The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
10 — Wednesday, February 24, 2021
statement
“
I’m a nice guy,” crooned Neil,
the
sloppy,
cocaine-addicted
aspiring novelist, to the woman
he’d just attempted to sexually as-
sault, Carey Mulligan’s Cassandra.
She eyes him now knowing other-
wise. “I’m a nice guy.” Neil repeated,
desperation creeping into his voice.
Cassandra smiled. “You keep say-
ing that. You’re not as rare as you
think. You know how I know? Be-
cause every week, I go to a club, and
every week, I act like I’m too drunk
to stand. And every f---ing week, a
nice guy like you comes over to see if
I’m okay. You want to f--- me still?”
“I’m a nice guy.”
Though I watched “Promising
Young Woman” on pay-per-view in
my bed by myself, I could still hear
the collective eye roll from women
everywhere at this line. I could al-
most as clearly hear the gears turn-
ing in the head of every man who’d
heard the line and thought back to a
time he’d crooned it too.
I remember hearing it in high
school. I got B’s DM almost a month
after he’d been accused of sexually
assaulting a girl I knew as a friend of a
friend of a friend. This news shocked
me as I thought back to running lines
with him in a practice room for a play
we were both auditioning for. Slight-
ly chubby, awkwardly kind and will-
ing to run lines with the freshman
girl who didn’t know anyone there,
he seemed like such a … nice guy. He
promised. He promised that he was
a nice guy in the DM, then he asked
me on a date. He was probably lone-
ly after he’d been kicked out of the
show based on the allegations, but I
knew better. This was no nice guy.
I blocked him from my Instagram,
along with the story from my mind.
I heard this line again a few years
later. S was my new friend, why
shouldn’t I have thought of him as
a nice guy? I was crewing a show he
was starring in, and he sure seemed
like one in the beginning. We’d get
coffee after rehearsals. He’d always
offer to drive and pay. He showered
me with compliments, even men-
tioning me in his bio in the playbill.
Swoon. And so, I had no reason to
think otherwise until his texts be-
gan to get more frequent and more
demanding, and I complained to my
friends that he was beginning to get
a little … clingy?
I felt the first red flag when I told
him I’d lost my virginity and he re-
sponded, “How about you seriously
consider not f---ing someone unless
you’re in a committed relationship
with them.” First, this is verbatim,
I still have the screenshots. Second,
this is some seriously demented pa-
triarchal nonsense.
Another red flag sprung up when
he pointed out that I’d stopped re-
sponding as much as I used to and
that he had “separation anxiety”
when I ignored him. “I’m working,”
I lied. “Are you lying to me?” he re-
sponded. Yikes. He wasn’t wrong,
but he clearly couldn’t take a hint.
His response? “Don’t ignore me.
I’m a nice guy.”
I brushed it off and showed the
texts to my friends. We ended up
laughing about it. I would never have
admitted it to myself at the time,
but the attention seemed harmless.
The red flags are obvious now, but
at the time I was almost flattered to
have someone so obsessed with me.
It became a little less funny when
he started texting my friends beg-
ging them for my address because he
wanted to drop off my usual coffee
order and apologize for being clingy.
I then told him I didn’t want to be
friends anymore. It was even less
funny when he told one of our mutu-
al friends, “Honestly, the only thing
that would fix our friendship would
be a gun.”
So much for a nice guy. Isn’t it fun-
ny how that works?
From my experience with guys,
this is how it usually goes: Guys only
have to promise they’re nice guys in
the event they prove themselves to be
otherwise. A nice guy is a term used
“to describe someone who believes
himself to possess genuine ‘nice guy’
characteristics, even though he ac-
tually may not, and who uses acts of
friendship and basic social etiquette
with the unstated aim of progressing
to a romantic or sexual relationship.”
Sounds about right, especially when
you add the context that it’s often
used as a cover for violent or misogy-
nistic behavior directed at women.
After everything I’ve gathered
from my experiences with men, I re-
quest but one thing of the male popu-
lation: Be a nice guy and mean it. We
want to give you the benefit of the
doubt. Women are not prudes or “So-
cial Justice Warriors” or “unf---able
b-tches” for not putting out or not
wanting to go home with you or put-
ting you in the “friend-zone” or not
letting you hold our drinks. We’ve
just heard way too many stories
about what happens to girls who do.
The threat of gender-based violence
is always in the back of our minds,
and we go out of our way to avoid
making ourselves a target. We’ll give
the guy we’re not very interested in
our phone number at the bar because
we don’t know how angry he’ll get
if we don’t. On the other end of the
spectrum, we aren’t sluts or whores
or whatever other terms of endear-
ment you want to call us to your bud-
dies when we do choose to do some-
thing with you. Assuming consent
was present, we think you’re a nice
guy. Don’t screw it up.
People who date guys, I commend
you for having to deal with not one
but two pandemics in these troubling
times: COVID-19 and the nearly as
deadly “Nice Guy” epidemic. Accord-
ing to a study published by the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
in 2018, six women were killed ev-
ery hour at the hands of someone
they knew. In February 2017, a school
nurse in a Dallas suburb began identi-
fying and counting women murdered
by men. By 2018, the spreadsheet has
reached 1,807 rows and counting.
But they were such nice guys…
No more
Mr. Nice Guys
BY RAELYNN SNODGRASS, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY