Noli Irritare Leones

There’s a guy who often comes up for criticism on feminist blogs called the Nice Guy™. The capitalization and trademark symbol are important here; the Nice Guy™ is not a regular old guy who is actually nice. Rather, he is a guy who, for whatever reason, strikes out with women, and who becomes resentfully convinced that the reason for his lack of romantic success is women’s perversity. Women, the Nice Guy™ will tell you at length, don’t choose nice guys. Whatever they may tell you, they actually actively avoid men who would treat them well. Instead, they rush for “alpha male” jerks, “Bad Boys” who will screw them over, break their hearts, and mistreat them.

It should come as no surprise that women disagree with the Nice Guy™’s diagnosis. In romance, be you male or female, gay or straight, the race is not always to the good and kind and morally deserving. It also helps to have a really cute butt, or breasts/chest, or legs, or an easy confidence in your approach, or skill on the dance floor. But by and large, women do not, any more than men, actively prefer to be treated badly.

At this point in the conversation, if we’re on a big name feminist blog, a few dissenting voices will appear in the comments. That’s all very well, a commenter may say, but you haven’t addressed how to actually change the Nice Guy™’s resentment. You haven’t addressed how to change the “fact” that women do, actually, go out of their way to pick men who mistreat them.

So, take a look at a case study, George Sodini, the man who shot up a fitness center in Pittsburgh, killed three women, and left behind a blog seething with resentment against all the 30 million women who, in his view, rejected him. It’s already been noted how this guy’s resentful take on why he is losing out with women resembles the classic Nice Guy™ narrative. Take, for example, the top listed quote from his diary, an entry fueled equally by bitter racism and misogyny, which Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses here.

Why do this?? To young girls? Just read below. I kept a running log that includes my thoughts and actions, after I saw this project was going to drag on.

November 5, 2008:
Planned to do this in the summer but figure to stick around to see the election outcome. This particular one got so much attention and I was just curious. Not like I give a flying fcuk who won, since this exit plan was already planned. Good luck to Obama! He will be successful. The liberal media LOVES him. Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama’s plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on. Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Long ago, many a older white male landowner had a young Negro wench girl for his desires. Bout’ time tables are turned on that shit. Besides, dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes! Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be bangin a bruthr real good. I saw it. “Not my little girl”, daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez. You do the math, there are enough young white so all the brothers can each have one for 3 or 6 months or so.

The racial resentment here would almost be comical if it didn’t bear such bitter fruit. What, you’re claiming that black men each get to sleep with a white woman for 3 or 6 months a piece? When we outnumber them maybe eight to one? Do you have any idea how little of our sexual attention your math assigns to black men, and how much you have left over for the white race? Guy, if you’re going to make black men the excuse for your own loser status, can’t you make them just a tiny bit more in demand than that?

It does, though, in its viciously racist way, fit the Nice Guy™ story to a T. The reason Sodini hadn’t had sex for nearly 20 years, in his own view, is that “hoez” prefer men who are less deserving than him.

It’s also its own rebuttal to the Nice Guy™ story. Google Sodini’s photo and you’ll see that, though he’s no George Clooney, he’s not ugly. His diary suggests he’s reasonably fit. He had a decent job as a system analyst, and claimed a net worth of $250,000. In terms of the most superficial characteristics, there was no real reason for him not to be able to get laid.

However, when you add in the fact that, by his own account, he had no male friends either, the fact that his neighbors describe him as a reclusive man who had quit talking to him, and especially the fact that he just killed three women, an explanation for his lonely status isn’t that hard to supply. Might it be, as Jezebel suggests, that

… women rejected him because he was the kind of guy who would one day shoot up a gym.

I mean, think about it, really. If we women really crave, above all else, guys who are nothing but trouble for us, shouldn’t John Hinckley have totally nailed Jodie Foster? Aren’t scary violent guys with guns exactly the kind of jerks that, according to the Nice Guy™ narrative, we should be falling over ourselves to sleep with? Or could it, just possible, be that the reason lonely murderers weren’t getting laid to begin with was that they already had that violent streak in them, and when women met them, they encountered things that made the hair on the back of their neck stand on end.

In fact, though we’ve all had the experience of rejecting guys who were genuinely nice enough, but not for us (the guy, say, who totally disagrees with you about whether he wants kids, or who’s the most amiable fundie you could ever meet, but you’re Unitarian, or who otherwise just isn’t on the same page as you regarding something on which you really need to be on the same page), we’ve also all rejected guys who made the hair on the back of our neck stand on end. The guy who carries a knife, and one of his first questions is whether you’re connected with any guy bigger than him, who could beat him up. The drunk who volunteers, right off the bat, that he’s going to beat up any guy who pays you any attention. The guy who tells you a long story about how God sent messages to him in traffic lights to go and find his ex-girl friend, and then says, by the way, you look a lot like her, and you look rather romantic, right now, against that post. Oh, we may sometimes fall for the smooth talking guy with great pecs who will cheat on us in the end (just as men fall for the female equivalent), but we also have a basic sense of self-preservation that, when we listen to our gut, leads us to avoid the most scary dangerous men who want to go to bed with us.

And don’t you ever let anyone talk you out of that gift of fear.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 6:39 am and is filed under Feminism, News and Commentary, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.