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.”
@Some Gal You need some Boone therapy, stat!
No. It’s called being an asshole. What is your problem?
@SomeGal kudos to your boyfriend!
I do that as well – one time I was stomping home fast (because it was wicked frosty and I was freezing) and it was around midnight, so I didn’t go through the park but around it. There was this guy in front of me, sort of staggering along drunk, and I was catching up with him pretty quick, so I thought I’d give him a wide berth – the pavement was broad, and I could see the oncoming traffic so I figured I’d give him about six feet of clearance. (No clear space to cross the road until the lights we were coming up on anyway.)
I got to about ten feet away and he suddenly whirled around, grabbing the park railings and brandished this glass bottle he was carrying at me. He was bigger than me, and I was terrified for all of half a second, but then I realised HE was terrified; he was leaning backwards and making ‘keep away’ gestures with the bottle. As soon as he saw I was actually female and tiny (compared to him, the screen name is an in-joke about how I used to think I was big and scary and it’s so not true, alas) he was all, ‘Aw sorry darling’, and looked really embarrassed. I just hadn’t realised he’d heard me clomping up fast behind him and considered me a threat, because I’d never thought of myself as one.
So now I avoid EVERYONE like the plague. 😀 Which is hard, because I walk faster than everyone…
or this, as proof that all cats love boxes
Oh, no imbedded pictures. Okay, this then.
@Gillian
So happy! (My cat actually came up to snuggle so either she sensed I need cute or somehow realized I was giggling at a dog and got jealous. She hates dogs. Either one is fine with me.)
I have lost my capacity to be surprised at this shit; my first thought on reading the post was “I bet he’s done this before.” 0_0
I feel terrible for his victims and their families. Thank you all for the brain bleach.
Ah, yes, the strangers (95% of them they are men) who stop you on the street and demand you explain yourself because you are not! appropriately! happy! and why can’t you just SMILE?!
I always tell those fuckers that my dad just died or I just got diagnosed with cancer. Shuts them up real fast.
Regarding this piece of shit, why can’t *some* men understand that this is EXACTLY WHY WE RESPOND WITH FEAR when a stranger stops us like this?! Murderers and rapists don’t wear signs. We don’t know if you’re dangerous until you do something dangerous, and often that’s too late.
*95% of them are men.
I added an additional phrase there for some strange reason.
There’s also the fact that you have to be a very unpleasant person to react to someone else’s fear with rage. Seeing someone who’s afraid should evoke compassion, not anger.
@ Buntzums
Inverse hero…. that’s just perfect. I’m going to save that for future discussions.
@Some Gal Sadly, mine are useless right now. The windowsill is full of sun and so they are both splayed in there, tummies in the air, in the middle of their solar recharging cycle.
The news is depressing today:
* 28% of South African schoolgirls are HIV-positive; only 4% of boys in the same age group are. This means young girls are largely being infected by older men.
* This is not just a problem in South Africa!
* The Steubenville rape trial — I can’t even read about it.
* Surprise! Our criminal justice system is completely racist!
* Apparently women are too stupid to use an iPad.
It’s almost making me glad Google Reader is going away, since that is where I read all of these stories.
That is something that would have shocked me in a previous life; but, of course, these guys are predators, seeking chances to reoffend. They do it on purpose, and his ‘oh, guys, I didn’t mean to!’ is just an act, camo.
Rip that camo off, sez I. Show him for what he is.
Cloudiah, I’d seen a couple of those already, but omg the HIV rate one is horrifying.
Where I work, we have a parking lot that is really sketchy, I often spend a good part of my night just patrolling that lot, the only time I approach a woman in that lot is in uniform and then I’m trying to get her back to her dorm, we don’t publicize our safety escort policy enough. That lot is so poorly lit, that I can see a lot of bad things happening there. Part of the reason I’m there is just to make sure nothing bad happens, another reason is to catch anyone who hits another vehicle and make them leave a note. I wish the neighboring HOA would let us put more lighting in that lot.
@cloudiah
Are you talking about the whole argument that her silence was consent?
Oh gods that’s fucking terrifying. Horrifying, terrifying, such an illustration why so called nice guys can be terrifying.
@kittehs
ugh. just…gah. And what’s worse is I feel like I shouldn’t be suprised O_O
The fuck that fucking advice. I’ll go on a walk alone at night whenever I damn feel like it. I don’t run my life around the fact that sick fuckers exist.
@ beshemoth
I had a situation like that once. I was walking (alone! at night!) around my apartment complex and saw some guy coming closer. However, I tend not to walk around to avoid people, idk why, so I was just prepared for a fight, and when we passed he jumped, and I jumped back because I was already preparing for a fight. Turns out he hadn’t seen me and was scared XD Probably should be more careful in the future.
@gillian
What an adorable cat 😀
@Behind the Orange Curtain
what the fuck? safety escort? Some guy comes up to me in a dark place late at night, even in uniform* I’m going to be as suspicious as hell of him. And I sure as hell wouldn’t walk back to my room with a strange man who approached me. I’m going out on a limb to assume you’re trying to ‘protect’ women, but offering help makes you more suspicious, imo, and most rapes don’t happen from strangers, so the ‘i can see a lot of bad things happening here’ just makes it seem like you don’t know much about this topic. Also, read the victim blaming advice leftwingfox put here. Kind of relevant to this. (hint, I copy pasted it in my post, so it literally is right here.)
*the uniform has literally no affect on me, so saying even in uniform is like saying even in a different necktie than I usually wear to me.
The nice guy tm is one of the worst that I have to deal with. They usually stalk and intimidate their exes and when confronted, they ask for some sort of sympathy. One guy kept asking me if I’ve ever been in love while I was banning him from campus, I told him that my personal life was none of his business. He then accused me of acting like a robot. There’s a lot of entitlement there,
@ Marie
One of the services our department offers is a safety escort, we give people rides to their dorm, or if they’re on crutches or some other limited mobility, we’ll assist them in getting to class, it’s part of the job. Usually I’m driving around that lot in a marked vehicle, in full uniform. It’s an area that is not patrolled a lot, and we’ve had a few crimes happen there, like one person had all four wheels stolen off their car. It’s an ounce of prevention as far as I’m concerned. We used to have a campaign about it.
@behind the orange curtain
Even if it is part of your job this:
made it sound like a woman only thing. Also the ‘get her back to her dorm’? I’m assuming you mean if someone asks you, but the way you came across to me was more of a ‘lets help those poor little ladies back to their rooms before trouble finds them.’
Also, this is just me, since everyone’s different, but being approached by someone in a uniform is not reassuring.
I don’t think it’s really fair to be annoyed with Orange Curtain (the individual) for the fact that a. the college he works for has an escort program and b. it’s targeted at women (and people who have limited mobility). It’s unlikely that either was his choice, and a lot of colleges have escort programs targeted at female students. We can talk about whether or not that’s a good thing overall (focusing on the victim rather than the perp, etc), but it’s not like this is something that the commenter came up with all by himself, or like he’s a random dude approaching women because he just decided to do that (which is indeed weird and often creepy).
I don’t get the annoyance with BtOC, either. Most colleges have escort programs, but at least mine was open to everyone, it didn’t secify who it was for.
@Marie
Usually they’ll ask, we ask once and if the answer’s a no we keep going. I probably should have used better grammar, but grammar goes out the window when I work until 1:30 am, the bad things are usually hit and runs, or vehicle burglaries and vandalism and the occasional fight