One reason so-called Nice Guys ™ seem so creepy to so many people is that it’s easy to see the rage and the bitterness and the weird sort of self-hating entitlement that is so often lurking underneath – and sometimes not that far underneath – the “nice guy” exterior.
Consider the gutwrenching case of Jill Meagher, an Irish woman who was raped and murdered in a suburb of Melbourne Australia last September by a man who accosted her on the street as she was walking home from a bar. A man who later told police that he had only approached her in the first place because he was “trying to be nice.”
In a lengthy interview with police, in which he confessed to raping and strangling Meagher, Adrian Ernest Bayley explained that he had only approached Meagher because she “looked distraught” and he thought he could “help.” And he only became angry at her when she rebuffed his kind offers.
“It wasn’t really my intention to hurt her, you know that?” he told police.
I spoke to her, you know and said, look, I’ll just – I’ll – I’ll help you, you know. … She flipped me off and that made me angry, because I was trying to do a nice thing. You know that? …
I was just – I was trying to be nice and – she kept going from being nice to nasty, to nice, to – you know what I mean?
Earlier in the evening, Bayley had reportedly argued with his girlfriend about his “jealousy and possessiveness issues.” The girlfriend returned home, where she reportedly told her landlady that she was “hiding from Adrian.”
The newspaper The Australian paints a picture of a man with rage issues and very little self-awareness.
Mr Bayley was working for a drainage company until his arrest six days after Meagher went missing. The workmate he had been drinking with that night told police Mr Bayley would become “angry and aggressive” after fighting with his girlfriend.
“He had a very short fuse and didn’t like to be told he was in the wrong,” he said. “In the times that I worked with Adrian, he was often talking about women. He would say he couldn’t understand how men could hurt women or be abusive towards women.”
None of this is to say that all Nice Guys ™ are harboring killers inside of them, or anything even remotely like that. But those who most loudly proclaim their “niceness” often turn out to be pretty awful, in part because they think that women owe them something for being so insistently “nice.”
Same here, Yoyo. I get really sick of hearing about poooorrrr Matthew Newton.
(For those lucky people who don’t know this guy, he’s an actor, but known more for being the son of Bert and Patti Newton, who’ve been on Australian television since it started in the 50s and are very popular.)
Hrovitnir – your new kitty is so squeeeee! with the little paws!
Jeff: You have zero evidence he was mentally ill, except that he did a bunch of things which SOME mentally ill people have done and which a whole LOT of neurotypical people do every day. On top of which, we had already discussed at length how similar what he did and how he acted is to accepted, promoted straight cis male behaviour. That means that you read this comment thread, read all the women talking about how prevalent this behaviour is and how often they have to put up with it, and dismissed us out-of-hand as either liars or mentally ill ourselves, just so you wouldn’t have to examine the culture that gives you free rein to treat women as prey.
In short? Go fuck yourself.
@ Sid- Every time I hear someone go on about how we MUST consider the mental health explanation, all I hear is “LALALA OUR CULTURE ISN’T FUCKED UP LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU.” It’s fucking exhausting.
@Jeff: If he actually had an uncontrollable sexual urge, why the heck wasn’t he just masturbating? Or why did he wait until he was alone with these women if it was so dang uncontrollable?
It’s like (sorry, can’t remember who)* mentioned that he never did this to anyone bigger than him. It’s not lack of control. And I’m having a hard time believing it’s mental illness, too.
*I actually like, tried to control F key words in the previous pages to see who it was, so maybe it was on another thread?
Eerily enough, I just came here after reading some of the monster thread that followed Phil Plait’s blog entry on Elevatorgate. Folks, this is why men who don’t respect women’s boundaries are worrisome. He might just be an insensitive clod, or he might be someone like Bayley.
@kim
That parrot thing sounds nice. Also kind of makes you want to walk up to those guys who say men can’t control themselves and yell ‘but even people who literally can’t control themselves find ways!!!!!!’ um, rant? 😉
@cloudiah and shiraz
sorry you guys had to deal with your stalkers 🙁
@wally wick
um….bwuh?
Luckily I missed jeff mensrights whole comment here…so I’ll consider that a win atm. Jeff, stop trying to blame creepy men on people with mental illnesses.
go pet a cactus, jeff.
oh joy. didn’t know that. *barfs*
@augochlorella
Sorry about your college 🙁
Jeff:
There is clearly so much you don’t understand. Keep fucking that chicken.
Wally smells familiar.
Ever so many hugs for everyone who’s dealing or has had to deal with tough times.
Hugs for the anonymous lurker who shared her story!
Hugs for cloudiah and everyone else whose asshole stalkers think Facebook’s a clean slate!
*passes babies around*
*sigh* The problem with this is that EVERYONE looks at the “other side”, whenever something like this happens people rush to write people like this off as “lone crazies” because no one wants to accept that there is a bigger societal problem of misogyny and rape culture. We’ve looked at the other side. We found it wanting.
