So, “Nice Guys” are causing a stir on the Internet again, thanks largely to a new(ish) Tumblr blog called “Nice Guys” of Ok Cupid, which posts selected highlights from the OKCupid profiles of self-proclaimed “nice guys” who make it very clear, in their profiles and in their answers to OKCupid’s “match” questions, that they are in fact anything but nice.
Some of them are actual or potential date rapists, convinced that women that they’re “nice” to owe them sex. Others are bitter from too many rejections, and launch long tirades in their profiles about how women are bitches and whores. Still others are clueless on a more fundamental level, declaring that women have “an obligation to shave their legs” and otherwise prettify themselves for men while noting that they themselves only shower or brush their teeth occasionally.
It’s not clear how any of this is supposed to convince the women of OKCupid that these angry, ranting, hapless-yet-entitled “nice guys” are indeed as “nice” as advertised, much less convince any rational human being to have sex with them.
The site is a goldmine of unintentional self-revelation — as is a similar site with the name of, er, OKCupid Goldmine — and I’ve spent hours looking through the pictures on both sites and discussing them with friends. The only reason I haven’t linked to it in the past is that neither of them blur out the faces of the people they feature, which seems to me a pretty major invasion of privacy. (As you no doubt have noticed, I’ve taken the liberty of somewhat creeepily disguising the faces of the guys in the pics I’m posting here.) But “Nice Guys of OKCupid has been pretty widely discussed, linked to by Jezebel (1, 2) and The Guardian and even the Men’s Rights subreddit, to mention merely a few examples; Ok Cupid Goldmine is also provoking discussions. Posts on both sites regularly get dozens if not hundreds of comments and reblogs on Tumblr. The cat’s already out of the bag.
Here are a couple more of these “Nice Guys” with their faces all spiral-ized:
I used to hang out with a lot of people who could broadly be considered (less-than-stereotypically-shitty) “geeks”, and it seems to be a sort of geek machismo. Lots of quoting of Stephen Fry bits on choosing to be offended, which you don’t do, unlike women/minorites/whatever, because you’re that much more logical. Data from Star Trek is cool but not a fantastic role model, dudes… faux-sociopathy/libertarianism seems to come with this.
@CassandraSays
I have a friend who is quite the Star Wars fan but gets that sort of crap in her R2-D2 swimsuit because she’s non-white and conventionally hot. It’s ridiculous – I’m white and beardy and slightly awkward and no-one would doubt me at all if I were to say I liked Star Wars and sociology, but it attracts a great amount of disbelief when she says it.
I say less-than-stereotypically shitty more as an averages thing – most of the geeks I used to hang out with in high school were stand-up dudes and very clever, but some were worse than the worst neckbeard stereotypes. One was tried as an adult at 16 for an assault-rape and thrown into gaol, though :
Also because I was never really enough into videogames or anything enough to qualify as a geek. Dork or weirdo, perhaps, but never geek.
That’s why I find the conversation so frustrating. I’m into a lot of geek stuff like fantasy and sci-fi, I even played D&D for a while in my tweener/teen years, but dorky or awkward? Nope.
If I tell people that I love, say, punk, they go “oh, OK”. If I tell them that I love science fiction they give me a WTF look (non-geek) or immediately assume that I’m lying (stereotypical geek). It’s weird.
The whole idea of identifying who you are as a person via what you’re into has always seemed a bit odd to me though. I do it too sometimes, usually as a lazy verbal shortcut (“I’m a goth” is more succinct than “I wear a lot of black and red and purple and love horror and dark fairy tales and classic Goth bands like Bauhaus, and I used to have my hair dyed wine red, then dark purple, and I own way too much silver jewelry but won’t wear gold, and if there’s a movie about vampires or werewolves that isn’t total crap, I’m there”). But to choose just one of those verbal shortcuts and go “yep, that’s me, that totally tells you who I am as a person” seems almost guaranteed to lead to all kinds of the sort of obnoxious behavior that you see from some of the people commenting on that article (and that you saw in, say, the responses to Sarkesian).
Also random but I found a new word in the comments on another article.
“povertise”
Am I just being a snob or is that not actually a word?
Do they mean impoverished?
They seem to mean “make someone poor”.
I’m quite ready to believe it’s a case of internalising the message. I’m one of them, it took me at least until I was 24 to break out of the conviction that I was doomed to never have attention from a woman I thought of as physically attractive. The later years of school and a few years after that convinced me that popular, attractive women ignored me and my ilk. I’m fortunate in that although I went as far as the butthurt nice guy “why don’t they like meeee can’t they see that I’m awesome” line of thought, I never fell into the trap of thinking it was because of shallow materialism or the evolutionary pop psych shit.
