Before we get into nice discussion about nice girls and nice guys, I want you to go watch this video.
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(I mean it. I’m not even going to be nice about it. Go watch and then come right back. I’ll wait for you. I might even slip into something more comfortable.)
(that space was you, watching the video. Thank you. I love it when you do what I tell you.)
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I don’t know the context for this scene. I don’t have a lot of grounding in the series but based on this - and Joan, omg Joan is My People – I suspect I would love it.
What I do know is this: there are some angry women on Mad Men.
Betty Draper, for example, our rampant pigeon shooter, is the (very nice) poster girl for nice girl rage.
I know some nice girls are nodding their heads, right now.
I mean, we know this story: about how women bite their tongues and their carrot sticks to keep it all in check. How we, historically, have made nice and played small. How an angry woman is a spectre. How ‘hysteria’ and ‘bitch’, liberally or even hypothetically applied, can shut us up.
“I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch.”
We’re nice because anger is dangerous. So we file down our nails and with it our edges and dull our teeth and nibble at the edges of directly expressed emotion and, let’s be honest, life.
We’re the nice women. We’re doing The Right Thing at the right time in the right way and probably wearing the right shoes while we’re doing it. Nicely.
And I have no doubt that a lot of nice women are holding it together publicly and then shrieking at their kids at home.
I submit to you that the ‘nice girl’ is confined, constrained, and angry – and really, not so ‘nice’ at all.
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Nice means “pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.”
Originally, though, nice meant ‘not to cut’ which became ‘not to know’ which became ‘ignorant’ which transformed into ‘foolish’ or ’silly’ which became what we’ve got now: pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.
Who aspires to this?
Nice is a social strategy and its tactics are quiet, smiling, obeisance, sacrifice, agreement, gifts, doing favours, ingratiation.
Nice is a bribe. Nice is a way to be un-noticed while raging inside at being un-noticeable.
Nice is a way to gain the trust of someone who has no business trusting you. In fact, in The Gift of Fear, Gary de Becker includes the ‘niceness’ ploy as a pre-indicator of violence.
Nice is patting your irritable kid on the head and kissing your philandering husband and then going outside to kill some birds.
Because a victim, especially a nice one, is the most dangerous creature on earth.
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All of this is what nice means, but what nice does not mean – and what we often conflate it with – is “innately good.”
So that’s nice, and The Nice Girl.
What about The Nice Guy?
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Nice guys. I’ve ended things with guys and had them reply, see? this is what happens to the nice guy.
And – perhaps like a lot of women – I let them think that.
Because I was being nice.
Women do this a lot. We tell guys ‘you’re such a nice guy’ when really what we mean is I would go out with you, but:
- you’re creeping me out
- your house is filthy which scares me and god forbid we live like that
- your conversation is beige
- you don’t surprise me
- I’m smarter than you
- you’re not bringing it in the bedroom
- you’re aimless and I’d have to carry this thing
- I’m worried that I’ll have to do all the work in this relationship
- I think that all this sweetness is an act to cover up the fact that you’re flaky and once you’ve ‘got’ me, you won’t really be there for me
- you’re not that great of a kisser
- you’re too much work
- you want to eat my soul
- I know that this sweet stuff is a front. You don’t want to be nice to me – you want to own me
- you lack initiative
- you’re not intellectually challenging
- I would have to unlock you
- I see the future and it is me shopping for your family at Christmas while you watch TV
- I can see what you want and it is too much
When I do this – when I spare the guy’s feelings to avoid a scene and just agree that yes, the problem is that he is too nice – I perpetuate the nice guy myth.
That nice guys finish last. That the good guy never gets the girl.
Which leaves a lot of men running around, wounded, thinking that ‘nice’ is a problem – and it is, but not for the reasons they think – that must be cured. The cure, they think – or dating gurus are quick to reassure them – is to be a jerk, or a pick up artist, or just plain not nice to women.
Any PUA will tell you that women don’t like nice guys or that good guys who are ‘too nice’ to women won’t be successful with women.
Not true.
It is weak, ineffectual, closeted control-freak guys that repel women (and people, more generally). Nice isn’t the problem.
Or maybe it is.
Here’s my PSA: just like The Nice Girl, The Nice Guy isn’t really nice.
