relationships worked better”.
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Creutzer said:
Some of them may even not be deluding themselves. But I would say there’s going to be one hell of a selection effect. Would we ever hear from the people who were lifted out of their misery by finally finding a fulfilling relationship? No, because being happy just in virtue of your relationship is still low status.
We’re also going to have a hard time telling how many unhappy people are nonetheless able not to behave in such unhealthy ways, or have learned not to behave in that fashion without becoming happy.
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Creutzer said:
Damn that lack of an edit button…
I realised that what I said doesn’t actually defend the cynical theory that unhappiness is low status so saying you have to be happy before you can have a good relationship is status signalling. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle between the extreme version of that cynical theory and Bugmaster’s very charitable interpretation, in that the people who believe that you need to be happy with yourself before you can have a good relationship probably just believe something convenient.
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Nita said:
That seems unlikely, considering the abundance of that sentiment in popular song lyrics.
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Creutzer said:
Don’t song lyrics have a history of pretending that things that are actually low status aren’t, especially when it comes to romance?
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Leit said:
Song lyrics also have a really bad history of being misinterpreted; see: Self Esteem, and a generation deciding that it’s romantic to put up with enormous amounts of shit.
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veronica d said:
You all have a very uncharitable view. First, I have nothing personally invested in either 1) if you get dates or 2) if you live “well put together” lives. I have no reason to lie to you.
Here is the thing: when I decide to date someone (in my case a woman), I do care about the whole package. Among other things, I’m looking for maturity, experience in life. Her holding down a job is a plus. Her having a rich social circle is a good sign. Knowing something about her past relationships, how she handled her breakups — these things matter. If she come across as a fuckup, how much do I want to risk with her? If she comes across as bitter and lonely, that’s a really bad sign. What kind of dates will we have? Her sitting across from me sullen, ranting about how unfair everything is? Or will she be super needy and clingy and expect me to be her *everything*, without any real sense of what my needs might be? Do I want that? I got enough issues of my own.
If you choose to see this as terrible women finding dishonest ways to fuck over “low status” men — well get over yourself. As likely you are hearing people tell you straight-up honest what is undesirable about you. Few people want to date a sadsack.
#####
BTW, I’m *not* saying you have to have it 100% all together to date. First, I’m not in charge of who dates who. Second, I’m hardly 100% together. I got my baggage. So does my g/f. Most people do.
But I’m waaaaaay better than I used to be. And that matters a lot.
#####
This stuff is a feedback loop.
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Bugmaster said:
> I have no reason to lie to you.
I know you don’t.
But if you are willing to accept the concept of privilege in general, then it’s it not possible that you yourself have privilege that others lack ? Being mistaken is not the same thing as being a liar, you know.
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Creutzer said:
Veronica, what you’re describing is very far from the original bone of contention, which was people saying that you basically must be perfectly content with your single life before you can have a relationship. I’m saying that’s bullshit and proposing to explain it as status signalling. This isn’t to begrudge anybody their reasonable attempts to avoid fucked-up relationships.
As a general thing, please, please watch your pattern matching. It’s got quite out of hand in this post of yours. For example…
… I would like to call your attention to the fact that this whole subthread has hitherto proceeded in a non-gendered fashion, and rightly so.
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veronica d said:
Well, right. I don’t think you have to be *totally okay* outside of a relationship to enter a relationship. However, I seriously doubt that those who assert things like that do so for reasons like Creutzer suggested. Nor do I think “status” is the single defining variable one should look at.
(Which, I mean, read *Impro*. Improve your status play. Sure. I’m all for that. But when “low status” becomes a mantra of bitterness, step back.)
Here it is: I think people who say “you should be okay outside of a relationship before you enter a relationship” are probably saying something kinda insightful, even if they are expressing it in a way that is not literally true. The point is, if what you bring to a relationship is mostly *your needs*, you’re gonna have problems. First, not many people want “they need me so much” as the big-primary for why they date someone, so if you come across that way you’re killing your own odds. (Add to that the feeling that “they need anyone, just anyone, me or anyone else. They’re that desperate” — this is not a good strategy for flirting.)
Second, if you are in fact needy, then this can lead to really bad relationship dynamics, such as lots of codependency, lots of insecurity and need for constant validation, which can become irksome. Many people have experienced this from both sides and they fervently avoid it.
Or not. I know people with hard mental illness who still find romance. But the point is, it’s extra work they have to do, both partners. Which is fucked up and unfair, but in my experience those who succeed are in fact those who do the work.
Saying, “This is really fucking hard” is the opposite of privilege.
Regarding privilege — I think here the defining factor of privilege is people who *do not get it* and therefore say stupid things. However, in this case I don’t think that is what is happening. I think what happens is this: you have people who themselves have been in a bad place romantically, but then later got into a good place, and when they look at what changed, they do not see that the *world out there* changed. But instead often they see that they got their shit together — whatever their shit was — and from that they got happy and more confident, and from that the dating followed.
For example, Scott Aaronson basically said this. It’s a common story. I suspect it is mostly true.
And yeah, me too. I’ve had long stretches of grinding romantic failure that sucked a lot. But then, I’ve had good periods as well. The difference: me.
I’m really happy now. I have a g/f. The happiness came first.
