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