Often nice is a social strategy. Nice is a mask worn by scared, creepy, angry, bribing, entitled, controlling people.
Nice covers a lot of anger.
This is what I know about nice guys, and why I’m suspicious of them:
Because in life, nice guys are not getting what they want, and they’re mad, and they’ll be mad at me, too when I don’t toe the line (and I won’t). The worse a guy’s character, the nicer he’ll try to act.
But I’m too nice to tell a man these ugly truths.
And so flourishes the urban myth that nice guys finish last (with women) – if they get to finish, at all.
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Just like the Nice Girls, Nice Guys are angry.
Nice appears to be flexible but is rigid: Nice has muscled and restrained herself, intently and vigorously, into compliance with everyone else’s expectations and so your failure to do the same – for her, for the world – enrages her.
And I’m okay with anger – anger is fuel and anger can be hot and oh, the righteous fires that anger will light.
But repressed anger is stasis. Repressed anger is vindictive, passive-aggressive, and insidious. Repressed anger is dangerous.
The truth is this: repressed anger is the shadow of Nice. Anger, denied, trails Nice everywhere, in every light.
Here’s another truth:
The Good Guy does get the girl.
But Good Guys aren’t necessarily nice. In fact, all the man and women I know, respect, love or want to love are most definitely not nice.
Nice: pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory, deceptive, dangerous.
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My point: nice guys are not nice, meaning ‘innately good’.
Nice is just the angle they’re working to get what they want. And when they don’t get what they want, they blame nice, and strip away nice and show the world who they really are.
And who they are is who the women in their lives - who lied and told them they were nice - knew they were, all along.
I have some ‘bad boys’ in my life – but they’re not really bad boys. Instead, they’re men who are at home in their skin and their masculinity, sexuality, aggression, vulnerability, heart, darkness, light – and don’t need to camouflage any of it with a layer of nice. I know that if I ever turned one of these men down, sexually or romantically, they’d never lash out at me. These guys – these men – would never call me a bitch or even a bad word (unless…well, never mind).
But the so-called nice guys? They’re nice until you don’t want ‘em or you don’t give them what they want. And then they call you a bitch or a tease or a slut.
Nice.
Last week, after my first hypnotherapy session, I went grocery shopping.
In the store, I suspected that the young guy smiling at me - he was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old – was a kid I baby-sat when I was a teenager.
I was just a few blocks from where I grew up so it was within the neighbourhood of possibility.
He smiled at me in the produce section. He blocked my cart in the cereal aisle and held my gaze. He stared at me as I checked expiration dates on milk.
Obviously, we knew each other. I just couldn’t figure out how.
In the frozen foods aisle, he walked up to me and handed me a piece of paper and smiled. I said “Do we know each other?”
He said, “Not yet,” and turned and walked away.
On the back of a receipt was a phone number, presumably his.
What just happened here? I asked, looking around for an answer or an opinion.
(If any occasion demands an audible conversation-with-self in a public place, this was definitely it.)
When I was at the cashier, he was in line at the till beside me. He smiled at me some more while his mom paid for his groceries.
What is happening here??? This time I exclaimed it silently because other people were around and that sort of thing violates unspoken queue rules.
He checked me out in the parking lot, too.
I was so disconcerted that while driving home I had to pull over and call Heather.
I told her the story.
She was shocked, too. She’s a good friend. She doesn’t fluff up my ego. We both know I’ll be thirty-seven next week and my stomach has seen flatter days.
We tried to understand. She wanted to know what I was wearing.
“Jeans and ballet flats. Full mama regalia. My hair looks good, though.”
“What shirt are you wearing? Are your ta-tas out?”
I paused. This is basically a trick question. “Well, it doesn’t really matter what shirt I’m wearing. My breasts always obvious.”
“It matters. Are we talking turtle neck or v-neck?”
“I’m wearing a sheer tunic but it is not provocative. I’ve got a tank underneath.”
We struggled to understand a little bit more. Maybe the older woman wasn’t his mom. Maybe it was his sugar-momma. Or maybe it was his mom, but she won’t let him stay out past midnight so he’s looking for a sugar-mama. Maybe he just saw the movie Mrs. Robinson.
“Heather, of course he hasn’t seen Mrs. Robinson. He’s too young. I haven’t even seen Mrs. Robinson. Dustin Hoffman is a grandfather. That’s how old that movie is.”
