An earlier draft of this post appeared about two weeks ago; entirely due to editorial dissatisfaction on my part, this updated version replaces it and thanks you for your patience. Actually-new content coming soon! I SWEAR.

I want to talk a bit about the “Nice Guy” (google it; hilarity guaranteed) debate from a slightly different perspective. Namely, because this is me, a perspective that is as broad and structural as it is personal, and as much about stories as it is about reality. I want to talk about the teen movies of our lives.

My last two years of high school were pretty ridiculous; one teen movie after another. You know this story – most popular girl in school falls for a weird nobody. You know this story – girl gets her heart broken, platonic friend who’s secretly in love with her has to be the one to listen to her heartbreak, help her get back on her feet, and in return he gets “friendzoned” and she chooses some asshole hotshot who’s wormed his way into her acquaintance. Cut to the prom, as our good friend and nice guy hero watches sadly as the unappreciative girl dances happily ever after with that outsider meathead.

But then, what about this? Flip the script: the object of love was the most popular BOY, and that nobody was a girl. Nobody’s nobodier friend had loved him all along, and took it upon herself to teach him to love again after his girlfriend dumped him and broke his heart. She put all her energy into healing him, and then a new girl swooped in, pretended to make friends with the boy’s circle, asked him out and he was never seen again.

Do you know why I swapped the genders? It’s because the plot doesn’t change, but the story does. In the first one the popular girl is shallow and ultimately a bitch, and the nice guy has been done wrong; he spouts invective and makes internet memes about how she led him on and friendzoned him before eventually realizing he’s too good for her. In the second one the platonic female friend is pathetic; you can just see her long skirts and dorky hair; the girl who steals the boy in the end is a skank and a bitch and a whore.

Do you see what happens here? In either version, the girls end up the villains. They are shallow heartbreakers or evil sluts or mousy, social-climbing fools. Can’t you just picture them? In either version, the guy has been injured – whether by the girl who dumped him or the girl who led him on. Women! He can say now. Who can understand them?! He’s probably played by Penn Badgley, when he’s the friend. Taylor Lautner, I think, when he’s popular. I like it.

What is happening to distort these tales is not just the bias of my memory — yeah, I actually lived through one in real life, but the events in both really are the same — but millennia of cultural beliefs that are as difficult to see past as it is to convince yourself that the blue and the green of this image are actually the same color (they are). Let’s run them down.

