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.”
And the creepy just keeps amping up.
If I wanted to be creepy I would have a clown avatar.
You know what isn’t creepy? A baby raccoon in a tub.
@Wally- Walk away, dude. Just walk away. Don’t try to salvage this. You’re just going to dig yourself in deeper.
Another addition to the list of Totally Inappropriate Imaginary Pets.
(I’ve heard that they like going into your wardrobe and flinging clothes around, just for fun.)
http://youtu.be/4AD-8-IYY_8
Yes. Good night everyone.
I am pretty sure stalker will go away so I’m not that worried. He’s fixated on other people now, and has convinced himself that we were “such good friends.” (Which is terrible for those other people!)
Wally, I think you’re not getting what we’re saying to you; I’m not sure if it’s ‘cos you’re trolling or what. But you might want to try just apologizing (without defending yourself) and listening for a while.
WHY CAN’T I HAVE A BABY RACCOON?
Cloudiah, I’m pretty sure that it’s because Morris hates you.
Thanks cloudiah, I was thinking about Mathew Newton recently, the guy said he was out of control when he was violent but surprise surprise all his victims were girl friends or people who were socially weaker eg taxi drivers and bell hops. Funny how he never beat up his boss, or another large male actor or a cop. Hmmmm
Because at first it’s all little and tiny, and then one day you come home and find that it’s eaten the cats.
(Or at least that’s why I wouldn’t get one. Have you seen the size of those things when they’re grown?)
Do raccoons eat cats?!??! Hazel and Buster won’t let me get one, then. I’ll just watch the videos.
Back to the murderer… It’s hard to deal with him and what he did. I just feel like whatever she did once he fixated on her, he was going to hurt her. If she was nice to him, if she was mean to him, either way he was going to hurt her.
Gad, her poor family. I just keep coming back to them — she can’t be hurt any more, but her husband and the rest of her family must be in so much pain. Makes me teary.
@M Dubz:
I have no problems with cultural explanations, but they rarely tell the full story. You should be willing to look at the other side too, which I believe does make more sense in the case of that guy.
He is a serial rapist with an extensive criminal history, he admitted to have an uncontrollable sexual urge but faked his way through the sex offender program to get early release. I don’t think it’s far fetched to suggest some sort of pathology like antisocial personality disorder.
Of course, it’s not just the crazies. But this guy doesn’t seem “perfectly sane” for me. I don’t think it’s very productive to draw a connection between his crimes and certain behaviors in the general population.
They could potentially, but mammals do have a tendency to make cross-species friends if they’re introduced at a young enough age. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ikm3o5hDks
Oh fuck off, Jeff. You are using the violent criminal mentally ill bullshit and we don’t need more of that in the world. He’s a person who gets off on rape. That makes him raping, violent scum, not mentally ill.
That construction that shocking violent crimes = mental illness and vice versa simultaneously seriously impacts on the lives of mentally ill people and gives violent arseholes a cover. No one wants to have this goddamn 101 discussion with you.
Can anyone tell this entire fucking thread is making me angry (not the awesome commenters! The story, his fucking revolting self-flagellating bullshit, the reality of victim blaming, and the other fucking horrific stories on here. Support and internet hugs for anonymous_lurker and anyone else who wants it. 🙁 )
@Jeff
Men who constantly claim they are nice are rarely nice. Most guys I know who are nice don’t go around proclaiming it. This story was just an example of a guy who claimed to be nice and wasn’t very. And furthermore, some folks are DEFENDING this mans actions because that is the culture we live in.
In high school when a teacher was found to have for the last 30 years been raping the children in his care people came out of the woodwork to claim that all those children had tempted him or were lying. This man also felt he was a nice man overall.
There are likely plenty of examples of that kind. And plenty of less extreme examples of guys who proclaim their niceness. Rejection doesn’t mean that object of your affection is a bitch, a whore or anything of that sort, but the internet is full of self proclaimed nice guys decrying the object of their affection. I’m sure one of the guys from my hometown complained about me on the internet. He certainly had plenty to say to mutual friends when I rejected him: shallow, whore, and he even kept texting me to tell me that he was masturbating to the thought of me (once he even called me while he was doing so). He still claims to be a nice guy. He isn’t mentally ill.
