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.”
@CassandraSays
Agreed. That being said, I have had campus (and other) security/escorts scare the shit out of me (which is just inevitable sometimes, I suppose) and then I’ve had very good interactions where the security/escort called over, asked if I was okay/needed a ride, and then only approached more if I needed them.
IME, and FWIW female security have almost always been more respectful of my space.
I once took advantage of an escort. We had on campus police and there are had been several break ins (cars and dorms) in the area. It was dark and I lived down a dark street. The police walked me home. I felt stupid for asking for help, but he was really nice.
Unasked for help would freak me out though.
There are shitty people in every job, especially security, I just don’t want to see someone who as far as we know means well being blamed for the shitty people and how badly they do their jobs.
That being said, men who randomly approach women at night all “hey pretty lady, it’s dangerous out here, maybe I should walk you home”? That’s not cool, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because the chances of the recipient being scared by you are greater than the chances of her being reassured by the offer, given that you’re a stranger who isn’t acting in any sort of official capacity.
What the perp is describing is the rational of every street harasser, rapist, and MRA.
Perp: Hey baby!
Target: Leave me alone!
Perp: effing b should be r to d effing c!!!
The thing is I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. Totally agreed that he’s reprehensible, don’t get me wrong – but I have this horrible feeling that he might feel justified, because ‘he was being nice’ so ‘they owed him.’
And to be honest that could even be worse, that people can get it into their head that rape is a justifiable thing to do.
@Behind the Orange Curtain
I am glad you clarified (I have had escorts escort me after I said no), but I think you were clear enough the first time.
I think it is good you have an escort program, sucks about the lighting, and the lack of publicity for the program is typical. 🙂
Okay, maybe it’s me, but all three of the schools I went to had a “walking escort” policy, and as I had jobs and sometimes research that often kept me out quite late, I frequently availed myself of the service, especially at the last, where I often had quite the long walk at 1 or 2 in the morning and welcomed the companionship.
Of course, it wasn’t the kind of thing where someone would come walking up to you randomly in the dark, you had to call ahead and the dispatcher would give you the name and id number of the person who would come to meet you (and it was likely to be a woman as often as a man as far as I can recall). It was also marketed to students as an all-around-safety thing, so they were just as willing to see to it that a falling-down-drunk guy got back to his dorm (I called because none of his friends were willing to leave the party to walk him home) as they were to walk me to my apartment when I left the library.
It was a service the school provided, paid for by university fees, and it meant that all kinds of places were safer because community service officers were constantly walking around and paying attention to the space. I don’t remember any particular gender bias in how the service was framed (at least not in the grad schools, which were both based in major urban areas) and I was, on at least two occasions, really glad to have them with me.
I guess I think it could be done well or badly, depending on the underlying assumptions about who ‘needs’ help and how the assistance is going to be rendered.
UCSD had an escourt service, but they only came if you contacted them. They had bikes to respond quickly to requests. They wore bright yellow shirts with an acronym on the back that I don’t recall at the moment. Possibly CSO.
There were also “Don’t be that guy.” posters up.
@MorkaisChosen
He certainly seems to want to play hero and get rewarded for it even if he has to create the situation himself (“there’s a guy following you, wanna ride?” is likely invented) and then forcibly take the reward. The woman in the OP wouldn’t let him play hero so he took his reward anyway and killed her.
Now, he is still playing hero by condemning himself while pleading not guilty. I am quite sure that he still considers himself the good guy.
@melody The thing I wonder, not with you (I just want to be clear that I’m not questioning your particular feelings/perceptions) but with our society in general is whether we all, women especially but men too though for different reasons, are conditioned to discount our own perception of danger in our environment. People here mention The Gift of Fear from time to time and it’s a really good book. One of the points de Becker makes is that we get signals all the time encouraging us to excuse away the boundary pushing of others and minimize our own apprehension about particular people and situations, with the result that we are all (sing it with me folks) punished for being mean and/or bitchy to people who “didn’t mean us any harm” or punished for being stupid/careless for being attacked by a criminal.
So, basically I think that if people (any people, regardless of physical attributes of any kind) are feeling unsafe about walking home or to their cars, etc. and don’t automatically have a buddy right there, it is a great thing to have someone who can step in. No judgement, no questions, just a companion to walk with for a little while. And I think that anyone who would try to insist that taking a reasonable precaution to respond to a perception of increased risk is somehow suspect or “silly” has an agenda and is, more likely than not, an apologist for something.
This has really hit me, partially because it happened in my neighbourhood but mostly because the press has released a huge amount of detail about the crimes he has almost certainly committed. I feel so badly for Jill’s husband and her parents but also very sorry for this douches girlfriend.
