Scott Alexander rescued the "nice guy" concept

About five years ago I encountered the idea of the evil "Nice Guy™". I'm not sure which essay started the whole thing, it could have been this one but I'm not sure. The basic concept was a male author was criticizing women for falling for jerks and rejecting good but shy partners. 

I read it and didn't see anything wrong with the argument, then it was pointed out to me that the author expects women to make the first move towards timid men.

Critics portrayed the essay as saying that self-described nice guys were actually vile men who expected sex for women as an exchange for treating them in a normal fashion. Legitimate nice guys are spelled out in lowercase, while the evil ones are called Nice Guys™.

But when I read it I saw someone who doesn't understand female attraction. I believe women are attracted to confidence and a take-charge attitude. They don't want to make the first move; they want to feel desired and swept up the romantic display. What the author needed was a better approach, not sensitivity training.

Still, it gave the term "nice guy" a dark aura for me, the way men who promise they will be a "perfect gentlemen" always seem to be grabby creeps and I now refuse to use the term.

Well, Scott Alexander has saved the term singlehandidly with a long but brilliant and well-paced blog post. He describes a man named Henry who is a serial abuser of women who has been married five times and used violence against all of them.

When I was younger – and I mean from teeanger hood all the way until about three years ago – I was a nice guy. In fact, I’m still a nice guy at heart, I just happen to mysteriously have picked up girlfriends. And I said the same thing as every other nice guy, which is “I am a nice guy, how come girls don’t like me?” 

There seems to be some confusion about this, so let me explain what it means, to everyone, for all time. 

It does not mean “I am nice in some important cosmic sense, therefore I am entitled to sex with whomever I want.” 

It means: “I am a nicer guy than Henry.” 

Or to spell it out very carefully, Henry clearly has no trouble with women. He has been married five times and had multiple extra-marital affairs and pre-marital partners, many of whom were well aware of his past domestic violence convictions and knew exactly what they were getting into. Meanwhile, here I was, twenty-five years old, never been on a date in my life, every time I ask someone out I get laughed at, I’m constantly teased and mocked for being a virgin and a nerd whom no one could ever love, starting to develop a serious neurosis about it. 

And here I was, tried my best never to be mean to anyone, gave to charity, pursuing a productive career, worked hard to help all of my friends. I didn’t think I deserved to have the prettiest girl in school prostrate herself at my feet. But I did think I deserved to not be doing worse than Henry...

I don’t think I ever claimed to be, or felt, entitled to anything. Just wanted to know why it was that people like Henry could get five wives and I couldn’t get a single date..

Henry has four domestic violence charges against him by his four ex-wives and is cheating on his current wife with one of those ex-wives. And as soon as he gets out of the psychiatric hospital where he was committed for violent behavior against women and maybe serves the jail sentence he has pending for said behavior, he is going to find another girlfriend approximately instantaneously.

Exactly. That's exactly how I felt growing up, before I lost weight and started exercising confidence.

Alexander's point in the post is that whenever shy nerds like himself complain about their lack of romantic luck they are bombarded with claims of being the evil Nice Guys™ and not actual nice guys. These criticisms come from the social justice pit of the Internet, which is known for its vulgar hyperbolic scorched-earth rhetoric.

In a recent follow-up post, Alexander expands on that subject of online feminists bullying shy male nerds.

When feminists say that the market failure for young women is caused by slut-shaming, I stop slut-shaming, and so do most other decent people. 

When men say that the market failure for young men is caused by nerd-shaming, feminists write dozens of very popular articles called things like “On Nerd Entitlement”.

The reason that my better nature thinks that it’s irrelevant whether or not Penny’s experience growing up was better or worse than Aaronson’s: when someone tells you that something you are doing is making their life miserable, you don’t lecture them about how your life is worse, even if it’s true. You STOP DOING IT.

Alexander very carefully documented his examples of prominent feminist blogs kicking shy male nerds when they try to lift their faces out of the dirt, labeling them as scum and accusing them of every vile thing possible. This is not an example of idiot hunting. There really is a reactionary social justice mentality that crushes innocent, gentle male nerds whenever they try to voice a complaint. Some of them really are nice guys.

Hat tip to Bryan Caplan for the link.