We gave up trying to understand this boy’s MILF issues (it is cool when a grown-ass man like John Devore appreciates mamas but weird when a kid who still lives with his mom is hot for another mom) and talked about my hypnotherapy, instead.
It was wonderful.
Once, when I was outlining my challenges, my new projects, all the things I was excited about, and wondering aloud what my next great adventure would be, a friend said: “How about being still?”
I was almost as surprised by this question as I was when an eighteen year old boy gave me his number in Extra Foods.
I struggle with still. I can’t get there. My mind is always on and I have insomnia on a regular basis. Yoga, meditation, massage – nothing works.
In hynotherapy, I thought I might get still. I thought I’d relax into myself and find calm.
I relaxed. I surrendered. I went there. And when I got there, I felt my entire being vibrate. My body was still, but my energy was humming. And in that second, I realized: still is not my home. Buzz is where I live.
It was such a relief. I don’t have to fight who I am. I vibrate at a high frequency. Still is not for me.
So we talked about that and how I’m not going to feel guilty any more that I’m not zen.
Because I’m not zen, dammit.
I told her how being hypnotized felt like a lucid dream. You know when you wake up from a dream that is so good, you go back to it, but you’re liminal – both sleeping and awake and guiding the dream? Hypnosis is like that. Or like the flow when I’m writing. Or like sex. Hot sex is a trance, too.
And then we hung up, but not before wondering some more about this confused eighteen-year-old’s definition of “age-appropriate”.
Heather clearly kept thinking about it because she called me later that night, all a-fluster.
“Ok. Don’t be offended, but you know the movie Shallow Hal? Where Jack Black is hypnotized so that he can only see people for who they really are? And that’s why he saw fat Gwyneth Paltrow as thin?”
I was a bit panicked by the “don’t be offended” and “Shallow Hal” reference. Was she going to tell me that this eighteen year old had magical Jack Black/Shallow Hal powers and therefore could beyond my fat ass to my inner beauty? Because my outer beauty is so…lacking?
THIS WAS NOT PROMISING.
“Maybe that’s what your hypnotist did for you. Maybe now when you look at a man, you see him as he really is: eighteen, horny and fervently proud of his almost-there mustache.”
Let us pray.
tyler perry.
love his backstory: broke, homeless, an escapee from horrific childhood abuse, he chose to write. He wrote. He wrote eleven plays and toured them around the country. He found an audience, and a passionate audience, and he leveraged the loyalty of that audience to get a movie deal. His first movie, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, cost $5.5 million dollars to make and grossed $50.6 million in box office receipts. Since that movie, Tyler Perry made eight more (Madea’s Family Reunion, Daddy’s Little Girls, Why Did I Get Married?, Meet the Browns, The Family that Preys, Madea Goes to Jail, and I Can Do Bad All By Myself) and grossed nearly $400 million dollars.
LOVE that.
love that he started in the the-ah-tah darling. How arty. You know I love The Artists.
love that he built an audience and leveraged their passion for his work into movie-making for the masses. I see analogies there. Ahem. Writing. Social media. Platforms. Influence. Audience. Passion. That’s all I’m a-saying.
love his fucking fearlessness. Tyler Perry recently wrote a wrenching email to his fans:
I’m tired of holding this in. I don’t know what to do with it anymore, so, I’ve decided to give some of it away…
Memories at 40: Not long ago, I was asked to speak at an engagement. I walked in and I was told that they had assigned a person to take care of me while I was there. She walked up to me, all of 5′2″ of her, and asked if I needed anything. I looked at her and started to sweat. It took me back thirty-something years to her apartment. I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old when I went over to play with her son and Matchbox cars.
She opened the door in skimpy lingerie. There was a man sitting on the couch, smoking. She told me that her son was in the bedroom. I was there playing with him about 20 minutes when I heard the man arguing with her. He said he was leaving and slammed the door. She came into the bedroom and told me that I had to go home. She told her son to take a bath and she locked him in the bathroom. I was at the front door trying to get out, when she came in and laid on the sofa and asked me if I wanted the key. I told her I had to go home as it was getting dark. She put the key inside of herself and told me to come get it, pulling me on top of her.
Memories at 40: “What the f*#K are you reading books for?! That’s bull*#*T!”