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Creutzer said:
I can’t tell you how incredibly fucked-up this sounds to me. Dammit, being unhappy when bad things happen to you – or no good things do – is normal. What has American culture come to that nobody can recognise unhappiness as anything other than practically a sign of debilitating mental illness?
Thank God my girlfriend is from a culture that still gets this right…
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Bugmaster said:
> I think here the defining factor of privilege is people who *do not get it* and therefore say stupid things. However, in this case I don’t think that is what is happening.
Yes, “in this case I don’t think that is what is happening” is what all of those privileged straight cis white men say, too. This is one of the reasons why I’m personally not sold on the usefulness of this entire “privilege” concept, to be honest.
That said, the rest of your advice is analogous to saying, “look, it sucks to be poor, I know; but what you’ve got to do is work harder, and then you’ll be ok”. Sometimes, this is perfectly valid advice that is 100% useful and accurate. At other times, it’s not; but it can be genuinely difficult to distinguish these two cases when you yourself have a high-paying job, a cozy home, a decent car, nutritious food, and enough time and money left over at the end of the day so you can spend it on arguing with people on the Internet.
I am somewhat sympathetic to your advice in general; for many people, “just work harder at being dateable” is a viable solution. But it’s not for everyone. For some people, the answer is “radically transform who and what you are”, which is kind of like “work harder”, but turned up to over 9000. For some others, it’s more like “wait for biomedical breakthroughs to come along”, at which point it’s out of that person’s hands (unless he’s a brilliant neuroscientist, I suppose).
But saying, “I know you’re unhappy about being alone, but you’re alone because you’re unhappy, so just become happy and everything will be fine” is… somewhat less than helpful. It sounds like something that a generally happy and well-adjusted person would say, to someone who is neither of those things. I know you mean well, but… some people can’t afford cake, you know ?
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veronica d said:
@Bugmaster — Your argument proves to much. Which is to say, I used to feel completely hopeless dating, like for realz, and then I got shit together. Likewise Scott Aaronson got his shit together. This is a real thing.
Which, at the time it is hell, but a lot of folks who believe they have no hope end up a few years later basically fine.
But how to get there? I wish I had an easy answer.
#####
Racial privilege says that white folks should be careful what they assume about black folks. Furthermore, they should resist making assumptions, be careful what they say.
I mean, privilege is a motte and bailey (hi Ozy!), so let’s try to use it in a reasonable way.
Anyway, neuro-typical privilege says the same about NAT people. Likewise, I guess maybe there is not-a-nerd privilege too. (But maybe that’s NT privilege in disguise. Not sure, to tell the truth. The relationship between neuro stuff and nerdom is complex.)
But anyway, I guess racial privilege still lets black people talk to black people. Can we NAT folks talk to NAT folks? Can nerds talk to nerds? As someone who has walked this path, do I get no voice?
Privilege exists by degrees.
Is there temporal privilege? I used to be fat, hopeless neckbeard who looked male. Now I am not. Do I have “tall, purple-haired tranny who is and always has been a math nerd” privilege?
I mean, I do think I have privilege over (some) male nerds. Obviously.
#####
If someone tells me they feel hopeless, that they’ve given up — well, it’s tricky, right? Saying “Oh just buck up” doesn’t help much. But then, saying “You’re right you’re totally fucking hopeless sucks to be you” probably isn’t so nice either.
Maybe saying, “You can’t do this *right now*” is a better thing.
On the other hand, if you say you’ve given your all, maybe you have. It has to be okay to give up.
For now. Maybe you can try again next month. Or next year. Just stay alive if you can.
I’m pretty sure going down the “I’m an omega male” path is a dead end. Status matters, and being on the wrong side of status is really obvious in ways that being on the right side of status is not. But still, folks fixate on status, totalize it. They build it into a false model, which probably hurts more than helps.
#####
When I entered the trans community, I went and bought a book on therapeutic discourse techniques, cuz so many of my Twitter friends were suicidal and I wanted to communicate with them in helpful ways. I think it worked. Maybe. None of my close friends have killed themselves.
So far.
#####
“It gets better” is a really important message in the queer community. Which, there are variations. Some folks prefer “You get stronger.” I like both versions. I mean, they might not be totally true for every queer kid in every way no matter what. And many of the rich, Hollywood cisgays pushing the message don’t know shit about being a broke-ass tranny. So yeah, there is some privilege there. But still, it’s a damn good message.
“Get yer ass to the big city, as soon as you can, sad little queer child. Podunk Nowhere ain’t big enough for you. We queers are strong as fuck and you are too.”
Not every queer kid makes it.
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Being a nerd can be hell. But being a nerd can be fucking awesome. If you are today in-hell nerd, then maybe tomorrow you’ll be fucking-awesome nerd.
Attracting the opposite sex is waaaaaay easier if you seem like fucking-awesome nerd than if you seem like still-in-hell nerd. Which, there are reasons for this, some fair and reasonable, some not so fair. But either way, try to get into fucking-awesome nerdspace. It’s better here.
#####
Perhaps I have some kind of “I made it into fucking-awesome nerdspace” privilege. Is that a thing? I guess maybe. But saying I know nothing about in-hell nerdspace is false.
