For a while now, I've been very interested in the phenomenon of the Nice Guy. No doubt part of the reason is that I'm a something of a recovering Nice Guy myself.
To wit: in high school, I wrote a song called "The Chauvinist." The song was inspired by a guy I knew at the time who projected a very masculine leftist/anti-authoritarian image. Inspired by an incident in which this guy hooked up with a friend of mine whom I had developed a Massive Teen Crush on, I penned the song as a bit of revenge (though I doubt he ever realized it was about him). At the time, I thought he was being unethical and exploitative of my friend, since he did not frame his desires in any kind of romantic narrative. Of course, looking back now, it's all too easy for me to pick apart the intensely problematic aspects of my thinking and the song that it produced: the idea that someone can be "stolen" away, the fetishization of a kind of chivalric romantic love, and so forth. It took me a long time to realize that these sentiments were not tremendously helpful to anyone (and were indeed quite damaging), but I'm sure that at the time I felt greatly superior to the swaggering target of my ire.
However, I think there was a tiny seed of protofeminist thought present in the song as well, in that it involved attacking the kinds of dominant attitudes towards women that I saw around me at the time. And that's one thing that's interesting to me about the Nice Guy train of thought: it starts with a recognition of some issues of gender inequality, then comes to vastly different (and intensely problematic) conclusions than feminist analyses do. For example, it seems to get stuck at a stage of blaming individual women and men (but mainly women) for perpetuating the state of gender relations, rather than moving on to a consideration of the bigger systems of oppression at play.
I wonder if this incipient sense that something is wrong with gender relations can somehow be nursed into a recognition of the existence of systematic sexism. Unfortunately, insofar as the Nice Guy complex is found amongst geeks, I think that any such effort is going to be met with strong resistance due to the tendency of some straight white geek men to equate their experiences of subordination (especially in high school environments) with the experiences of socially marginalized groups. This leads, in my experience, to a resistance to identity politics. Getting people past an individualized approach to sexism is hard enough most of the time -- it's that much harder when the people in question believe that they, too, have been persecuted (as "beta males") and thus know just as much about the topic as women. Let me be clear: geek men often do suffer by virtue of failing to live up to hegemonic masculinity. However, they are nonetheless still men with all of the privilege this entails, even if their patriarchal dividend is slightly smaller than that of some other men.
I started off this post with the admission that I'm a recovering Nice Guy. I say "recovering" because it seems like those same thought processes that inspire Nice Guy-ism can creep back in the most insidious ways. For example, whenever I try to distance myself from problematic expressions of desire for women on the part of men, I am effectively saying: "I am different from those men. I am not like them. We are fundamentally different and their desires are morally worse than mine." I don't believe that this is a particularly productive way of thinking, but it's easy to fall into. I'm all too familiar with it, because these kinds of categorical distinctions between Good and Bad people are at the core of Nice Guy thought.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
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I've been thinking about this for a while, but hadn't thought about how it starts off from a place of "gender relations are messed up" before. I had mostly attributed it to the feeling of loneliness and disconnection and a lack of socially-appropriate masculine outlets. It means that some men come to believe that the only thing that can fill the void in their life is a woman (because society tells them that is true and they don't have evidence to the contrary. Women are told the same thing about children, which can lead to similarly unfortunate consequences.) A friendship with a man that could mitigate the loneliness would run up against all the homophobia of society, and any friendship with a woman is assumed to be sexual or headed towards sex, which makes it nearly impossible to just connect with any human.
ReplyDeleteActually, as a genderqueer transmasculine gamer, I think this is why I have so many close straight male friends. I am enough not-man they can be vulnerable, but enough not-woman they don't have to worry about relating to someone who's not like them and nothing is ever going to turn sexual (since we're both straight guys). It's a role I've played, well, pretty much my whole life, and is part of the masculine privilege that I picked up super-easily.
My approach to talking to still-Nice Guys is currently, "what is it you actually want? What leads you to believe a woman will provide that? What would it be like to have a woman want you for that reason? It's pretty high expectations; how would you feel if you started dating and became her entire world?"
Nice Guys seem to believe that they are Good and the rest of the world is Bad, but it seems to be rooted in the fear that if they don't blame the rest of the world their loneliness is all their fault. If that individual women didn't reject them because she's Bad, it would have to be because they are Bad. So, theoretically, by offering other explanations that still say "you aren't lonely because you are Bad; you are lonely because these dynamics keep people in our society from living fulfilled lives," should work just as well. Possibly better, because it can lead them to find those communities where connection isn't based on sex (personally I've found it in occasional, special geeky spaces. Usually they lasts until the first un-recovery Nice Guy shows up and ruins it for everyone.) Whereas just thinking the rest of the world is Bad doesn't lead to anything but more frustration, pain and alienation.
There's been a lot of discussion about this issue over on Clarisse Thorn's blog, but I thought I'd chime in as a long-time lurker.
ReplyDeleteI agree with parts of what you've said. Namely, I can relate to your high school experience. Those "evil manly men" expressing their sexual interest to women directly, "coercing" them into sex and risking making women uncomfortable. This is indeed a problematic thought-process. And I also struggle with it seeping back into my head.
But I think at the heart of it is a view that male sexuality is toxic and predatory unless it's kept on a leash and "controlled".
