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.”
@cloudiah: I think you must mean that more rape reports made the campus look less safe, but you typed more safe.
So … yeah. Thought I’d point that out.
*awkward silence*
Er. How’s Pharaoh treating you?
Amazing how many “men can’t help it” only “can’t help it” when they come across someone vulnerable and alone.
It’s weird, I’ve never seen a female black belt raped in the middle of Tae Kwon Do class. I guess guys can “help it” when the alternative is getting their tracheas caved in?
@Falconer, Every once in a while (read: “Very frequently”) my brain decides it’s more fun to write the opposite of what I intend to say. It’s just helpful like that. 😀
I have not had much time to play Pharaoh recently, but I’ve saved your helpful tips for when I get back to it.
Tell your brain to behave or you’ll poke it with a Q-tip!
Hey, it works for Homer.
@ Cloudiah What your college did sounds wonderful, and I’m glad they were rewarded for it. All colleges should have that sort of training program.
The problem is with the names:
It looks like “non-forcible” is “these people had consensual sex and shouldn’t have” whereas “forcible” covers situations of non-consent.
Wally, fuck off.
WallyWick needs the banhammer – no sign of good faith at all.
Holy fuck, Wally. *speechless, recommends others NOT click that link*
Wally, next time you get the desire to post a picture of a mutilated zombie baby (what it looked like to me) for god sake put a warning on it.
How bad is it? Should we summon THE FUTRELLE to delete it? (Not clicking, not clicking.)
I didn’t think it was terribly bad, but I’m not squicked out by most zombie type stuff, so that’s just my opinion. :/ I’d say ask him to delete it anyway, since there isn’t any warning on it :/ or add a warning. idk.
cloudiah: it’s not as bad as the time Zarat posted a pic, but it’s in really bad taste, considering.
I emailed his big red head above so he can make the call.
“How bad is it? Should we summon THE FUTRELLE to delete it? (Not clicking, not clicking.)”
Please, or at least add some sort of warning so people know it isn’t the SQUEE babies Falconer’s got. Fuck, Falconer offers his newborns as Brian bleach, AssWally posts that. That shit’s fractally wrong.
I smell sock.
Wally’s pic was a sort of zombie baby doll. So not really comparable to the shit Zarat posted. I removed it anyway.
Wally, this really isn’t the best thread for jokes like that. Rein it in a bit or you’re going on moderation.
“go pet a cactus, jeff. ”
I <3 that.
I haven’t commented here before, but I’ve been reading here for some time.
I encountered the Reddit MRA culture at my university, and I couldn’t be more disgusted by the way in which these particular individuals continue to talk about how they are THE underclass (which is especially laughable, given we live in Australia and the indigenous people are literally being subject to cultural genocide and are vastly overrepresented in prisons and in communities riddled with poverty – the Northern Territory Intervention is a good place to start, if you want to learn more about it) and women are the over-privileged mastermind controllers of the universe. This, while simultaneously engaging in the misogynist abuse they deny exists within our society. It’s stomach churning.
I also live not far from where this poor young woman was raped and murdered and followed the story since it appeared in the papers; walked the same streets at the same hours, frequented the same bars – to say it was a shock to the community is a gross understatement. Unsurprisingly though, some of the scum mentioned above did blame her for her murder as the investigation was underway (“she probably let him lavish her with attention with no intention of following through”).
For those who can stomach it, here’s an article that explains what we know about the night she disappeared thus far, including the footage from CCTV that tracked her final moments: http://www.news.com.au/national-news/victoria/jill-meaghers-final-moments-on-a-fateful-path/story-fndo4cq1-1226598588787
It’s pretty evident that this man, if nothing else, was behaving like an ordinary “Aussie bloke” the night he raped and killed Jill. It also makes it quite clear how randomly he selected his victim – it was within all of 8 minutes of having encountered her. :/
@Falconer and Cloudiah…Pharoah? So it’s you two I have to blame for me downloading the game whenever it was last mentioned. And now I’m hooked. Even though it is essentially quite repetitious. Thinis was bloody hard, I kept getting wiped out by the Egyptian army.
There’s much wrong here, I might suggest some reading to you.
In that case the patient could volitionally control his behavior and therefore was convicted. But nobody would claim that the brain chagnes resulting in Kluver-Bucy didn’t play a causal role.
Simplistic models of self-control and responsibility (criminal or otherwise) don’t help anyone, they are as useful as suggesting “drug addicts just need to stop taking drugs”.
@the person who asked “why didn’t he just masturbate?”: read any book regarding criminal psychology of sex offenders. A lot (not saying anything about Bayley here) simply don’t return to a calmer state, free of fantasy, desire by masturbation.
Strictly speaking that’s wrong. Statuatory rape is also non-forcible: no consent (victim is too young to give consent) but without force or threats.
*sigh*
This reminds me of something that happened recently in my city.
Guy who has been caught multiple times peeping in on women and who was “discharged from the military” after allegations of rape were filed but never prosecuted and who was caught peeping in Oregon and then pulled out a gun and almost shot the boyfriend of the girl he was looking in on when he got chased from their backyard…comes to my town and gets drunk one night and BREAKS INTO HIS FEMALE COWORKER’S APARTMENT somehow and apparently climbs into bed with her without her noticing.
Of course, because she is probably too afraid to mention the climbing into bed part (especially since our society treats rape and almost-rape victims with a huge degree of hostility), he only goes to jail for being drunk and disorderly and is released that night.
Fast forward the next day, two detectives come to his apartment to hear his side of the story. The guy guns them down without even listening to them and goes on a shooting rampage (luckily only injuring a couple people) before he is executed by FBI and SWAT.
These are the first two officers killed in my city since the city government STARTED.
This guy came from a background of “almost” getting caught before he escalated. Things like the peeping, the rapes that were never actually prosecuted, the gun charges being knocked down to misdemeanors. He scared the shit out of his probation officer so badly that he did two years in prison because he didn’t want to have to deal “with that bitch.”
There are SO many of these angry, entitled, sexually violent men out there. The only reason there aren’t more women is because we don’t socialize our girls to be this way, or we’d see more of it there too.
Add to this our shitty economy, lack of meaningful employment and a society that consistently minimizes shitty behavior as “boys will be boys” until it finally escalates to tragic levels, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Nanasha – that’s so horrible.
But it’s good to see you posting again!
hey Nanasha, it’s been a while. How you been?
Has there been any suggestion that Bayley has had brain damage?(re Kluver-Bucy).
Does the analogy between a rapist and a drug addict hold up?
A drug addict is chemically dependent on the drug, otherwise withdrawal symptoms occur. Are rapists chemically dependent on sex? If they are, then masturbation should suffice. If they are not, what is the addiction that drives them? It seems to me, therefore, that rape is about power and control, fear and anger. So what then is the solution? We treat addicts with chemical therapy for their addiction, underpinned by emotional therapy to teach them new strategies to cope when they are at risk of relapse. We also incarcerate them when they breach other laws, particularly in regard to property.
We still ask that drug addicts be responsible for their behaviour and part of the process is asking them to acknowledge and take responsibility for the damage they have caused in the course of their addiction
However, there is a very straightforward correlation between an addict and their drug of choice and assuming there is no harm to others in the acquisition of it, they are using a drug…not a person…to satisfy their addiction.
Models of self control are posited as a wide response to the notion that men have no self control when it comes to sex. If we teach men from an early age that sexuality is not about acquisition but communication and respect, then we hope that we can effect change at a basic level. In this way, we begin to address the issues of power and control, fear and anger. For repeat and serious offenders, then we need another model.