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Dude Man said:
@Veronica d
“Being a nerd can be hell. But being a nerd can be fucking awesome. If you are today in-hell nerd, then maybe tomorrow you’ll be fucking-awesome nerd.
Attracting the opposite sex is waaaaaay easier if you seem like fucking-awesome nerd than if you seem like still-in-hell nerd. Which, there are reasons for this, some fair and reasonable, some not so fair. But either way, try to get into fucking-awesome nerdspace. It’s better here.”
There’s a problem with this, and you mentioned it yourself. Not only is there no easy way to go from one to another, but the person might not even know how to get from one to another. If the piece of advice you give to someone is “do X” but neither you nor the person you’re talking about knows how to do X, is it really that useful as advice?
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veronica d said:
@Dude Man — Well, it might help one person a lot and the next not so much. It depends on what they already have to work with and what message they need to hear on that particular day.
Which, I don’t have all the answers, but I know what worked for me and what I have seen work for others. Also I think I can see kinda dead ends that people get trapped in.
#####
Like, to come at this general point from another angle, it can be very frustrating to be trans. Like, there is a lot of stuff that drives me bananas. For example, being AMAB queer can be hell-on-earth when trying to operate in an AFAB dominated queerspace.
Which is a funny kinda feminist thing, cuz while the folks born with dicks are getting the raw deal, it’s still masculinity that gets to walk tall.
So that’s a thing.
Anyway, there is this whole trans woman separatist scene, like trans women who just drop out of queerspace and make our own spaces and our own stuff. Which, it’s kinda cool. I love the events. It really is liberating to be totally among my own kind and not have to deal.
But on the other hand, I refuse to go full separatist. Just, no. I understand the frustration of my trans sisters. I feel it too. It can be alienating as fuck. But I’m not going down the path that says, “OMG all cissies and AFABs are always terrible to all trans women always and GRRRRRR!”
I’ve lost friends cuz I said nope to that.
#####
I guess a lot of guys feel like “omega males,” even if they don’t use those terms. I see it a lot when “status” is treated like this totalizing thing, a fixed factor of one’s life, that which determines all success and happiness. Add to this a full dose of resentment. See, there are these “high status” people who win at love and get to lord it over all the “low status” people.
And I guess there are just two types of people. Or maybe three, if you buy the alpha-beta split. Which am I?
(I guess we gals get ten types: HB1 – HB10. Wait, then there are “warpigs.” I guess as a non-passing tranny I’m automatically a warpig, or something. I dunno.)
The reality is, I think most of us kinda muddle through in “middle status,” going up and down depending on the day and who we’re hanging with.
#####
Even social justice types should use logic. Even if we value lived experience, and I surely do, we should strive to believe true things and not believe false things.
If you say, “The only problem in my life is I cannot get dates.”
Well then go get dates! Ask women out.
If you say, “Well I cannot get dates cuz I have factor X” (whatever X is).
Then you have two choices: say that the entire female half of the species is terribly wrong about factor X, or else admit that maybe factor X is something of a problem.
If you choose the latter, then GO FIX FACTOR X.
I mean, work on it. Make progress. Try. Maybe find ways to compensate.
And if you really, really, really tried and you really, really, really cannot fix it — well that fucking sucks.
But that does not mean that literally every woman is wrong about factor X, or that it’s all some totalized status game, or that you might not work it out in a few years once your life circumstances change, on and on.
In the meanwhile I suggest doing a lot of math. And learn to dance.
Math and dancing — it worked for me.
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Bugmaster said:
@veronica d:
Overall, you seem to be drifting back and forth between the following separate forms of advice:
1). “Just buck up, it gets better”. As Dude Man (and you yourself !) said, this is somewhat less than helpful. People who are hurting, for any reason, are not just looking for platitudes; they are looking for actionable solutions. And telling them, “look at me, I turned out great !”, is exactly the kind of thing a privileged person (in this case, privileged along the happiness and social stability axis, not the race or gender axes) might inadvertently say.
Examples of this include stuff like:
* “a lot of folks who believe they have no hope end up a few years later basically fine”.
* All the descriptions of how great your life is now.
* “Well then go get dates! Ask women out.”
* “If you choose the latter, then GO FIX FACTOR X.” (which, as I said before, is similar to proclaiming: “just stop being poor”).
2). Descriptions of what a person could actually do to become happier (overall as well as in their love life). This stuff is actually useful, but, of course, may not be applicable to everybody (or, indeed, to most people). Not everyone can learn to be as good of a mathematician/dancer/lover as you are. Not everyone can afford to leave Podunk, USA and move to San Francisco or Boston. But still, if you were to expand on this advice, it would be a lot helpful than (1). Now, you are no longer saying “just stop being poor”, but something along the lines of, “if you take the following free online classes, you may be able to get a better job”.
But there’s one thing that I think you’re missing, and it goes something like this:
3). “I know you’re unhappy, and it really sucks. I can think of some things you can do to maybe become happier, but meanwhile, I empathize with you”. Without some basic human compassion, items (1) and even (2) just come off as condescending and contemptuous. For example, when you implicitly divide the world into people who have successfully “worked on it, made progress, and found ways to compensate”, and those who are just too lazy or too stupid (so stupid that they actually believe that “literally every woman is wrong about factor X”), you come off as a holier-than-though ideologue. I realize that you never intended to come off as such, but… well… that’s what privilege is all about. Other people do not necessarily see you the same way you see yourself.