And I work with the mentally ill Jeff and I find most of them are fairly able to deal with their rage. Occasionally, I work with individuals who can’t seem to control themselves (like the one who threatened to light my hair on fire), but generally these individuals are able to control themselves.
Yeah. Mentally ill has a definition. Unless you’re trained in psychology and have examined the person, you really have no place diagnosing him as mentally ill.
So I looked up my own college’s rape statistics, and not only does our safety report distinguish between “forcible” and “non-forcible” rape, but apparently we haven’t had a rape in seven years… Yeah, I’m going to call bullshit on that.
Good to know that if I’m ever raped during college, not only will I be questioned as to whether my rape was “forcible” or not, but it also looks like my college will hush it up so that I won’t ruin their spotless rape record.
I’m going to sit in my campus apartment and feel really safe now.
UCSD has that distinction too:
While the number of reported Forcible assaults seems to be 9 in 2009, 9 in 2010, and 6 in 2011, there appears to have been no reported non-forcible incidents. I can’t say I’m surprised by that.
@ Cassandra
Some of the Raccoons we have here are huge, they get in to the dumpsters and freak out everyone
@augio
That’s a really crappy wording. Clery makes us distinguish between forcible sex offenses and non-forcible. It’s kind of archaic and out of touch
BTW, for those who remember my close encounter with the curious raccoon, I found out why it’s not scared of people – someone who lives in the house that backs onto mine is feeding all the local raccoons. Which, yeah, I get that they’re adorable, but I’m still not sure that’s a great idea given that they’re easily big enough to hurt people (and that they might carry rabies).
Blitzgal said:
“I always tell those fuckers that my dad just died or I just got diagnosed with cancer. Shuts them up real fast.”
I had some guy do that too me when I actually had just been diagnosed with cancer and I tore strips off him very publicly and embarrassed the hell out of him. I really didn’t need that shit that particular afternoon. Fortunately I’d been on the way to meet my parents and my dad heard the whole thing and for the first time that I remember came over and gave me a big hug (Dad’s really sweet but physically very reserved). Stupid guy made a fast escape, which was a little disappointing because I wasn’t finished with him, but a hug from Dad? Wow!
@Seranvali
I hope you are doing better now. I’m glad you stood up for yourself.
I hate when guys come up when I am upset and tell me I should smile. That isn’t okay and isn’t nice.
I’m upset I shouldn’t have to pretend to be happy for some strange man.
For almost a decade I worked on a gorgeous university campus where there was all sorts of wildlife and the racoons got huge from feeding on the trash. Students would throw cookies to foxes. A deer almost ran into me one morning. My son was a student there and lived on campus for the first year. He was on the fourth floor and racoons would tap on his windows at night. One year I lived up in a mountain town and I had 4 cats and two dogs. They would go out on the deck and into the yard, and I had a big glass pane in my kitchen door. One night I was on the phone in the kitchen, saw a little face in the dark and instinctively opened the door to let a cat in – but it wasn’t a cat. It changed its mind about coming in, too, was just curious. One night I left the kitchen door open for air, and a racoon came in and chewed open a plastic gallon water bottle. Never again after that. For some reason, the dogs didn’t seem to notice any of this. Deer would prowl the neighborhood, and I would see bighorns right up by and even on the road most mornings. Every now and then someone would see a mountain lion in the town. Those are very dangerous, one killed a high school student on the running track back in the 90s. And, CassandraSays is right: rabies is a very real thing out here, though mostly for bats and skunks. Racoons mostly get distemper. Although there was a horse with rabies a few years back up north that had to be put down. A lot of wildlife has adapted to humans and will often live quite close to us. I’ve seen deer, foxes, and even coyotes in city neighborhoods a lot. In some of the mountain neighborhoods, large herds of elk life right up close to people.