How is it that so many self-proclaimed nice guys turn out to be so terrible?
I don’t have the answer to that but I do have some fine examples of Nice Guyism — five in all — borrowed from Reddit’s Nice Guys forum, devoted to showcasing DMs sent by “self-proclaimed ‘nice guys’ who are actually manchildren or douches, or who mistake being spineless and pathetic for being nice.”
This guy’s mask came off pretty quickly:
And neither do I.
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“Niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.”
― Gavin de Becker, ‘The Gift of Fear’
I wish I could believe the last one was fake. Ewewew.
I think the key term there is ‘self-proclaimed’. People who are actually nice don’t go around claiming to be nice.
Well, hopefully some of these guys are still growing up and emotionally maturing, maybe in ten years they will look back and say “Boy, I was sooooo cringy back then!”
I feel like we’ve seen the *using asterisks to signify cringy actions* thing before. Is it a manosphere thing? Or has it become a manosphere thing?
“Yoo-hoo! I’m NICE! So you owe me not only your attention but a pussy treat!”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TxC9-PJfyKo
(By the above commercial’s logic, the Klondike company owes me six bars for every time I was subjected to it; unfortunately, I’d already crashed my pancreas by that point.)
This all… reminds me of the guy in my Japanese film class that yelled at me that he knew I hated him and women like me should just fuck off, etc… we had never spoken before, so yeah…
Especially the last one.
Ugh, italics mammoth ate the last part of my comment. I only meant to italicize the word become
Full Metal Ox, I had to watch it with the sound off, but that commercial looks AWFUL. I don’t imagine it’s improved by having the sound on.
I was going to say that this was the only Klondike Bar ad that didn’t suck… but it turns out it’s for a wine cooler?!
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/vincent_price_as_a_polar_bear
@Bookworm in hijab:
The wife is talking about painting the foyer a nice yellow, which evidently bores the husband to the point of torture; five seconds of ordinary interpersonal civility earns him a KLONDIKE BAR!!! YAYYYY!!!!
Nah. Online D&D’s where I first met that. It’s useful – saves pissing about with quotes or italics to seperate your char’s words and actions.
These guys think they are nice?
My IQ is barely adequate (they make you do the things when you are dyslexic) and I still have more self awareness than these guys.
I can’t count how many times in recent years I have described a truly good man as “a nice guy. No, really, actually a nice guy, not one of THOSE!”
I find that if you look at it more broadly, there are a lot of “nice people” who really, really aren’t, and generally you can see right through them. Not all of them humblebrag it (or just flat outright demand to be recognized as such), and most of them don’t use the specific self-description of “nice” as that’s mostly a man-looking-for-sex thing, but it’s part of a phenomenon which goes far beyond the manosphere.
I will say that it’s darkly hilarious when someone tries to wield their supposed reputation like a cudgel to try to get things out of strangers who have no reason to know who they are. (“Supposed reputation” because their actual reputation probably isn’t what they think it is, “darkly” because it’s usually only funny when it happens to someone else.) “I am a good person, why are you denying me?!” they practically outright scream, to someone who they only met minutes ago and has so far seen only garbage behavior from them.
This can look similar to, or occasionally overlap with, someone who knows they’re not actually nice but tries to pull rank or privilege (which they may not actually have) on others for ego reasons, or even sadism or spite.
@GSS ex-noob,
This is how I describe my husband.?
@Snowberry,
Your comment really resonated with me. If there’s one key relationship skill I’m trying to instill in my kids, it’s trust your gut. You don’t need to give reasons for why you don’t like someone (especially if that someone is demanding that you provide said reasons). I think a lot of women fall for the facade NiceGuysTM put up because a) we’re socialized to put others’ feelings ahead of our own and to care for others at the expense of our own needs, and b) we don’t want to be seen as “mean” if we admit, even to ourselves, that someone just creeps us out and that we don’t want to be with them.
I really struggle with this, not romantically but in (supposed) friendships. I had, and still have, a bad habit of taking on friendships with “nice” people, people I have “no good reason” not to like, even if I have a bad feeling about them, and then getting used as an emotional punching-bag. NiceGuysTM definitely try to weaponize womens’ “be kind at all costs” socialization to use against us.