I know that point (3) it’s frustrating, given that everything you’ve said in point (2) is (most likely) demonstrably true. Any kind of an efficient rational agent should be able to look at the evidence and come to the same conclusion, right ?
Humans aren’t perfectly rational agents, though. And, on the flip side, if you keep giving people the same message, and it keeps not working… well, then maybe there’s something wrong with your message, or with your delivery. Or maybe there’s something wrong with everyone else, of course, that’s a possibility too.
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veronica d said:
I don’t think I lack empathy. What I lack is patience for those who turn their lack of success into resentment against people like me. I understand these things come from a place of pain, but the culture they have created is hella toxic.
I don’t claim to offer solutions, so saying “This doesn’t help solve this” or “your advice does not work” are empty. I’m not selling a book on dating. I am stating a fact: I know many people who once believed they were forever-alone and doomed, but who now have romantic success. Like, I know *a fucking lot* of people who walked this path, including me. So when I see a man deal with the bad shit, and I see him flirting around the edges of incel-space or redpill-space (or whatever), I speak up, cuz that shit isn’t going to help either. Plus it makes the social spaces kinda awful for women.
And I know this sub-thread is supposed to be gender neutral, but I don’t really see the gender-reversed dynamic. Maybe it exists in a way I do not see.
(There is the “male tears” stuff, but that seems like a different sort of thing.)
Anyway, this is why I bring up the trans separatist stuff. I see a commonality, which is a group of people with legitimate pain, but who create a subculture that deals with their issues in a really unhealthy way. On the surface it seems like a safe space, and to some degree it is, but the messages that tend to dominate are cynical, exclusionary, and ultimately reinforce isolation.
Wanna see examples from lonely men? Wanna see stuff far worse than any trans separatists?
Look, I’m not blaming the redpill for Eliot Roger’s violence. His violence belongs to him. However, the redpill space gave him his ideas.
Had he found different ideas equally appealing…
#####
The fact is, I *cannot* say “Well do X and it will fix your problems.” The reason is kinda simple, I found an X that works for me. But mostly that X was “Become a woman.” Which, my biggest problem was gender dysphoria. This won’t work for most of you.
(I also had to deal with my neuro stuff, but by the time I figured out my gender stuff my neuro stuff was less of an issue.)
Scott Aaronson’s X was (evidently) to achieve some level of academic success, plus probably just mature a lot. (I read somewhere that he entered college as a young teen, which OMG that must have been hard.) But yeah, most folks are not cut out to be a big shot quantum computing person at MIT.
I can’t tell anyone what their X will be. However, it seems like “Find a girlfriend” actually doesn’t work very well, for the reasons I’ve stated. “Stew in your resentment” probably won’t work well either. “Find a community of lonely, angry men on the Internet and share crappy theories about how it’s everyone else’s fault” seems worst of all.
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Creutzer said:
Well, provided you’re referring to the dynamic I was talking about (and which I think this subthread was originally about), I can assure you that it does exist with women. I’ve seen plenty of times what happened to my female friends when they dropped the facade and let on that they’re not oh-so-cheerful and happy about life.
As for the resentment dynamic that you have made this subthread about, I have no idea.
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taradinoc said:
@veronica d:
“Look, I’m not blaming the redpill for Eliot Roger’s violence. His violence belongs to him. However, the redpill space gave him his ideas.”
That isn’t the impression I got from reading his manifesto. The way he told it, IIRC, when he discovered that space, he thought most of the people in it were wimps for trying to understand the world and adapt themselves, but that a few of them “got it”, i.e. had formed the same world view he already had. It didn’t sound like he picked up many of his ideas online at all.
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veronica d said:
If you’re a straight guy who is reasonably happy with the heteronormative dating script (and note that most men and women are), then try this: Models: Attract Women Through Honesty.
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nydwracu said:
Part of the problem with advice is that people who have found strategies that work may not have any idea how they work or what they do. I was going to ask that same question because I’ve benefited enough from other people’s willingness to make the initial signal of attraction that I ought to stop free-riding, but then I realized that I legitimately have no idea whether that’s what I’m actually doing or not.
And then, even if I could give advice myself, it would be tuned to my particular social environment / type, so it wouldn’t be helpful to that many people.
So I’m not sure if sensible advice can exist. Except for obvious pieces of low-level advice (don’t pedestalize, don’t be completely passive, etc.) and Scott’s Soviet spy thing, which is useful enough that I’ve either sent it or explained the principle behind it to everyone I’ve established mutual Soviet spy status with since I read it.
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Henry Gorman said:
I think that the space for offering “obvious low-level advice” helpfully is wider than you think, because a lot of people do seem to be genuinely clueless about various things.
Consider, for example, how frequently American men wear hideous, ill-fitting clothes and have awful haircuts or facial hair. (There are some social environments where this is more common than others, of course– for example, I’ve noticed that at least a good 40% or so of male computer science undergrads sport some combination of ill-kept underconditioned long hair, patchy/wispy beards, ill-fitting T-shirts with jokes on them, and baggy jeans, shorts, or cargo pants). Improving clothing and grooming probably won’t fix 100% of these people’s romantic problems, but it will increase their probabilities of success almost all the time.