“You F*#*ing jackass! You got book sense but you ain’t got no mothaf*#*en common sense! You ain’t sh*t and ain’t never gonna be sh*t!” I heard this every day of my childhood. As my father would beat and belittle me, he played all kinds of mind games with me. He knew I loved cookies as a kid, most kids do. So he would buy them and put them on top of the fridge and when I would eat them he would beat me mercilessly.
My mother was out one night, as she loved to play bingo, and my father came home…mad at the world. He was drunk, as he was most of the time. He got the vacuum cleaner extension cord and trapped me in a room and beat me until the skin was coming off my back. To this day, I don’t know what would make a person do something like that to a child. But thank God that in my mind, I left. I didn’t feel it anymore, just like in PRECIOUS. How this girl would leave in her mind. I learned to use my gift, as it was my imagination that let me escape. After he was done with his rant he passed out. Since my aunt lived two doors down, I ran to her. She saw me and was horrified. She loaded her 357 and went to kill him. Holding a gun to his head, her husband came and stopped her.
Memories at 40: I got a call not long ago from a friend. He told me that a man that I knew from church when I was a kid had died and he didn’t have any insurance. His family was trying to reach out to me to see if I would pay for his funeral. I quickly said no, but I wish I would have said yes.
There is something so powerful to me in burying the man that molested me.
I wish I would have dug the grave myself.
Memories at 40: I was about 8 or 9 years old. I had a crush on a little girl across the street. She would come over to my house and we’d play. She was about 12 or 13. One day she stopped coming and when I asked her why, she told me that my father was touching her. I didn’t believe her, so I talked her into staying one night. We were both asleep — she was in one bed and I was in another. I opened my eyes to see my father trying to touch her and her pushing him away. I moved in my bed trying to make him think I was waking up. He looked over at me and left out of the room. Not long after that, he beat me mercilessly for something again. Another mind game set up, so I told my mother what he had done. The blood drained from her face. We left that day. We were at my Aunt’s house and he came there about 1am. Not long after that we were back at home. Nothing would compare to the random, drunken, violent beatings I would receive from then until I was 19.
Memories at 40: We would spend the summers in the country, with my father’s adoptive mother. As a kid I was always sick. I had asthma and he hated it. He hated that I wasn’t strong and viral like him. He hated that I couldn’t be in the sawdust, pollen and the raw lumber like him. He hated that I liked to read and write and draw. He hated that me and my middle sister were darker-skinned than him. He didn’t think he could make a dark baby. He just hated everything about me I guess. Anyway, I had to go to the doctor every Tuesday to get shots to control my allergies. When his mother found out she said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with that damn boy…he just got germs on him. Stop wasting all that money.” When my mother left to visit some friends I heard what sounded like water running in a tub but it was sporadic. She came and got me out of the living room leaving my Matchbox cars on the floor. She said she was going to kill these germs on me once and for all. She gave me a bath in ammonia.
Grateful at 40: I was asked recently how I made it through all of this, (half has not even been told) and my answer to that is…I know for a fact that there is a GOD. When my father would say or do those things to me, I would hear this voice inside of me say, “That’s not true” or, “Don’t believe that” or, “You’re going to make it through this”. I didn’t know at the time what “it” was, but today I surely have no doubt that “it” was GOD. That voice always gave me comfort. It allowed me to hold on. It kept me from being strung out on drugs, from dying when I wanted to commit suicide. It kept me from being a gang banger or drug dealer. Worse than all of those things put together, it kept me from being him. It brought angels to comfort me after every foul, harsh word or every welt on my legs or back. GOD, only GOD.
so. Tyler Perry. He’s brave. He’s real. He tells it. He wrote his way out of poverty and pain. What’s not to love?
errr…the movies? I’ve only seen two. I laughed awkwardly and I wished that I didn’t and wished for more of a, well, craft and so no, I don’t love them. They kinda make me wonder when Martin Lawrence is gonna show up.
they make me itchy. they make me wonder why big ostensibly ‘black’ films often feature black men in dresses. Dave Chapelle – and by no means am I suggesting that he’s a thought leader – wonders about this too. He thinks it is a conspiracy by the white Hollywood establishment to publicly disempower and humiliate successful black actors. Or at least I think that’s what he thinks. He was a bit incoherent and twitchy when I saw this on Oprah so I may be filling in the blanks.