I think one of the things I struggle most with is to get myself to view my sexuality as a giving thing. I think women have little difficulty with this. Women are seen as giving sex, men are seen as taking it. And I think until that basic view is resolved (i.e. shift to "we all share sex") it will be difficult to resolve the Nice Guy(tm) problem. You basically have a bunch of guys feeling that if you don't "control" yourself, you're hurting women. As if women are delicate flowers and expressing sexual interest will make them wilt if the interest isn't mutual.
But what's tricky about this is that it is tantalizingly similar to the discussion that goes on in some feminist circles. It is of course reasonable and understandable that feminism focuses on the wrong and the bad (including the bad things some men do), because that's what we need to fix. But it also means that it's very difficult to right our view of our own sexuality: being constantly bombarded by images of men harming women (often sexually, or with sexual overtones) makes it very difficult to escape a gut-level feeling that male sexuality is bad.
So I would suggest that not only is the Nice Guy(tm) thought process a seed of feminism, but also that a lot of feminist discourse is actually re-enforcing of that thought process. Which is why men like you and myself, perhaps, who regularly read feminist blogs have so much difficulty with these thought processes seeping back into our psyche.
And I must emphasize, this is not to criticize feminism. Of course they focus on the negative. That's what feminism is for: for tackling what's wrong. Blaming feminism is like blaming the news for being too negative. It's silly.
But I do think this side effect is difficult to escape. And I've been thinking that I ought to balance out my feminist reading with more positive portrayals of male sexuality and more strong "can take care of herself" portrayals of female sexuality if I am ever to truly recover from this.
@Cessen:
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree that the idea of men's sexuality as essentially destructive is involved here too. And certainly, this idea is at the heart of SOME feminist thought -- I'm thinking writers like Dworkin. However, it's really a much older idea that's often found in social conservative thought.
I do think that there is a difference between the kind of thought that sees men's sexuality as essentially coercive across all times and places (i.e. transhistorical fact) and that which points out that in contemporary mainstream North American society (and in many others) men are encouraged to adopt a predatory sexuality, but recognizes that other configurations are possible. There are feminist traditions and writers in both camps, but the latter seems much more useful to me.
Given this distinction, I'd like to challenge the idea that exposure to feminism somehow reinforces the notion that men's sexuality is inherently bad or wrong. It's the culture that's presenting these images and making associations between violence and sexiness -- but since most of us have lived in a rape culture all our lives, it seems like business as usual. Feminism highlights these problematic connections, but it's not their source -- patriarchy is. By pointing out these connections, feminism shows that men can be different -- and indeed, better -- than the patriarchy expects them to be. Thus, I would argue that the distinction you bring up at the end of your comment is a false one.
(P.S. This is a feminist blog!)
@Blake:
ReplyDeleteThanks! I think you've identified a lot of key issues here that I totally missed in the post. Perhaps the reason the Nice Guy ideology approaches a kind of feminism but usually fails to make the leap is because it starts from a problematic place. That is, it begins with the issues you describe (the disconnection, the belief that a girlfriend will lead to perfect happiness/completeness, etc.) which leads to a consideration of the state of gender relations with the goal of providing an answer for the question of "why can't I get a woman?" If this is your starting question, then I suppose it's hardly surprising if one's theory of gender relations doesn't get past a stage of blaming women for wanting "bad" men -- that's already a good enough answer.
I think the geeky ideal of puzzle-solving and logical thinking also plays a role here. This becomes problematic when applied to social situations, with the result of (and I'm stealing this phrase from someone else) some geek men discussing women as if they were "Rubik's Cubes that morph into fleshlights when solved."
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI did not mean to suggest that this is only a symptom of feminism. Certainly it is first and foremost a symptom of our larger culture. I did not grow up to view my sexuality as toxic purely due to feminism. But that sensation did worsen quite substantially when I started reading feminist blogs.
But I think you misunderstood my point a bit. The abstract theoretical discussions in modern feminism absolutely take the stance you have outlined. I wasn't intending to say otherwise.
But the overwhelming majority of concrete, real-life stories that are covered and talked about are of men doing bad things. And, humans being the creatures of narrative that we are, those stories tend to influence us in ways that abstract discussion does not.
I will again reference the news as an analogy. As a population, people are far more comfortable getting into cars than they are getting into planes. And this is true even when the statistics are revealed showing that the opposite reaction is far and beyond more appropriate. And if I recall correctly from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of psychology, this is due to humans generally latching much more strongly onto narrative than to abstract facts or theory. Emotionally, in any case.
If you repeatedly tell a person lots of stories about house cats mauling people, this is likely to affect their perception of cats. And this is true even if every time you tell a nasty cat story, you finish it off with "but don't worry, most cats aren't like that."
Of course this doesn't mean that the news should cover more stories about safe and successful flights that had zero problems. That's not their job. And likewise feminism has no analogous responsibility.
But the effect remains. And therefore I suspect that, due to this, feminism is doing at least as much to reinforce these negative cultural tropes about men as it is to dispel them. But, again, men are not feminism's responsibility.
In any case, feminist writing at least has this effect on me (and demonstrably so), and thus I desire to seek out positive narrative portrayals of male sexuality to balance it out. Which are, unfortunately, few and far between in our culture.