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szopeno said:
I disagree completely with “arseholes have more sex partners because they got dumped”. That contradicts everything I know about arseholes. I mean, I had arsehole friends, who had tons of sex partners (while I was in stage-one nice guy), because, well, they DIDNT F* CARE ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS. Literally. If you dumped them, fine, they were going to dump you anyway within few days. I mean, one guy, who fucked a girl while I was on the NEXT F* BED, dated few girls in the same time and when one of them “dumped” him, was totally unmoved, I mean totally. He treated her as a background noise, while he was making plans to hit on another girl and how to organize this logistically with f* all his current girls.
If not for my wife, I would become misogynist stage-four nice guy, I assure you, because my whole experience was that real jerks who were treating women like shit were having no problems with getting laid, all my female friends were complainaing about “why all males were arseholes” while ignoring all non-arsehole female friends. In certain stage of your life, it is very easy to get impression that, yeah, all women are like that (TM).
And finally, you need reliable fathers only if reliable fathers are crucial to children survival. if females have support from their family, mothers, sisters, or relatives, fathers are not necessary.
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Henry Gorman said:
What you’re saying doesn’t really contradict Ozy’s point at all. The fact that your roommate didn’t care about getting dumped doesn’t mean that he didn’t get dumped. And his dishonesty probably means that he probably lost and had to replace more partners than say, an ethical person with a bunch of fuckbuddies or an ethical polyamorous person would have.
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szopeno said:
@henry gorman but he got more sexual partners because he wanted to and he could, not because he wanted a stable relationship and couldn’t get one, as – at least as I think – is implied by Ozy.
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Robert Liguori said:
So, my experience with PUA material is pretty much limited to Strauss’s book, bits of Roissy that get quoted frequently, and hearing it secondhand from a friend, but isn’t hacking the “Only friends tease me and make light about X, therefore this person doing so is a friend.” the expected model of negging? Maybe I’ve just been reading the exceptionally reasonable PUA material (a horrifying thought), but my understanding was that this was the PUA model, and “You need to knock women down a peg! Insult them!” was the strawman.
Hmm. Now I’m wondering about a meta-level question; how would you judge what a group really believes about one of their tenants? I mean, I can certainly imagine that a large percentage of the PUA community knows the hack model, but internally believes the assert-my-power model. I can look at a bunch of other situations involving community-wide practices which are honored in the breach, in which everyone in a community will agree that drinking is a sin in public and then go home to a nice Scotch.
I ask because I think it would be good to have a strong model of when you can say “This community really doesn’t care about drinking, they care about talking about drinking.” In particular, when I read Ozy on social justice in context with other, more well-knwon writers, I get the feeling very similar reading 10 Christian bloggers, 1 of which is Fred Clark and the other 9 of which are advocates of prosperity gospel. Yes, an examination of the source material of feminism/Christianity shows that the few are right and the many are wrong, but they are the many. If a term like ‘Nice Guy’ is being used by the many in a way that defines it as being male-specific (as it has been every other time I’ve seen the concept discussed), how can you salvage it?
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Nita said:
From what I’ve read, the classic explanation goes like this:
(1) a HB10 gets too much positive attention from men
(2) this has two effects:
(2a) normal compliments have zero effect on her
(2b) she develops a “bitch shield” to preemptively deflect attention
(3) to break through her bitch shield, you can use a neg, which works for the following reasons:
(3a) you differentiate yourself from the crowd of supplicating AFCs
(3b) you make her doubt the assumption that her value is way above yours
(3c) this motivates her to “qualify” herself — that is, to prove her worth in your eyes
You can decide whether this is closer to “friend-sense hack” or “knock her down a peg”.
Personally, I would be happier if PUA material contained less “don’t be afraid of her — she’s like a dog or a child, or a robot” and more “don’t be afraid of her — she has her own insecurities and wants to have a good time, just like you”.
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veronica d said:
According to Clarisse Thorn’s book, you’ll find both models of negging discussed among the PUA, depending on the moral caliber of the individual PUA.
Herself, she likes the verbal sparring element of (the good kind) of negging. Which, yeah it’s kinda fun. But then, it goes both ways guys! 🙂
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anonymous coward said:
>tenants
tenets!
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jossedley said:
Thinking about Nice People, what do people think is the appeal of the romantic fairytale?
Person A is a bit of an ugly duckling and is smitten by Person B. Person B doesn’t realize how awesome A truly is, so A orbits for a while while B typically chases C, then eventually realizes C isn’t the right person for him/her. At that point, A hangs around outside with a boombox, takes off her glasses and lets down her hair, or whatever, and B realizes that A was the person for him/her all along.
Looking back, that is absolutely TERRIBLE life advice, much worse than thinking that anyone can grow up to succeed in any career that they want badly enough, or that the team that wants it more wins the game. Why is it so appealing and enduring?
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InferentialDistance said:
The standard romantic fairytale is basically the hero’s journey. Person C is the antagonist, frustrating person’s A’s, the protagonist’s, ambitions (which, being True Love, are pure and noble). However, person A is held back by their own failings, and upon improving themself (let down hair, take off glasses, hang around with boombox, etc…) is capable of overcoming their antagonist. And then everyone lives happily ever after, because True Love.