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Idiot hunting with the Southern Poverty Law Center

The self-appointed taxonomists of hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center released a list of Men's Rights websites they consider to be the work of hatemongers, and have idiot hunted the issue to prove that only bigots can care about injustices men face.

M-Hawkins did a good take down of some of the nonsense, and even referenced a classic post I wrote about the feminist shell game, where criticism of modern feminist causes like affirmative action is misrepresented as opposition to older victories like voting rights.

He did a great job of showing the polarizing impact modern feminists can have. Feminist caricatures like Gloria Allred say if you don't mimic her exact goals and tactics for reaching them, then you are an evil bigot. There is nothing in between, she says. By the Southern Poverty Law Center's logic, her existence should disprove feminism as a legitimate movement.

It's also Allred's with-us-or-against-us thinking that leads to nonsense like this. Some of the examples on the list of Men's Rights deserve harsh criticism and are belligerently sexist, but then there are descriptions of pages like the MensActivism blog:

This website tracks news and information about men’s issues from around the world, with a focus on activism — and outrage. Par for the course are lurid headlines like this one: “Pakistani wife kills, cooks husband for lusting over daughter.” The site also runs stories like the one it headlined “Australia: Girl, 13, charged after taxi knife attack” that involve no abuse accusations, but are merely meant to undermine what the site claims is “the myth that women are less violent than men.”

What's the problem here?

Here's the kicker for the SAVE Series page

The site trumpets as a “key fact” that “[f]emale initiation of partner violence is the leading reason for the woman becoming a victim of subsequent violence,” even though a study shows that approximately twice as many women as men are injured during incidents of domestic violence.

That's poor reasoning. The Southern Poverty Law Center is trying to sweep male domestic violence victims under the rug, and their broken logic assumes they can judge who started a fight by who reported an injury afterwards. This is a basic failure in logic, but it's presented like some kind of trump card.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is guilty of idiot hunting. They have found some idiots on the web, an easy task no doubt, and used those anecdotal examples to "prove" that a civil rights cause is illegitimate. Shame on them, as Men's Rights advocates have shown a lot of potential.

I've learned a lot from Warren Farrell over the years and his brand of masculinism is truly a quest for gender equality.

Farrell declared we live in a bi-sexist society, where both genders have their own problems. That's not a way of saying men and women have an equal amount of problems, nor is it a wish to undue the progress women have made. Instead it's a desire to bring both genders forward with more progress.

The good feminists are out there fighting for gender equality, and by their own admission they have left a gap to be filled for men's issues.

False rape accusations, domestic violence and custody laws are real issues that need to be addressed, and I'm glad to see civil rights activists are out there tackling them. It's terrible that some jerks who want to turn back progress have made some idiot blog posts, but that doesn't disprove the important work other people are doing.
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Is domestic violence funny?

Quite a few people on this hidden camera show think so.



So it's out of the way, yes, I have personal experience with this. It causes you to notice things you otherwise would have missed.

A few years ago I was flipping through the channels and saw a bit from the show The King of Queens where the wife got a bad haircut and the husband accidentally said something insensitive about it while trying to be nice so she punched him in the arm and he yelped in pain.

And the laugh track sounded.

There's a slogan that says there is no excuse for domestic violence. Of course, when the victim is a man there are nothing but excuses, and its socially acceptable to make them.

Think about this video the next time you see a woman strike a man. It's not empowering or justified, and it certainly isn't funny.
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Is shooting a sleeping abuser self-defense?

Once again, a judge has let a woman go after executing her husband while he was asleep.

Clearly the victim, Mr. Cummings was an evil man: A white supremacist who was trying to make a dirty bomb. Amber Cummings also alleged that he was also a pedophile and sexual abuser.

But that doesn't justify a vigilante killing or premeditated "self defense." This was a murder, cold and simple. The shooter was in no immediate danger and chose to kill her husband instead of seeking help.

We have laws and rules in this country for a reason. Calling the police is supposed to be the first option when someone is in this situation. We also have a well-publicized system to take in and protect abused women. If someone is in an abusive situation in America, they always have somewhere to turn.

Well, as long as they're a woman or a child. If they're a man, we're not so concerned.

