It's a Nice Thing
In my blog post of two weeks ago I wrote that I'd been mulling over the possibility of marketing my book as something akin to "Nice Guy Testifies & Tells His Side of the Story".
I've pretty much decided against doing that, but I thought I'd write a bit on the subject.
As I've told people several times, my earliest sense of being gender atypical came in childhood, and it did not initially take the form of wanting to be a girl or wanting to be thought of as a girl, but rather took the form of thinking of myself as a good boy deserving of the respect of the adults.
I wanted to be thought of as mature, as having myself in control. Keeping my own behavior within the lines was at least as important as coloring within the lines. I was holding myself to a standard, for my own self-worth and pride as well as wanting it to be seen and acknowledged. "Good" also involved performing well as a student, applying myself to the material presented to me and satisfying the teachers and getting a good grade.
I think adults sometimes forget what it's like, but when you are a child, adults monitor your behavior a lot. They intervene quite a bit to correct behavior that they disapprove of and they put a fair bit of effort into trying to describe an ideal good behavior that they want children to aspire to. With that going on pretty much all the time, it had the effect on me of making me feel that adults were perpetually suspicious of children as potential misbehaving people. Adults explained this in terms of children's insufficiencies: we weren't mature enough to be trusted to behave properly without an adult monitor; we didn't understand enough things yet to do the right things, we were still ignorant; we didn't have good judgment yet, we could not properly weigh all the things that had to be thought of and taken into account to make the right choices.
Well, with them harping on that so much, it should not seem surprising that a child would see behavior and maturity as an important thing, a central issue in life. When adults emphasize something the way they emphasized behavior, if you as a child consider yourself to measure up rather well, you're likely to take pride in it. When you get praised for something, you tend to take pride in it. I had both: I made my own assessments and thought I was pretty grown-up, and I had teachers and parents and other adults saying so as well. So it became an important part of how I thought of myself.
It was not just a matter of "do what you're told and don't disobey". There were principles. You were supposed to be nice to people, you were supposed to avoid doing things that would hurt anyone, hurt their feelings, break or mess up things. Be kind, and don't be destructive. Be thoughtful, instead of just acting without consideration of those actions. And disruptive was a form of destructive, so in a lot of situations it was bad to be loud or rude or to be offensively crude and nasty.
I was serious. I don't mean I never giggled or had fun, but I took myself seriously and accepted the importance of all this and internalized it.
What made it a gender issue, of course, was that the boys in general were not very good at it. And since "it" was the process of trying to be good, that could be stated more succinctly: boys in general were not very good. I was. I was competing with the girls. For self-respect, because this was important. And to show the girls that they couldn't be dismissively smug and superior to me, oh yes, I was totally about showing them and sometimes showing them up. I also admired them and thought of them as people like me, naturally. We had this important characteristic in common!
The boys rebelled. I don't know to what extent they had problems with self-esteem and self-respect due to not being very good at this thing that the adults emphasized so much. Maybe they did, or maybe they never cared and never valued that stuff, I don't know. They certainly acted as if it was stupid stuff to be concerned with, and they held it in contempt. They embraced bad, whatever was considered bad, whether it was being loud and disruptive or crude and disgusting or hurtfully violent, boys seemed to take perverse pride in being bad. I have more sympathy and understanding for that now than I did then. At that age, I found them embarrassing and I disapproved of them, and I didn't want to be seen as one of them, as anythign like them, so I did what I could to step away from them.
They used dirty words (we weren't supposed to, and I didn't). They reveled in potty functions, body functions, body parts that were supposed to be private, talking about them all the time and being crude.
The boys thought I was obedient and a follower of behavioral rules because I was scared of adult disapproval, scared of punishment. I wasn't. I took on adults when I thought they didn't measure up. There were principles and standards involved and it was totally unfair for someone to say "do as I say and not as I do" or to be behaving in a fashion that would have gotten one of us in trouble and then claiming different standards because they were adults. I wasn't just competing with the girls, I was competing with the adults themselves!
Fast forward to the adult male phenomenon of the Nice Guys™, the males who are associated with the complaint that girls don't choose them, don't choose guys who are nice but instead make themselves available to the bad boys.
It is important to understand "nice", to pause and ask what it means in this context. "Nice" is what was held out to us as kids. Being good. Holding ourselves up to an internalized standard and getting our self-esteem from measuring up well to that. "Nice" is what the boys, in general, rebelled from. "Nice" is what the girls more often successfully aspired to.
Recall, now, that this notion of being good included avoiding the crude and disgusting. Not to put too fine a point on it, but being sexually aggressive, being physically invasive and focusing attention on personal and private body parts and body functions and so forth, really don't fit into the "nice" and "good" package.