By the way some real advice to stop rape.its very good. 🙂
http://www.thenation.com/article/172643/ten-things-end-rape-culture
Nope, doesn’t ride. He’s already made up a tale to entice one woman into his car, where he raped her. I don’t buy the idea that he’s setting himself up as a hero with any glimmer of believing it.
I’m now waiting to hear that he’s raped his current or former girlfriends. It won’t surprise me at all if DV emerges.
The one tiny glimmer of consolation for Jill Meagher’s family is that he pleaded guilty to rape, so they don’t have to listen to some dirtbag lawyer claiming “she wanted it” or other shit. It’s bad enough that he’s contesting the murder charge – what, he was just trying to get her to shush when he strangled her? Jollying her along?
I just hope to god they never let him out, but I have no faith that our courts will put him away forever, which he more than deserves.
On a happier note: Gillian, I laughed aloud on the train when I read “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.”
<blockquote. And I think that anyone who would try to insist that taking a reasonable precaution to respond to a perception of increased risk is somehow suspect or “silly” has an agenda and is, more likely than not, an apologist for something.
You get such mixed reactions from folks is part of the problem. If something does happen it is your fault because you didn’t take precautions, but if you do take precautions you are paranoid.
It really isn’t fair.
But these damned if you do damned if you don’t things come up a lot if you are a woman. The whole madonna/whore thing.
Gillian, from all the nights footage it appears that Jill was quite affected by alcohol. From my experience you can’t always be aware of your surroundings, feeling etc when drunk which is partiarly why we have to put it on the men to stop rape.
The other reason I tend to dislike the “be aware of danger” approach is that it can very easily become both paralysing and used as a reason to blame a victim who hasn’t followed the “rules”
I totally forgot I was doing a blockquote partially through.
I knew I needed to sleep.
Yoyo, you have my sympathies.
One thing that confuses me here is that he seems to have admitted the crime and directed the police to where he left Ms Meagher’s body. So how then can he go to trial and plead not guilty? Or maybe I’m confused as to what he’s now asserting about what he did? If all his tears and talking about hoping for the death penalty is not about getting sympathy, how can you then reasonably look at a judge and say “I’m not guilty”?
Or maybe I’m expecting reasonable behavior from a demonstrably unreasonable person…
@Kittehs Spreading happiness is my joy!
@Gillian
It also isn’t just him at this point as he has legal representation. So, it isn’t surprising that his behavior doesn’t match with how the lawyers will try to present him.
Re: escorts
Maybe I reacted differently because I’ve never been on a campus (that’s where these happen) so I was just thinking of how I’d react if a security person at a mall or shop or a police officer approached me. I get what your saying now, but 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” was really unclear what your intent was, especially with the phrasing.
It was very unclear to someone who hasn’t gone to college (that’s wear these happen, right?).
UCSD is the University of California, San Diego.
Yoyo, I want to point out that at absolutely no time did I say anything that came even close to suggesting that people who have been raped have any culpability whatsoever.
I was explicitly talking about people who make the choice to call for an escort when their university offers such a service. I was also explicitly calling out and rejecting the social pressures which prevent people from using such services without social stigma when they feel unsafe for any reason.
You will never find anything I’ve said which would suggest that rape has anything to do with anything other than the desire of a predator to inflict terror on someone.
You don’t know me and I don’t know you, so I’m going to give you a pass for suggesting that I was participating in rape apology up there, but frankly given the context of the conversation, I think the suggestion that
means that I am totally okay with blaming victims is both remarkably obtuse of you and also utterly disgusting.
All the “I hope they bring back the death penalty” stuff is a crock of shit. We haven’t had it in this country for decades and there is no movement, no suggestion it will ever come back. He knows full well his worthless hide is safe, so he can weep and wail as much as he likes.
But yeah – all that, leading the police to where he buried Ms Meagher (a long way out of town), having her phone, hiding her bag … but oh noes, he never murdered her.
@Marie – what Orange Curtain said, “only time I approach a woman in that lot is in uniform and then I’m trying to get her back to her dorm” meant, I think, “I would never walk up to a woman in a dark parking let except while I’m on duty and in my uniform because that would be scary.” Obviously a guy wearing a uniform isn’t automatically safe, but the point was that this person knows better than to approach strangers in a dark parking lot in general and only does it in this context as part of a job to keep them safe.
“Getting back to the dorm” suggests this lot is near a residence hall, so most people in the lot are either going into or leaving a dorm. If you’re getting into your car and leaving, you don’t need a security escort most likely, so the only other thing you’re doing is going back to your room. Hence the “get her back to her dorm” part.
It made sense to me, but I used to teach on a college campus that had a “Rape Path” *sigh*
“It was an accident and I am consumed by remorse” is possibly the spin that’ll be put on it in court.
But yeah, I’d missed that part of it, my previous comment is on much shakier ground than I thought.