Also, there was no reference to a record of abuse before the murder. In the pursuit of justice, we should apply skepticism when someone makes an important claim over a matter as serious as domestic abuse. However, that's not the way things work out in practice.

Details like how both she and her husband slept with loaded guns simply raise more questions about exactly what was going on before she shot him in the head while their daughter was in the kitchen.

Maine's big alternative weekly, The Portland Phoenix, followed up when prison guards allegedly allowed three prisoners to savage a convicted child molester, who died a few days later. While in both of these cases it's hard to sympathize with the victim, an ordered society needs to leave these matters to its judicial system instead of the whims of violent vigilantes and mob justice.

It's really hard to muster up indignation when bad things happen to bad people. I don't think I could dedicate my life to protecting murderers and rapists from a system that must have some lapses here and there. There are other issues that resonate with me much more, but I'm glad there are people out there who care about this issue enough to get involved.

I won't hold my breath for The Phoenix to cover the Cummings killing as critically as the fatal prison beating. The staff has an ax to grind with the Maine prison system and they have been targeting the prison guards who did not intervene, not the prisoners who actually killed him. In the Cummings case, the murderer is a woman who's claiming abuse and has social activists backing her.

I wouldn't be surprised if they write an article slanted to her view. Not only was she let out with no jail time and no probation, she also escaped being institutionalized where she could receive mental health treatment.

From the Portland Press Herald article:

After [Justice Jeffrey] Hjelm left the courtroom, about 50 people wearing "Free Amber" stickers burst into applause.

Outside of the courthouse, Amber Cummings thanked people in the community for their support. Her husband was mentally ill, she said, and she didn't want people to be angry with him.

Well, at least she doesn't hate him. Instead of calling the police or a mental hospital, she must have put two .45 bullets into his head while he slept out of love.
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Getting away with a terrible crime

CNN has reported the latest undeniably false rape accusation story, and it follows the standard template.

-Male(s) accused of sexual assault have reputation ruined forever.

-Police find glaring problems with accusers story.

-Accuser is unnamed by press, wrongfully accused are named and pictured

-Police or district attorney decline to charge false claim maker.

-Sympathetic line for accuser's emotional well-being.

-All justified by saying real victims might be discouraged from reporting.

To this I ask one question. What value do we place on those potential case reports?


We've all been told that real rapes are under reported. As terrible as that is, we have to compare that to how many false reports are made and what damages that does.

From Tawana Brawley to the more recent Duke lacrosse case, false accusers have walked free after creating some pretty big messes that could have put their victims in prison for decades. Once free, those found guilty will have to register as sex offenders and face further social costs for the rest of their lives.

What's unknown is how large a slice of the real reported rapes would go unreported if these criminal cases were pursued. It's just assumed that the damage to society would be more than the benefit of discouraging further false reports.

While the percentage of false reports is hard to measure, there are credible reports of 25 percent and higher. Whatever the exact number is, each one is a tragedy. Each represents the life of the victim - the falsely accused - that is marked with shame for all eternity. Even if found innocent, the accused are still distrusted in some circles.

Forgotten here is the damage from false accusations to real rape victims. They certainly haven't benefited from a watered down definition of rape, a view that rape is a normal, or a society that tolerates false accusers, which leads to legitimate accusers being treated with suspicion.
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Gut reactions tell us how we really think

Last week the Maine State Police announced that the two bodies - a mother and her 12-year-old son - found in the burned out shell of an SUV were the result of a murder-suicide.

The response comments on the Portland Press Herald website reflect a disturbing thought trend; When a man kills, we go looking for the victim. When a woman kills, we try to find a man to blame.

Here's a typical example from the web site

"life musta been really bad at their 'home' for her to do this...makes you wonder about the husband."

A dead wife is the result of an evil man, a dead child from a suicidal wife is the result of an evil man, and a dead husband is the result of... an evil man.

Earlier this year Laureen Rugen, who stabbed her husband to death, was sentenced for manslaughter and the only jail time she received was while she awaited trial. Her defense? She said she was the victim of domestic violence, and the judged believed her without any supporting evidence, and plenty of testimonies that she was the real abuser.

What ever happened to "There's no excuse for domestic violence." When the perpetrator is a woman, it turns out there are plenty of excuses.

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