I don’t have a problem with incoherent and twitchy. I actually appreciate it. It leaves lots of space for interpretation.
I don’t have a problem with drag, either. But it does make me wonder why we apparently need to see rich, powerful black men in dresses.
this in turn makes me pause to note that if putting a man in a dress is a way to humiliate him, then my god it must be humiliating to be an actual woman. [Note: I am a woman.]
so then I worry that – despite the fact that Tyler Perry identifies with strong black women – maybe his films mock women. Then I wonder what are his movies really saying about women. or gender. or sexual orientation. or or or.
and I wonder ’bout all the bitch-slapping of Tyler Perry. I worry about my casual use of the term bitch-slapping because it is painfully accurate here which makes it all the more violent and disconcerting. I mean, think about what ‘bitch-slapping’ means and the context from whence it springs. Pimps controlling ‘their’ bitches. The ubiquitious naming – by everyone, it seems – of black women as bitches. Again, the allusion to feminization and feminized abuse makes it all the more humiliating to inflict on a man. I just did it now.
I worry when people start tearing down a rich, famous powerful black man. I wonder what that’s all about. (Actually, I don’t wonder what that’s all about.) I’m not even cool with dissing Kanye for being a jackass unless you’re Obama because otherwise it degenerates into the N word PDQ. I even worry about Michael Vick. Lots of times people are just waiting for a reason to bitch out a successful black man. And there’s the word bitch again.
I worry that to diminish a black man we put him in a dress.
I worry that to be made or compared to a woman is to be diminished.
I worry that this kind of man/woman discussion reinforces notions of gender and sexuality that are problematic and constraining and oppressive and the mofo problem in the first place.
I worry that I’m only worrying about gender ‘cuz I’m a white woman and that’s my thing. We’re hundreds of words into this essay and I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Spike Lee draws a direct line from minstrel shows to Tyler Perry’s movies that engage in and perpetuate stereotypes of “coonery and buffoonery“.
then I worry that I’m not dealing with the black thing because the only form of oppression I understand is gender and then I wonder, how the fuck am I going to champion my black, biracial babies if I don’t make sense of black means and what black is constructed to mean and the histories of the images I consume?
so a twitter debate that morphed into a most excellent rant by Damian J. Denson (@HypnotiqOne) rocked my world. It is not the only answer, but it is good.
Gotta luv|Hate w Perry but this T[hanks]giving his work will undoubtedly B screened by my fam. They will laugh & cry. I cant complain.
In defense of Tyler Perry (Yes, in defense): When I go home for T-giving, I will undoubtedly be a part of screenings of your recent work. In spite of the Black elite proposing I practically pause each and every DVD and proselytize about abhorrent imagery and coonery, I won’t.
Critiques of Perry & his work happen abt twice a month these days n my feed. These new Blacks have really “gotten over.” And they bother me. Perry & I have a certain Love|Hate, but I’ve never seen my mother, grandmother, & aunts laugh so hard by a bootleg recording of a stageplay. Tears. Choking. Laughing. Screaming. Giggles. Tears. Smiles. All from what “they” now say we should be ashamed by. I’m not. I won’t be.
Madea could have been based on many an Aunt (or Uncle for that matter). And I won’t disown the family that I see reflected in Perry’s work.
Should more multifaceted stories be told? For sure (Perry even agrees, ie. Precious). So to that I say, make them.
But I find it very offensive (and elitist) to tell other Black people where to find humor or good storytelling of THEIR liking. So keep making your movies, Mr. Perry.
hmmm mmm. Assent. Ascent. Yes. Thank goodness.
and thank goodness for everyone stepping up to start and have this conversation. Thanks to Tyler Perry. To his audience. To Spike Lee, the intellectuals and elitists and their critics, too. To Damian J. Denson. Well said.
and Precious. Can’t wait to see it. So glad Tyler Perry is famous and makes wacks of cash and can throw it behind a movie like this.
love that he did.
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you can find Damian J. Denson on twitter as @HypnotiqOne. I wish I wrote his bio:
Damian J. Denson. Professional Proselytizer. Freelance Writer. Cultural Critic. Doctoral Candidate. Mama’s Boy. Scene Stealer. Your Lucky Charm.
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