The pissed-off Nice Guys™, who admittedly don't tend to be in a very nice mood at the point that they're whining and complaining and muttering in dark fury about this stuff, are basically saying that they internalized the same "good nice" stuff that so many of the girls did. And the girls, what are they doing? They're holding themselves up to a standard, thinking highly of themselves with good self-esteem, being kind considerate people who play by the rules they learned, and they aren't doing anything so crude as blatant sexual aggression and when it is done unto them they tend to pull back from it as nice girls should.
But the gendered world means the nice girls are in an environment with somewhat-less-nice boys who do more of that disgusting invasive bad boy stuff, and the gendered world means the boys are enveloped in the mantle of masculinity when they do, it's OK and even admirable for boys to be bad because when you're a boy being bad is assertive, rebelling against the rules, whereas when you're good you're thought to be passively obedient due to fear of disapproval and punishment. So the bad boy is sexy. And sex is something for which we have an appetite. And from the standpoint of the good nice girls, the bad boys are bringing it on and the small handful of good boys, nice guys, they aren't doing that. They're being, well...nice, and then daring to act and think that sexual attention will be coming their way as a reward for that or something. Which calls into question their niceness, as if they are only being gentle and respectful and well-behaved because they think they'll get rewarded.
As I said in that previous blog post, that's not all that far from what the nice girls are doing as well: not merely holding themselves up to a standard for their own internal self-esteem but expecting some admiration for it, to be regarded as good girls, and daring to think of themselves as far better catches than those wicked bad girls who do bad and crude things. Of course the nice girls are generally not bitterly complaining and whining. They do have some gendered complaints but they're different ones.
Think about sexual initiative. The personality attributes and behavioral components that evolve into a comfort with doing that are largely set in childhood. In a world where sex and sexuality is bad, it takes a bad person to push someone else sexually, to make sex happen. And bad, as some have observed, can make you feel so good. Perhaps good enough to drop some of the superior haughtiness that one might have absorbed as one of the "good" "nice" people and realize that these more rebellious bad people occasionally have some rather likeable characteristics themselves.
The primary complaint of the Nice Guys™ is legitimate. Yes, if you aren't skilled in a bad-boy way at pouncing on the girls and getting some sexual tension going, the Nice Girls™ aren't likely to be any more skilled at kindling it and weren't raised with the expectation that they'd be doing so. And yes it isn't fair, the overall situation.
But they won't get anywhere until they realize the girls didn't set this up. And that not all girls are Nice Girls™, although there's no culturally shared expectation that bad girls will seek out nice boys and stuff. It has to be understood as a gender issue, a byproduct of the way that gender is constructed.
Once you understand what you're up against (and quit complaining about the girls) it's possible, if not quite easy, to figure out how to find your own personal solutions.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
I've pretty much decided against doing that, but I thought I'd write a bit on the subject.
As I've told people several times, my earliest sense of being gender atypical came in childhood, and it did not initially take the form of wanting to be a girl or wanting to be thought of as a girl, but rather took the form of thinking of myself as a good boy deserving of the respect of the adults.
I wanted to be thought of as mature, as having myself in control. Keeping my own behavior within the lines was at least as important as coloring within the lines. I was holding myself to a standard, for my own self-worth and pride as well as wanting it to be seen and acknowledged. "Good" also involved performing well as a student, applying myself to the material presented to me and satisfying the teachers and getting a good grade.
I think adults sometimes forget what it's like, but when you are a child, adults monitor your behavior a lot. They intervene quite a bit to correct behavior that they disapprove of and they put a fair bit of effort into trying to describe an ideal good behavior that they want children to aspire to. With that going on pretty much all the time, it had the effect on me of making me feel that adults were perpetually suspicious of children as potential misbehaving people. Adults explained this in terms of children's insufficiencies: we weren't mature enough to be trusted to behave properly without an adult monitor; we didn't understand enough things yet to do the right things, we were still ignorant; we didn't have good judgment yet, we could not properly weigh all the things that had to be thought of and taken into account to make the right choices.
Well, with them harping on that so much, it should not seem surprising that a child would see behavior and maturity as an important thing, a central issue in life. When adults emphasize something the way they emphasized behavior, if you as a child consider yourself to measure up rather well, you're likely to take pride in it. When you get praised for something, you tend to take pride in it. I had both: I made my own assessments and thought I was pretty grown-up, and I had teachers and parents and other adults saying so as well. So it became an important part of how I thought of myself.
It was not just a matter of "do what you're told and don't disobey". There were principles. You were supposed to be nice to people, you were supposed to avoid doing things that would hurt anyone, hurt their feelings, break or mess up things. Be kind, and don't be destructive. Be thoughtful, instead of just acting without consideration of those actions. And disruptive was a form of destructive, so in a lot of situations it was bad to be loud or rude or to be offensively crude and nasty.
I was serious. I don't mean I never giggled or had fun, but I took myself seriously and accepted the importance of all this and internalized it.