The hero’s journey is, for whatever reasons, incredibly appealing as a storytelling arc.
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Nita said:
Do you even have to ask? It has all sorts of narrative candy:
– plucky underdog we can root for
– unrequited love
– high emotional stakes
– dramatic moment of truth
– True Love conquers all / Destined for each other
– just world
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nydwracu said:
My guess is that it arose from bad poetry by Occitan proto-neckbeards back when sex was seen as a terrible dirty thing that can only get in the way of the Pure Love that exists between an Occitan proto-neckbeard and some woman he’s never said a word to, and now everyone’s so used to it that they don’t notice that it’s lab-grade 190-proof Shit That Doesn’t Happen.
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roe said:
Dr. Robert Glover has a somewhat different (though important I think) model of the Nice Guy (his book “No More Mr. Nice Guy” is often recommended in manosphere circles): Nice guys have an unspoken deal with the universe: if I meet everyone else’s needs, I will get my needs met without having to ask. The form of this he calls a “covert contract” – it’s never spelled out explicitly, but he sees it as binding (even though the other parties never agreed to it).
The way Nice Guys pursue romance looks like a special case of the way they interact generally.
I’ve encountered a lot of guys on the internet who say Glover’s book was an epiphany – I found it pretty helpful myself.
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Nita said:
Hmm, that’s how it seems to work in some families. Maybe that’s where they get the idea?
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InferentialDistance said:
It’s basically the romantic instance of the just-world-fallacy. Asking for people to meet your needs is entitled, and therefor unjust. The just action is not to ask, but to continue to meet everyone else’s needs (because leaving people needy is also unjust). Eventually, the just world will meet your needs (because leaving you needy is unjust).
Discovering that the world is unjust leaves a lot of people rather bitter. And then they reverse stupidity and end up with a different stupidity…
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roe said:
I think family dynamics has a lot to do with Nice-guy-ism, but my intuition is that there’s several different ways it can play out (eg. I’ve encountered Niceguys who have overly strict fathers (so they always have to manipulate to get what they want) and from non-present or weak fathers (so they never get a model for assertiveness)). I also suspect Niceguys are high on the “agreeableness” personality trait, which is the foundation on which the family experience builds.
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roe said:
@InferentialDistance – Glover called that a “victim puke”…
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veronica d said:
Glover seems like kind of a jerk. Like, he has the puff-out-your-chest model of masculinity and — well — I think for some men that probably works, but it hardly seems a good general approach for all men. For example, men who struggle with nerd-hood are likely to *fail badly* at that model and come across as try-hards.
Which, actually to me Glover pretty much does. YMMV.
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roe said:
veronica d: Huh – interesting. For clarity: by “try-hard” do you mean something like “inauthentic”?
Maybe this is like a “bravery debate” thing but I thought Glover’s book was more about basic self-assertion.
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veronica d said:
To be fair, I haven’t actually read the book — which, not being a nice guy nor being male, I’m not exactly in need of his services — but I pick up some of his schtick here and there.
But yeah, it’s a bravery debate. Guys who are trapped in shrinking-violet, total pushover space might benefit. But it definitely feels a bit too much like macho-man-man stuff, which leaves little room for other ways to be masculine.
I’m femme as fuck and totally assertive. Which maybe works cuz I’m a woman, but men can play too! Masculinity can be quite flexible.
For example, both Fred Rogers and Jimmy Steward were *men*. But they didn’t go around with their chests pushed out.
“Try hard” is the countersigning thing. People comfortable with their status are not constantly projecting their status in overt ways. They can ease up, cuz they know who they are. Men whose masculinity is comfortable don’t need to go around talking about “let’s lift bro!” to people who do not lift.
(Although if you are a weightlifting geek, then by all means love your hobby. But you can kinda tell that with some guys it’s a tool to overcome feelings of inadequacy.)
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roe said:
veronica d – Right, I generally agree, but it’s a common pattern in self-improvement generally for people to “over-shoot” or be hyper-enthused about this “new thing” that solves all their problems, then settle into a balance that works. And there’s a reason for that – if you’re trying to change an old habit, it takes a lot of mental energy and momentum and resources &etc.
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G. said:
Guess culture!
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roe said:
Dr. Robert Glover has a somewhat different (though important I think) model of the Nice Guy (his book “No More Mr. Nice Guy” is often recommended in manosphere circles): Nice guys have an unspoken deal with the universe: if I meet everyone else’s needs, I will get my needs met without having to ask. The form of this he calls a “covert contract” – it’s never spelled out explicitly, but he sees it as binding (even though the other parties never agreed to it).
The way Nice Guys pursue romance looks like a special case of the way they interact generally.
I’ve encountered a lot of guys on the internet who say Glover’s book was an epiphany – I found it pretty helpful myself.
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roe said:
Ack – sorry for the doublepost.
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MCA said:
I think what Ozy said very early on about being behind in social skills is actually crucial. Once that decremenet occurs, it can be very hard to recover from, because your peers have left you behind, and the very social interactions that would help close the gap become ever more difficult and daunting. This is compounded with dating – if an individual has fallen behind in general social skills, dating becomes much harder (especially before 18, when the pool is artificially restricted), resulting in further skills defecits, making further dating harder, etc. They’re self-reinforcing feedback cycles.
