As always, discussions on the internet always have to come back around to talking about men and their interests. Funny how that happens, eh? However Bitch, Ph.D. hits the nail on the head, as usual. While reading her description of nice guys and bitchy women, I kept nodding my head and thinking that she must have been snooping around in my closets because she knows about my life. Go read her summary and comment, and follow her links, for an overview of the kerfuffle.
In my opinion, the confusion over the lament of the "nice guy" is one of duality of meanings and interpretation. Men think "nice" is something good, and something to be aspired to. In many cases when women call a man "nice" it means something entirely different, but generally is not something we seek. And Bitch, Ph.D. hits on this. It's not that we don't want men that are nice, but we don't call them nice. We describe them for who they are. To me, nice has always been a multi-syllabled dropped pitch word, as in "well, he's ni-i-ice," that is always followed by a "but." It means, well, he seems nice, or has all the characteristics that we are told make up the category of nice, but there's something I don't like. It means, he is doing all the right things but I don't think he's doing them to please me, but rather to compete or show off or make it all about him and how good he is (see the beginning of this post). The worst case is when it means "this guy is creepy but hasn't done anything weird yet, but it's only a matter of time until someone says 'Johnny was such a quiet boy.'"
So fellas, aspire to "wonderful," "deep," "sweet," "sexy," or just about anything else. "Nice," is not nice at all.
Posted by binky at July 22, 2005 10:56 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Blogoramai've been keeping half an eye on this internet colloquy and i have this to say: way too many smart people have spent way too much time on this utterly underdetermined question. i don't know what any of it means, except to note that "nice guy" is tacitly being used to denote different sorts of people by everyone who has sounded off. so people aren't talking to each other as much as they are talking at each other.
seeing as how "hot" is a lot more appealing to me than "nice," i figure the same is true of many women. that's fine. i can't work with that. it's a lot easier to figure out what "hot" means than "nice" anyway.
Posted by: joshua at July 22, 2005 11:52 AM | PERMALINKWhich is exactly what I was saying about meanings and intterpretations. "Nice guy" as a positive statement is pretty much meaningless, and in fact is usually a mild to moderate negative. All of us - buys and girls - should aspire to be described as we are (smart, strong, great eyes, funny, sexy, whatever). In my experience, the only people who want to be considered "nice" are pretty creepy.
Posted by: binky at July 22, 2005 12:12 PM | PERMALINK