What made it a gender issue, of course, was that the boys in general were not very good at it. And since "it" was the process of trying to be good, that could be stated more succinctly: boys in general were not very good. I was. I was competing with the girls. For self-respect, because this was important. And to show the girls that they couldn't be dismissively smug and superior to me, oh yes, I was totally about showing them and sometimes showing them up. I also admired them and thought of them as people like me, naturally. We had this important characteristic in common!
The boys rebelled. I don't know to what extent they had problems with self-esteem and self-respect due to not being very good at this thing that the adults emphasized so much. Maybe they did, or maybe they never cared and never valued that stuff, I don't know. They certainly acted as if it was stupid stuff to be concerned with, and they held it in contempt. They embraced bad, whatever was considered bad, whether it was being loud and disruptive or crude and disgusting or hurtfully violent, boys seemed to take perverse pride in being bad. I have more sympathy and understanding for that now than I did then. At that age, I found them embarrassing and I disapproved of them, and I didn't want to be seen as one of them, as anythign like them, so I did what I could to step away from them.
They used dirty words (we weren't supposed to, and I didn't). They reveled in potty functions, body functions, body parts that were supposed to be private, talking about them all the time and being crude.
The boys thought I was obedient and a follower of behavioral rules because I was scared of adult disapproval, scared of punishment. I wasn't. I took on adults when I thought they didn't measure up. There were principles and standards involved and it was totally unfair for someone to say "do as I say and not as I do" or to be behaving in a fashion that would have gotten one of us in trouble and then claiming different standards because they were adults. I wasn't just competing with the girls, I was competing with the adults themselves!
Fast forward to the adult male phenomenon of the Nice Guys™, the males who are associated with the complaint that girls don't choose them, don't choose guys who are nice but instead make themselves available to the bad boys.
It is important to understand "nice", to pause and ask what it means in this context. "Nice" is what was held out to us as kids. Being good. Holding ourselves up to an internalized standard and getting our self-esteem from measuring up well to that. "Nice" is what the boys, in general, rebelled from. "Nice" is what the girls more often successfully aspired to.
Recall, now, that this notion of being good included avoiding the crude and disgusting. Not to put too fine a point on it, but being sexually aggressive, being physically invasive and focusing attention on personal and private body parts and body functions and so forth, really don't fit into the "nice" and "good" package.
The pissed-off Nice Guys™, who admittedly don't tend to be in a very nice mood at the point that they're whining and complaining and muttering in dark fury about this stuff, are basically saying that they internalized the same "good nice" stuff that so many of the girls did. And the girls, what are they doing? They're holding themselves up to a standard, thinking highly of themselves with good self-esteem, being kind considerate people who play by the rules they learned, and they aren't doing anything so crude as blatant sexual aggression and when it is done unto them they tend to pull back from it as nice girls should.
But the gendered world means the nice girls are in an environment with somewhat-less-nice boys who do more of that disgusting invasive bad boy stuff, and the gendered world means the boys are enveloped in the mantle of masculinity when they do, it's OK and even admirable for boys to be bad because when you're a boy being bad is assertive, rebelling against the rules, whereas when you're good you're thought to be passively obedient due to fear of disapproval and punishment. So the bad boy is sexy. And sex is something for which we have an appetite. And from the standpoint of the good nice girls, the bad boys are bringing it on and the small handful of good boys, nice guys, they aren't doing that. They're being, well...nice, and then daring to act and think that sexual attention will be coming their way as a reward for that or something. Which calls into question their niceness, as if they are only being gentle and respectful and well-behaved because they think they'll get rewarded.
As I said in that previous blog post, that's not all that far from what the nice girls are doing as well: not merely holding themselves up to a standard for their own internal self-esteem but expecting some admiration for it, to be regarded as good girls, and daring to think of themselves as far better catches than those wicked bad girls who do bad and crude things. Of course the nice girls are generally not bitterly complaining and whining. They do have some gendered complaints but they're different ones.
Think about sexual initiative. The personality attributes and behavioral components that evolve into a comfort with doing that are largely set in childhood. In a world where sex and sexuality is bad, it takes a bad person to push someone else sexually, to make sex happen. And bad, as some have observed, can make you feel so good. Perhaps good enough to drop some of the superior haughtiness that one might have absorbed as one of the "good" "nice" people and realize that these more rebellious bad people occasionally have some rather likeable characteristics themselves.
The primary complaint of the Nice Guys™ is legitimate. Yes, if you aren't skilled in a bad-boy way at pouncing on the girls and getting some sexual tension going, the Nice Girls™ aren't likely to be any more skilled at kindling it and weren't raised with the expectation that they'd be doing so. And yes it isn't fair, the overall situation.
But they won't get anywhere until they realize the girls didn't set this up. And that not all girls are Nice Girls™, although there's no culturally shared expectation that bad girls will seek out nice boys and stuff. It has to be understood as a gender issue, a byproduct of the way that gender is constructed.
Once you understand what you're up against (and quit complaining about the girls) it's possible, if not quite easy, to figure out how to find your own personal solutions.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts