Perspective

With thanks to Mairi and no-harassment-here.tumblr.com.

The article referenced is about why being a nice guy (lower case) is not enough.

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What article? What insult?

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/being-nice-guy-not-enough/

The insult is in the comic; it’s ‘Nice Guy’.

Noted. Also, article read; thanks. My own cynical view is that gender relations are difficult by nature. Culture and politics are indeed scandalous, but don’t take it personally, because Life itself is scandalous. Fortunately, so is Love.

Unless meant sarcastically, surely “nice guy” does not describe the man-boys responsible for the background of the last panel. Nice Guys ™ are passive-aggressive; the potty-mouthed thug-lite creepazoids responsible for the background are overt-aggressive. Which is worse?

Niceness, sincere or not, is not enough by itself. You need something else. Take for instance Obama. He’s a nice man, but he’s also an Ice Man.

That’s why people call them “Nice Guys™” – note the capital letters and the trademark – to differentiate them from the genuine nice guys.

Genuinely nice guys are just nice. They don’t stack their niceness on one side of a set of scales and their checklist of things they want from a female friend on the other side of the scales.

But sadly there’s a subsection of people on the internet who will start off complaints about how much women owe them with “I’m a nice guy…” and then say extremely not nice things about a woman who thinks that he’s her friend. It’s justified in their eyes, because the woman hasn’t held up her side of the bargain (a bargain which she doesn’t usually realise exists) and given him sex in return for niceness. They’re known ironically as Nice Guys/Nice Guys™ because that’s how they tend to identify themselves. They also have a bad habit of complaining about “friendzoning” – a mythical place in which a woman mistakenly thinks a man is her friend and treats him as…her friend…instead of realising that he’s a nice guy (or the case of someone who’s complaining about this, a Nice Guy™) and rewarding him with sex – and finishing their complaints with the revelation that now they’ve realised that “nice guys really do finish last” and “all women want bad boys”. Those guys? Really do switch from passive-aggressive to overt-aggressive at the flip of a coin.

They also don’t seem to understand that being ‘friendzoned’ is nowhere near as bad as finding out that someone you thought valued you as a human being just wanted to fuck you.