1. Girls are kind of evil. Let’s hate them. If you hadn’t figured it out by now, I was the platonic female friend who fumbled my chance at being rebound. Years and ample evidence (joint myspace account. animated hearts. slideshow. SHANIA TWAIN AUTOPLAY.) have shown me that I actually dodged a bullet with that guy, and yet for all that time — for all my feminist convictions — it is literally impossible for me to think of the girl who got him when I failed to without my reptile brain reeling off a litany of misogynistic slurs. Why hate him? HE was perfect, and misled, and an innocent victim of her feminine wiles. She was the lying ho who stole my man. Nice Guys may love the girls they want so badly; but give them half an excuse and the misogyny pummeled into ALL of us comes pouring out.
2. A dude’s love is a gift; he is entitled to be loved back. This is the point that first made me want to post. When the love of my teenage life chose another girl, I blamed her (see above); I didn’t blame him (gift me with your luuuvvvvv!); and most importantly, I actually blamed myself. Because I had no sense of entitlement that he should be mine; I DIDN’T FUCKING MAKE A PLAY. I wanted him, it wasn’t much of a secret that I wanted him, and yet instead of laying it down I chickened out (well, actually I was diagnosed with mono, and it was the week of my 18th birthday and also spring break and also the day before I planned to hand deliver a ~letter~ to confess my love and the secret history between his ex and myself*) (*did I mention that she was my OLDEST FRIEND and knew I liked him from the very beginning of their relationship and thus I also got to hate her for going out with him too? girls hating girls: HOORAY, SAYS THE PATRIARCHY) (seriously, these two years of my life: ri-dic-u-lous). The fact that I didn’t win his love was indicative to me only of my failure, not of his inherent masculine evil or his being some kind of tease. That’s because I don’t have male privilege; I wasn’t fed thousands of stories about people of my gender competing for and winning the affection of their love objects as an easy afterthought. Nice Guys have that privilege and that old old story, “decide on girl, show up, get gratefully laid,” seared into their heads and bros, honestly, I feel bad for you sons. Y’all done been brainwashed. There is nothing about just being there and liking someone that guarantees they should love you back, and we girls can yell at you for feeling entitled to our affection or we can laugh because we have never received parallel stories about our own romantic invincibility, but in the end, it’s not our fault you hold this misconception.We didn’t tell those stories.
3. Men desire; women reject. The weird dude who wants the beautiful popular girl who at least initially does not want him back is a narrative institution. Your Seth Cohens and your Bender-from-The-Breakfast-Club owe a debt to Sydney Carton (and Nice Guys, if you’re looking for a way to actually improve, may I recommend A Tale of Two Cities? It is a far, far better thing he goes to do than you have ever done spewing resentment around on memegenerator) and his forefathers all down the line to King Arthur, unloved by his own wife. This makes sense because unrequited love is a standard human experience, and — I’m just gonna slip the premise of this entire blog in here and see what happens — in most stories “the human experience” has been experienced solely by men. So there isn’t this tradition of stories about female emotion displaying the same complexity familiar to men; if it isn’t “want to have babies” or “very upset about something” it’s often not shown in female characters in the narratives deemed appropriate for male consumption. As a result, perhaps it’s understandable that men who’ve been fed the party line don’t fully realize that wanting and being rejected happens to us too (even in non-old maid capacity), that women don’t spend their time lolling on the throne of Power to Humiliate, that some women aren’t even that into men — in short, that we are human, and rejection is not a deliberately crafted insult we relish inflicting upon the Nice, but a simple byproduct of wanting to be with the people we love, too. Just like you.
4. WHO CAN FATHOM THE MYSTERIES OF THAT CREATURE CALLED WOMAN? Chicks, right? Impossible to understand! Such teases! So capricious! This is kiiiinda my favorite. First, girls are so untouchable and mysterious that they’re barely people, and when they lack personhood it’s super easy to project this idea of ownership and entitlement onto them, because they are things. Not human beings with desires and agency of their own. And second, once this ALIEN with her BOOBS and her MENSTRUATION (because patriarchal thinking is nothing if not cissexist) rejects you, what better way to discount her reasons and get out of having to account for yourself and your shitty romancin’ skills than to simply decide everything she does is senseless?
5. Women owe men; women are owned by men. Nope, I’m not gonna sweeten that up for you. Leaving it like it is. Because that is what is at the core of this.

It’s that last point that really gets me about this and makes me feel genuinely fucking unsafe when I see Nice Guys taking the internet by storm and demanding to be heard. No, we hear you already, and I don’t think you get, or at least I sincerely hope you don’t get, what your words mean. Every “bitch” uttered makes gendered violence that much more palatable. Every “leading me on” can be interpreted as “asking for it.” I don’t give a shit if the douchebags of the internet hold a douchebag pride parade every Sunday for the rest of my life; I can avoid you; I already do. What I’m not down with is RAPE CULTURE, the societal atmosphere that makes the lives of women and those perceived to be women dangerous and gross and often deadly.

Go, read Schroedinger’s Rapist and then come back and tell me why I should cater to whatever the fuck it is you want from me.

Edited to add: Okay, I may have gotten a little carried away by anger there, and in doing so flubbed my landing. I just have a lot of feelings, you guys. The point is, the Nice Guy narrative and rape culture work hand in hand to assure men that their feelings of entitlement are natural and inborn. But they’re not; they’re relentlessly taught. And this brainwashing is never more easy to spot than when you simply examine it in its full binary effect — there is no female equivalent, no inbred entitlement; there is no such thing as a Nice Girl, only one who wasn’t hot enough. Instead women are trained to be grateful, obligated, and altogether on the receiving end. As a fantastic acquaintance of mine observedyesterday, patriarchy doesn’t only teach men that they can naturally expect women’s time and affection, but it teaches women that those men are too, and that to refuse is something only a bitch would do.

Here we are, stretched across a cultural chasm that does none of us favors, teaches none of us emotional responsibility, and empowers none of us with the respect and autonomy we actually are entitled to by virtue of our humanity. The Nice Guy story is nothing new; it is an old, subjugating machine. Turn off the teen movie and grow the fuck up, team. How’s that for a landing?