Geekery has a number of features which make it exacerbate the problem of misogyny. It’s viewed as ‘for losers’ (or certainly was when I was a kid) which reinforces the mindset of geeky kids that they’re socially inept. It encourages the geeky kids to stay there and not interact outside of their circle meaning that their social skills stagnate. It’s viewed as inherently male losers, meaning that girls/women feel condemned by society in general for showing an interest, and this is accepted by those already in the group so women remain ‘other’ for them even if a woman wants to join in.
I expect that many of the geeks with poor attitudes towards women would have had them without being part of geek culture, but I think the way geek culture has been set up means that it heavily encourages the attitude. Without this I think that at least some of the misogynists would actually be reasonable, and others would be less rabid.
i wonder if some of the guys who react most violently to, say, conversations about possibly decreasing the obvious sexualization of women in video games feel as if ogling boobs in games is the only form of sexuality that they have, and that’s why they find the idea of it being taken away so upsetting. Same with comics, anime, and so on. Like, artificial women are all we have to interact with, how dare you try to take that from us!
Or, to put it more clearly – if the subculture didn’t spend so much time convincing its members that their geekery means that they’re destined to be scorned by real-life women then maybe they wouldn’t feel like they needed the pixellated kind so much.
In which case I can see how it must be a bit of a shock to be informed that it’s their attachment to the pixellated boobs and everything associated with them that’s likely to make many women scorn them, rather then their love of blowing the heads of imaginary enemies off with really big imaginary guns.
Late to the party but this post makes me want to tell all my male friends how awesome they are for being nice to me and not expecting sex.
Speaking of guns, has anyone else noticed that the niceguysofokc blog got nuked already? What’s with that?
Holy crap, it’s true. What happened? The “nice guys” of the world united to shut the whole thing down?
Actually, now that I think about it, it was probably taken down for privacy reasons. They’ll probably have to switch the to creepy spiral of bitterness that David used.
RE: geekery, I’m a geek. My friends are geeks, my husband is a geek and our kids kinda are too. Nobody that I know would freak out about “fake geek girls” because they’d be too busy admiring the skill it takes to make the costume. I know a few men who haven’t dated since high school and it makes them sad once in a while but they don’t hate women for it but just live their lives. They’re actual nice guys, not “nice guys”.
I did once have a “nice guy” friend. We spent a lot of time together because he lived nearby (in a rural sense), then I broke up with my boyfriend, he tried to touch my boobs, friendship over.
Cassandra: I don’t think “povertize” is a word in this reality.
Are you going to see “Mama?” The trailers look super-creepy.
@ hellkell
Probably. I loved Pan’s Labyrinth.
On “povertize”, I really wish that people would just accept that not all words need to be used as verbs.
Wisdom of Calvin: Verbing weirds words
I just watched the trailer for Mama I think I may see it.
I might wait for it to come out in DVD though.
Some scary movies are best watched with someone to hold your hand and cuddle with.
I just can’t do scary movies. My dreams get infected by them.
Anyone who recognises Calvin is wisdom is a star in my book. lumi, you rock!
I want to see Mama. I likd the short film, but I felt cheated by Guillermo’s last horror production (Don’t be afraid of the dark). It wasn’t scary at all, just boring and occasionally comical.
I’m getting tired of ghost films in general. It’s just a bunch of people hearing noises and then walking slowly through hallways. ugh…
Also! Let’s say that there are some men out there who can’t figure out what that question is designed to do, which is to get at the issue of whether or not they think that all women are required to conform to the physical preferences of some men. Guess what? Any man who can’t figure that out fails my “is this person worth dating” test on the grounds of sorry but anyone who can’t figure that out is not smart enough or aware enough about gender issues to be a good match for me. And I think that may be the case for most of the women who are paying attention to how men answer that question.
WHAT CASSANDRASAYS SAYS.
For me, there’s no situation in which “yes” as the answer to “are women obligated to shave their legs?” equals my having found a compatible dating partner, thusly:
1. If “yes, all women are obligated to shave to please any other party under any circumstances,” then no, I’m not dating you because I believe they are *my* legs and *I* am the sole arbiter of what grooming they receive.
2. If “yes, any woman I would date needs to shave, even though shaving is not a universal obligation of all women,” then no, I’m not dating you because I believe they are *my* legs and *I* am the sole arbiter of what grooming they receive, with the power to choose whether or not to shave them at any given time or period of time that is not dependent on your preferences (and whether or not I factor in your preferences is also *my choice*).
3. If “yes, it is true that our society in general pressures women to shave their legs as part of an overall obligation to perform a specific sort of femininity, [insert personal opinion about shaved legs here],” then no, I’m not dating you because even if that statement is realistically true, I prefer a normative outlook.
These men should try shaving THEIR legs every day. They’d probably change their minds real fast.
I don’t know. They would probably make up excuses for why it is different. Men have more hair so it isn’t the same that kind of bs.
Naïf: I enjoy the manipulation I get to do around here.
So you aren’t here in good faith. If you get banned I won’t care. You have made any ban/moderation more than acceptable, into reasonable, and arguably to be preferred.