When I experienced this, I actually deliberately, purposefully aped the “romance” I’d seen in media. I lacked any real context for it, only that this seemed to work, and it was my only touchstone. I think I was only different in that I was consciously aware of the crutch I was using.
When my social skills increased, I don’t think it was so much “not objectifying” or “not pedestalizing”, but rather just the very core basics like learning body language, facial expressions, anticipating people’s reactions, etc. A lot of it was subconscious, like a social form of the muscle memory you develop learning a new physical skill. As a result, I now find it really, really weird to interact with folks who are where I was, because I can see so much of myself in their social fumbles but can’t really put into words how to fix it.
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liskantope said:
How about especially after 23 or so, when many of one’s peers have learned how to date competently and have even found someone serious!
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Ghatanathoah said:
I think one thing this post needs to do is to set up where exactly the boundary is between “being upset that my dating strategy is failing” and “objectifying people and considering them to be machines whose buttons I press in order to get the result I want.”
Nice Guys engage in a series of strategies that they believe should attract people to them. When these strategies fail, they get upset. It doesn’t seem immediately obvious to me that your being upset because your strategy doesn’t work implies you think of the people you are using it on as mere mechanisms.
In fact, a lot of Nice Guy rhetoric seems to be partially motivated by concern for the other person. A Nice Guy who is upset that the other person is going for an unpleasant jerk often seems to be of the opinion that the jerk is making the other person unhappy, and they would be better off with the Nice Guy. This opinion probably doesn’t reflect the truth accurately, it is probably distorted by motivated cognition and envy. But the fact that Nice Guys frame their complaints in this fashion seem to indicate that they believe the other person is a person and want good things to happen to them.
A good analogy might be the Nice Doctor who is upset that all her patients are buying drugs from alternative medicine quacks who have better sales pitches. The Nice Doctor is probably upset partly or mainly because she is losing lots of money. And it might be more productive to try to improve her sales pitch instead of complaining that patients go for quacks instead of doctors. But on some level she is also probably genuinely concerned about her patients’ wellbeing, and is upset that they are harming their health by going to quacks.
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roe said:
My somewhat deeper-then-surface reading of PUA is that it’s a large toolkit of stuff which improves the probability of generating attraction – off the top of my head: push-pull, displaying high value, getting fit, dressing well, dealing with anxiety, cold approaches, calibration, inner-game, “fake-it-til-you-make-it”, body language, eye contact, cocky-and-funny, pre-selection, agree and amplify…
…and all anybody talks about in assessing its value as praxis is “negging.” Respectfully, I find this suspect. Has anybody been an empiricist about this?
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veronica d said:
I would love to see an empirical study. However, it would be much like an empirical study of acting techniques, since any failure could be chalked up to the player lacking game.
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Lambert said:
Increase number of subjects.
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roe said:
Oh, science is way too high a bar to hit with this stuff – I just meant the low bar of “I tried a, b & c – and a actually made my dating life easier, b didn’t do anything and c made it worse.” Placebo? Who cares! Your dating life is better! (To be fair, PUAs and red pillers try to draw much broader conclusions then this, but reverse stupidity yada yada)
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Lambert said:
Yeah, but I’m in STEM so I’ve got to naively advocate the scientific method for the social sciences and wonder why everyone else finds it so hard. 😉
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Nita said:
I think negging is the only PUA-specific technique most people outside the PUA community have heard about. Arguably, it’s overused, easy to misuse and easy to identify, so “PUA-wannabe negs a girl of average confidence, she takes it as an insult” is a common source of PUA visibility.
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veronica d said:
Failed PUA techniques are usually hilarious. Well, except for the one guy in the dumb hat who thought he should put his hand on me. Which, nope. Not sure which book taught him to do that, but it was gross.
But I kinda suspect this stuff must be less common these days than it used to be. I get the sense that the “canned routine” approach to PUA is kinda maybe old hat.
(Heh, “old hat.” Get it?)
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Nita said:
A dumb hat, you say? Must have been a practitioner of the ancient Mystery Method.
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roe said:
veronica d: Oh ya! Forgot about kino, thanks!
(I would imagine kino is one of the more difficult minefields to navigate – easy to overstep personal boundaries, takes a good reading of how receptive the other person would be – but touch is a really important part of attraction, so…)
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liskantope said:
I once encountered a guy who would regularly hang out in bars wearing a conspicuous hat, for the purpose of providing an icebreaker.
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Bugmaster said:
Am I the only person who really likes cool hats ? I don’t care if they’re supposed to be an icebreaker or whatever, I just want more diversity in our headwear
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Nita said:
@ Bugmaster
I like hats! I just think the people who wear hats they don’t even like are ruining the hat fun for everyone.
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Leit said:
Hats are awesome. Pity the trilby was ruined by “fedoras”. *frothing intensifies*
Also: maybe they do like the hats, and being able to redirect criticism is a handy side effect? Wearing silly hats is fun.
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veronica d said:
I dyed my hair purple.
Social hack.
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viviennemarks said:
I feel like Ozy would be able to sympathize with my old college problem– namely, wanting to bang the TAs like ALL THE TIME (one looked like David Tennant! He was a medievalist!). Yet another reason being above the age of majority now is GREAT.