Serial rapist with extensive criminal history =/= mentally ill. Mentally ill =/= serial rapist with extensive criminal history.
It hasn’t been productive to write off men like this as “lone crazies”. Drawing connections between his behaviors and larger societal issues makes perfect sense if you actually give a shit about preventing future assholes like this from doing and/or getting away with shit like this. It makes sense to want to write people like him as “just crazy” if you either do not want to accept that we live in a society with some deeply held, violent hatred of women or do not want to actually do anything about fixing that problem, or both.
Of course you don’t, Jeff. Because then, Jeff, you might need to look in your mirror, Jeff, and realize, Jeff, that you are a complete waste of oxygen, water and food, Jeff.
(I figure if he’s gonna give us softballs like that, I can at least oblige Jeff’s obvious need for attention.)
Fuuuuuuuuuck.
To my reading that means rape without force applied just… slips through the cracks. If you go quiet and just stop resisting to get it over with… apparently that’s not counted as an offence.
This is fucked up.
Because I thought it might help with morale during the battle, I brought provisions. Everyone should have one of these to hold onto. They fit easily in the hand and can’t help but lift the spirits!
@M Dubz – exactly. It’s the monster excuse all over again.
This spider just came sailing in over my desk and botched the landing, like an ill-trained parachutist or something, and rolled over a couple of times. Now it’s just lying there in a jumble.
Its leg span is barely half an inch. Compared to arachnids our distinguished Oz members have discussed, it’s a titchy little thing.
@MorkaisChosen Actually, it’s worse than that; the fiction of some distinction for “forcible” rape is just another way of trying to define rape out of existence. It means that if you are not horribly physically damaged (psychological damage is just “feelings” after all), it could not have been rape because you didn’t put up a fight (like any “good” woman would do while protecting her chastity, is the unspoken subtext). So yes, if you decided to stop resisting in order to prevent being severely injured or killed that can and is used as exculpatory “evidence” for the predator.
I went back and checked my college’s statistics on non-forcible rapes and we apparently haven’t had any at all as far back as the records I could dig up go (2006). I also checked out the statistics of the two other large colleges we have nearby, and it looks like the rape definitions are standardized by the Cleary act, so I guess I can’t blame my college for that (though I can still be mad about the forcible/non-forcible distinction existing at all).
Anyway, believe it or not, none of the nearby colleges ever had a year on record where zero rapes were reported, much less seven in a row. I guess my college is just a magic place where rapes don’t happen.
I’ve started using “decent” in place of “nice” to describe people, especially guys, because of this phenomenon.
Human decency is finding a woman drunk and afraid at night and ensuring she gets somewhere safe without harming her, and without scaring her even more, even if she gets hostile or screams at your or whatever. What this scumbag did was not decent, nor nice.
A decent man does not offer a well-intended compliment to a stranger at a bus stop and then start screaming at her and calling her foul names for not responding exactly as he wanted.
A decent man does not proclaim all women bitches because the last woman he wanted to sleep with rejected him.
Human decency is basic, it doesn’t need to advertise itself, and it is concerned with the well-being of others, not proving to yourself what an awesome specimen of carbon-based life you are and stroking your own ego with that evidence to shield you from the reality of your sad, miserable, lonely existence.
And I’m beyond tired of the “men can’t help it” bullshit. If men really couldn’t control their anger or stop themselves from assaulting women who provoke arousal, the beach on a warm summer afternoon would be the most dangerous place for a woman on earth.
TFT
Amazing how many “men can’t help it” only “can’t help it” when they come across someone vulnerable and alone.
I should also add that although they appear to be doing better than my college in terms of following through on reports of rape, I’m pretty sure my nearby colleges are still severely suppressing these reports.
(I’m looking at you, giant nearby University. 15,000 students and only one reported case of rape last year? I think not.)
Sorry for all the posts, but I just noticed how appropriate my suspicious cat avatar is for the college rape posts.
That’s right, college. Even my cat is suspicious of this crap.
@gillian
cutest! duckie! ever!
gaaah O_o I mean, I feel like you’re right about them, I just… no words for those kind of people.
*Squees at babies*
@drst
I find myself using decent more for the same reasons.
@augochlorella
College rape reporting always seem to be a mess of *facepalm* and *headdesk*, doesn’t it? I am sorry you are at one (of the many) who lie/fudge the truth.
@augochlorella Suspicious cat is suspicious, for very good reason.
The University I work for actually does a lot of training about rape and sexual assault, both for their security and police force, and for students. You know, those training programs that MRAs are so opposed to…
The interesting thing is that in the short run, that hurt them. People were more willing to report being raped, which then made the campus look more safe than the average University. But they stuck with it, and a few years ago they won an award from a large non-profit that focuses on campus security for providing an environment in which people felt safe reporting on sexual assaults of any kind. (But they do still have to use those fucked up categories, which are a required part of “Clery Reports” under federal law.)