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.”
pillow, there’s a great post at the Pervocracy about the troubling assumptions underlying the fact that these guys sometimes back off (at least a little) when they find out you have a boyfriend.
@Cassandra:
Well, if they have such an inclination through no fault of their own, it would be cruel to lock them up, and it seems that euthanasia is the more humane option.
@Thekittehs – On occasion so-called similiar fact evidence can be admitted, but it must be REALLY similiar to the crime for which someone is charged. It can’t just be – raped before, therefore raped this time (not agreeing with the principle, but setting out the legal theory. The ‘classic’ case in this kind is a woman who had four husbands die under suspicious (but different each time) circumstances and whether evidence of the previous deaths could be admitted at her murder trial for number 4.
@Behindtheorangecurtain – with evidence of that kind (which is really ‘character’ evidence), the Judge must weigh the relevance to the current case against the ‘prejudice’ the admission of such evidence would cause with the jury. Essentially, you can’t bring in evidence to show that the accused was ‘that sort of person’, it needs to be directly relevant to the case at hand.
@pillow – The Australian system has rules that, in theory are there to prevent a rape victim’s sexual history, clothing etc. being brought up at Trial. they are not always effective. There’s a book ‘Girls Like You’ by Paul Sheahan that follows one rape trial through the system and attempts to demonstrate the difficulties encountered, particularly when the accused is savvy and can ‘work the system’.
@somegal
I hate that excuse, the only person responsible for my actions is me, there is no one else that can be held responsible. When guys use this excuse it makes me ask them if they should be in a zoo somewhere. I really hope they lock this guy up for the rest of his life.
@pillow in hell- It freaks me out how deeply right you are. I know so many rape victims, and only two who have gone to the police over it. In both cases, I doubt that the rapist will ever spend a single day in jail. There is something sad and sick about our culture that victims are so unlikely to report the crime perpetrated against them, and it gives sick assholes like this space to operate with impunity.
I saw this show about this guy once who had a diagnosed rage disorder. Like he literally couldn’t control his anger because of a physical problem in his brain. The show was specifically how he got this parrot as a pet – one of those smart species who can talk – and he would take it with him everywhere and when he felt rage coming on, he’d talk to the parrot and it would calm him down again.
So yeah, if that guy can control himself, then people without any condition don’t have much excuse. I bet these ‘nice guys’ would be perfectly capable of controlling themselves too if they were in a crowded place where. It’s like that whole “consent is hard to recognise” thing… it’s only hard when they don’t want to do it or they think they can get away with it.
@Neurite
I’ve even had luck referencing other men in my family to get harassment to stop. “Well my uncle is a [thing in common with the guy] and he would never dream of treating a woman like you are.” Instant apology.
Of course, I’ve had bad luck with the boyfriend thing too because we aren’t married. It isn’t like a conversation with a total stranger about how well or badly my relationship is going is any easier to get out of.
@ Wally
Ah, so you are a troll. No need to bother engaging with you, then.
Oh, @jeff- I know plenty of perfectly sane men who pull bullshit like this all the time. When you claim it’s just the crazies, you write off the way that our culture makes so many of us sick.
@ Kim- that is the neatest thing! I love science, and the nifty things companion animals can do.
It’s not trolling to say that death is kinder.
@Wally, Decent people don’t call for euthanasia for other human beings. Don’t do that.
[hat tip back to yoyo]
In other news, dude who stalked me in college just tried to friend me on Facebook. Again.
0_0
Anyone else want to deal with this one? I am all out of patiently talk people through their dumbass assumptions today.
(These guys are perfectly capable of controlling their behavior. They just pretend not to be because they’re so steeped in privilege that it never occurs to them that someone might respond with “oh, well, if that’s true then I guess we better lock you up instead of keeping all the women indoors and/or armed in case you lose your temper again”.)
@ cloudiah
Ick. I once saw a guy who looked just like my creepy stalker ex on the bus and spent the next week looking over my shoulder – I’m kind of hoping that he’s too pretentious for Facebook.
Oh man, @Wally, I thought you were joking…
Intentionally causing the death of another human (not in self defense) being is a moral event horizon I am not willing to cross, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable that we as a society think it is acceptable to kill to maintain the social order.
Because how do we choose the people who are irredeemable? How do we decide who it would be “kinder” to kill? I don’t think that power belongs in the hands of other human beings.
@aussiesmurf
Thank you for the explanation.
It sounds like this is all based on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Bringing in evidence of other crimes violates that presumption.
I admit I was just a cop in Los Angeles, Californa so my knowledge is a bit superficial. Someone better educated in the law or legal history could do better than my guesses.
Here is the US laws were passed to protect the victim’s sexual history, which ideally should never have been admissable if it were not for mysogeny as a social norm. I say this because the laws are quite simple and are all similar to the crime of X is the occurrence of Y. They do not have “unless” statements attached to them such as unless the victim gives money away (charity) and therefore cannot be a victim of theft.
@Cassandra:
But if they genuinely wanted to avoid causing any more hurt they would consider suicide. They don’t consider that an option because they only rue their appetite for violence insofar as it brings about negative consequences for themselves. If even that much.
@cloudiah:
Surely you are talking about involuntary euthanasia only.
@Jeff_mensrights
I wasn’t aware thay loudly proclaiming “niceness” was a symptom of mental illness. I also wasn’t aware that thinking women owe men something was a symptom of mental illness. In which case, I really don’t understand why conservatives seem to prefer to listen to such “mentally ill” persons.
Here in the real world and surprising no one, what Jeff_mensrights just did is incedibly ableist and assholish. Don’t do that.
Ewww. Had a stalker from college try to friend me on Facebook last month, Cloudiah. Ick. Yes. Ignore, ignore, ignore.
Wally, how about some empathy for the woman — you know, the person, the human being, who was actually murdered. Jeff, you’re full of shit too.
@Wally Wick
Surely it was in fact quite clear what cloudiah meant and surely what you are doing is not a way to show your good intentions here.
Ugh. All the sympathy and hugs for people dealing with stalker exes/ gross people. That shit is the absolute worst.
Surely everyone else is as bored with this particular variety of trolling as I am.
@cloudiah
I’m sorry about your stalker. Is he setting up different accounts or can you block him?
Mea culpa. I was wrong. I should have thought about the implications of that initial musing of mine, which seem patently obvious in retrospect. But I’m not wrong in thinking that death can be a gift that I wish more people would willingly take.