Whenever I hear “my preferred gender is attracted to jerks” (are there bi Nice Guys of any gender? I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’ve never met one) what I want to say is:
“Your preferred gender is, like, millions of people. Now which do you think is more likely: that all umpty-million of THEM are into jerks, or that all one of YOU are attracted to jerks, and it’s not that everyone is passing you by, it’s that you don’t notice datable non-jerks around you? Because, speaking from a probability standpoint, I mean…”
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Matthew said:
you get amnesty about any relationship mistakes you make before the age of 18). The problem is when some people of any gender get stuck there.
There are plenty of really socially anxious and/or socially awkward people who will never have tried anything at all before age 18, which might be worth bearing in mind before adopting an arbitrary cutoff where you stop cutting people any slack.
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jeqofire said:
My dad straight-up told me not to get involved with girls until college. I don’t think he expected me to actually listen.
I would probably have stayed away from that sort of thing anyway, but I can’t help but feel like someone should have picked up on my taking his advice seriously right around the time they switched from warning me “friends will get you in trouble” to “Why don’t you talk to anyone?”
He also insisted I would have kids some day, as though this was inevitable. Not really encouragement to do so; it was simply a prediction. Someone needs to update his priors.
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Vadim Kosoy said:
Ozy, hello.
Let me start by saying I found many good points in your post and I like your writing in general.
However, there is one thing in this post I’m not entirely comfortably with, namely your approach to what you describe as “pedestalization”. You seem to claim pedestalization is a pure cultural construct whereas to me it seems in many cases a natural result of human emotions. When you fall in love with someone, often you see an idealized version of that person and as emotions run high you naturally want to please them and take care of them in every possible way.
In some ways, I definitely fitted the “nice guy” stereotype when I met my wife 11 years ago: a nerdy, shy guy more comfortable with quantum field theory than interactions with a romantic interest, often gloomy about the perceived lack of progress on finding one’s “soulmate”. I fell in love with her head over heels and did a lot of stuff that can be classified as “pedestalization”. Although our relationship had a rocky start, ultimately it was a success.
I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing to worship your romantic interest. I’m pretty sure my wife enjoyed the experience and in some sense she worshipped me as well and I have no complaints about that. I worshipped her for her sensitivity, passion and curiosity and she worshipped me for my intelligence, conscientiousness and ambition. As time passed, our feelings became less cataclysmic and our images of each other more realistic. Nevertheless, we keep being deeply in love with each other much because of the qualities we initially found attractive but also because of many things we discovered about each other over time. I probably stopped doing some of the “crazy” stuff I did in the beginning but I would still go to very great lengths for my wife’s benefit.
So, do I think “pedestilizing” is the Thing Women Want Everywhere? Definitely not. All people are different and different emotional dynamics work for different people. But I wouldn’t discard it as 100% a misguided cultural fantasy about how relationships should work but never do.
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liskantope said:
One of the most true statements I’ve read in a long time.
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nydwracu said:
This seems to assume that the evolutionary environment was anything like nice bourgeois society, which is almost certainly false.
Then again, it’s not “women naturally dig jerks because evolution” — it’s “women naturally dig conquering warrior types because evolution”. Which… ah, how do I put this? There’s evidence that there were a lot of gangbangs in the EEA. And you can look at that and the founding of Rome and the Yanomamö, and hear from some girls about the sorts of things they’re into, and there is one narrative that falls out of this, but I am not going to state it outright because it makes Howard Stern look like a Teletubby.
(Note that there have been selection pressures in another direction from that one, with the development of civilization and so on. But the dark shit remains.)
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corypheus said:
Since I experienced both, I can tell you that the four stages of nice guy could probably be modeled onto a hypothetical four stages of going from fundamentalist Christianity to atheism. Liberal Christian/agnostic/ambivalent atheist = stage 1 nice guy; asshole atheist = stage 4 nice guy. Maybe this could be mapped onto any model where someone loses faith in how they were told the world was supposed to operate. However literal minded they are or how attached they were to the previous worldview determines how intensely they feel that betrayal, and the intensity of that betrayal determines where they land on any hypothetical four stages.
Memories are a delicate thing, but I’m reasonably certain that around the time that my mother was teaching me that Christianity was the way the world worked, she also instilled in me that being “nice” was how you get girls to like you. It was probably part of the overall schema of “making sure a young boy grows into a productive member of society”. E.g.:
[7 year old me]: “Mommy! Mommy! There’s a girl I like in school, how do I get her to like me?”
Mom: “Well, little Johnny…” [sets the seeds for nice guy syndrome]
Asking subsequent adult women or female friends the same question never refuted anything that my mom said in that initial conversation when I was 7. So the worldview was firmly planted.
The first failure of this is not taking into account human bias. What do straight women know about getting a woman attracted to you? It would be like asking a music critic how to play piano; the critic knows nothing about playing piano — proper hand form, finger placement for better movement across the keys, music theory, what keys are what notes, etc. — his/her job is just judging whether the end product of the piano playing sounds good. If you want to learn how to play piano, you would learn from someone who is really good at playing piano. Even if I never become the best piano player in the world, the person who plays piano whom I’m learning piano from will always be more knowledgeable about piano playing than the critic.
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