Argh, Snowberry, THIS is what I meant to quote:
On that first one, the second text appears to be from the future. It’s dated December 29, 2021.
Normally Nice Guys™ wait 45 minutes or so before having a tantrum. This one’s so pushy, he’s traveled back in time nine months to pre-emptively call her a slut.
It’s almost like “nice” only makes sense as a label others give you rather than one you give yourself and you only get it by being nice to others.
Um… I definitely have used the * thing before. Usually on Tumblr when using the post style of a “chat”.
Usually, the asterisked actions or impressions get a whole line to themselves so it’s something like:
I’ve stopped using it mostly, just because it seems to be frequently done either poorly and chaotically, and the group of people doing it are starting to mostly be… not the sorts I want to share writing quirks with.
@Joekster
This is precisely how I know an extravagantly asshole move for funsies is coming from one of my friends (or I warn them myself), we start reminding each other what nice people we are and you know a joke taking the piss out of someone is coming.
Contrapangloss,
I sympathize! Your doggo action-descriptions are FAR cuter (though tbh the MRAs set the bar pretty low…)
Off topic, but: Happy Easter everybody!
I hate NiceGuys so much. I take pride in letting them know exactly how I feel. It’s the entitlement that gets me.
OT, but I’m having some problems with Firefox and Facebook recently, and have been unable to get useful information out of Google. I’m hoping someone here knows how to fix things.
With Firefox, for the past week or two it no longer always shows a cached copy of a page when I use the “back” button. Fairly often it does a fresh reload from the server without my asking, which can spoil things and at the very least is a significant slowdown. The only recent change to Firefox that sounded like it could be relevant was “partitioned caching”. I tried disabling that and restarting the browser but the inefficient “back” button problem persists. How do I get the old behavior back?
And with Facebook I can no longer reliably scroll down in the “chats” sidebar at the left side of the “messenger” page. Sometimes it will load more names if I scroll down. Other times it will not scroll past the initial screen-height of names. Interestingly, if it will load the second screenful it will not get stuck at the third, or fourth, or etc. — always, either it will not load the second, or it will work fine, for a given instance of having loaded that page. It’s like there’s two nearly-identical-looking versions of the page that you can get when you go to load it, a scroll down enabled version and a scroll down disabled version.
The problem is, it’s getting steadily worse. Almost every load gives the scroll down disabled version and to get the scroll down enabled version takes sometimes dozens of reloads.
Needless to say, this is unacceptable, and I have used Facebook’s bug reporting tool to report it. They have ignored the bug reports and continue to let the problem get worse.
How do I force them to either fix it immediately or, at the very least, disclose to me the magic formula for how to do a page reload that guarantees I get the scroll down enabled version? I’ve tried nearly every permutation of: reload; shift-reload; click in address bar and hit “enter”; close tab and control-shift-T to get it back; close tab and spawn a new one with right click “open in new tab” on the “contacts” sidebar on a non-messenger Facebook page; right click “open in new tab” on a name under “chats” on an existing messenger tab, then close the old tab and try to scroll down in the new; right clicking particular names; going to another Facebook page in the tab and then back again before trying to scroll down; and so on. Nothing works consistently. I don’t know what is making the difference between the loads where I get the good, scroll down enabled version and the loads where I don’t. I want to know what is making that difference so that I can control that variable to always get the good version, if Facebook refuses for some reason to fix their shoddy product. So what’s the magic formula?
Oh, and before you ask why I don’t just reload until I get the scroll-down-enabled version and then never, ever, ever, ever close or reload that tab ever again, I tried that and Facebook threw another curveball. After a while of using any Facebook tab it will eventually spontaneously do a full reload. Even trying to bring an image up in the pop-over lightbox can set this off, once it decides it is “due” (and then the image’s “X” to close it and return to the underlying page will disappear!) So there is NO WAY to keep a Facebook messenger tab from reloading to the (probably) bad, scroll down disabled version short of never using it at all, which “solution” would render the whole thing pointless.
Since I have done nothing wrong to deserve either of these frustrating problems, I am clearly within my rights to have them solved immediately. Unfortunately, I lack needed information and Google refuses to find it for me, on either issue. Does anyone know how to fix these problems?