This is a rant from the best of Craigslist, and it’s been getting a great deal of attention from various forums, including Smart Bitches and Mightygodking:

“What Happened to All the Nice Guys?”
[Date: 2007-11-19, 3:52AM PST]

I see this question posted with some regularity in the personals section, so I thought I’d take a minute to explain things to the ladies out there that haven’t figured it out.

What happened to all the nice guys?

The answer is simple: you did.

See, if you think back, really hard, you might vaguely remember a Platonic guy pal who always seemed to want to spend time with you. He’d tag along with you when you went shopping, stop by your place for a movie when you were lonely but didn’t feel like going out, or even sit there and hold you while you sobbed and told him about how horribly the (other) guy that you were fucking treated you.

At the time, you probably joked with your girlfriends about how he was a little puppy dog, always following you around, trying to do things to get you to pay attention to him. They probably teased you because they thought he had a crush on you. Given that his behavior was, admittedly, a little pathetic, you vehemently denied having any romantic feelings for him, and buttressed your position by claiming that you were “just friends.” Besides, he totally wasn’t your type. I mean, he was a little too short, or too bald, or too fat, or too poor, or didn’t know how to dress himself, or basically be or do any of the things that your tall, good-looking, fit, rich, stylish boyfriend at the time pulled off with such ease.

Eventually, your Platonic buddy drifted away, as your relationship with the boyfriend got more serious and spending time with this other guy was, admittedly, a little weird, if you werent dating him. More time passed, and the boyfriend eventually cheated on you, or became boring, or you realized that the things that attracted you to him weren’t the kinds of things that make for a good, long-term relationship. So, now, you’re single again, and after having tried the bar scene for several months having only encountered players and douche bags, you wonder, “What happened to all the nice guys?”

Well, once again, you did.

You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy. You laughed at his consideration and resented his devotion. You valued the aloof boyfriend more than the attentive “just-a-” friend. Eventually, he took the hint and moved on with his life. He probably came to realize, one day, that women aren’t really attracted to guys who hold doors open; or make dinners just because; or buy you a Christmas gift that you mentioned, in passing, that you really wanted five months ago; or listen when you’re upset; or hold you when you cry. He came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an asshole than he ever wanted to be.

Fact is, now, he’s probably getting laid, and in a way, your ultimate rejection of him is to thank for that. And I’m sorry that it took the complete absence of “nice guys” in your life for you to realize that you missed them and wanted them. Most women will only have a handful of nice guys stumble into their lives, if that.

So, if you’re looking for a nice guy, here’s what you do:

1.) Build a time machine.
2.) Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass.
3.) Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab ahold of it.

I suppose the other possibility is that you STILL don’t really want a nice guy, but you feel the social pressure to at least appear to have matured beyond your infantile taste in men. In which case, you might be in luck, because the nice guy you claim to want has, in reality, shed his nice guy mantle and is out there looking to unleash his cynicism and resentment onto someone just like you.

If you were five years younger.

So, please: either stop misrepresenting what you want, or own up to the fact that you’ve fucked yourself over. You’re getting older, after all. It’s time to excise the bullshit and deal with reality. You didn’t want a nice guy then, and he certainly doesn’t fucking want you, now.

Sincerely,

A Recovering Nice Guy

Oh, my. Such bitterness. Clearly there were sexual expectations, and quite possibly a sense of righteous entitlement, that contradict his self-designation of ‘Nice Guy’.

Am I alone in suspecting that all his supposedly selfless efforts and attentions were actually investments, investments that demanded some kind of coital pay-off? If that’s the case, then he clearly sees her as a prostitute, and that he’d felt he’d paid for rent on her body, and was ready to move in.

Not so ‘nice’ at all, really.

Manipulative? Certainly.

Exploitative? Absolutely.

Nice? The polar opposite.

After pondering the smouldering anger over an absence of eagerly anticipated reciprocity, were the female equilvalent of this diatribe written and posted, I realized it would be signed “Doormat”.

Tragically for all concerned, what “Recovering Nice Guy” failed to understand is that at the outset of the relationship — with his “Platonic guy pal” approach — is that he’d cast himself in the role of a brother, or a cousin, or an uncle, or at the very worst, a father. Once that’s set in the other’s mind, it’s a damned difficult thing to dislodge.

And I speak here from bitter experience. Lemme tell ya, kids, having someone you see and feel towards as a brother, someone you foolishly trusted, coming on to you sexually — especially if aggressively — is frightening and sickening. It’s wrong in every possible direction, and sets off all kinds of claxons because it howls of incest.

Yet, somehow, it’s all her fault.

[And neither are we allowed the woman's side of the story.]

But to my great delight and vast relief, I also encountered the rebuttal to the ‘nice guy rant’, also posted on Craigslist:

RANT: The Myth of the Nice Guy Finishing Last
[Date: 2004-12-08, 3:01PM CST]

I think it’s important to expose the lie of the “nice guy” because I see too many of my female friends feel guilty over these losers that they don’t want and I hope to give these dumbasses a wake up call, so they stop hiding behind simplistic notions like “I’m too nice” or “girls like assholes” and actually go out and improve themselves.
I’m not saying there isn’t a game being unconsciously played that makes people harder to get more desirable, but assholes with nothing to offer don’t get girls and assholes with something interesting to contribute do.
I do think genuine nice guys exist, but in my experience, they fall into one of two categories. They are either mentally retarded or they’re actually attractive, talented, successful men who are happy with themselves and don’t feel a need to prove anything. They are just nice to everyone, unless there is a good reason not to be and they don’t have problems “getting the girl”. Most people are a mixture of assholness and niceness with varying degrees of success in the mating game based on their own individual qualities and the girls they’re going after.
The stereotypical “Nice Guy Who Finishes Last” (NGWFL) is not nice at all, but resentful, envious, negative, hateful boy who blames every failure on outside influences and thinks a relationship with you is going to make them complete human beings.
They’re nice to you, because you’re better than them (in terms of looks, talents, personality, wit, general desirability, you get the point) and they have nothing else to offer you. They use niceness as a defense mechanism, a futile attempt to keep you around and keep you from ditching them, which just prolongs everybody’s misery. This is not to say they don’t have positive qualities, but compared to you they don’t. The NGWFL usually is pretty knowledgeable in one, maybe two things, but isn’t well rounded enough to keep the attention of potential relationships. Also, these very same boys ignore or are inconsiderate to girls that don’t meet their expectations (i.e. fat, ugly).
So you see girls, you’re buying into this manipulative, pathetic jerk’s game. It’s not helping them and it’s keeping you from finding some of us who are actually together and would make good, interesting company. Maybe some of you have low self-esteem or daddy issues or whatever, and it makes you feel special to have a NGWFL wanting you while you string him along. Well, you’re a dumb bitch, and need to get a life too. You’re only making things worse.
So, you selfish NGWFL, get over yourselves, stop playing your video games 24/7 and whining about being too nice, don’t threaten to kill yourself if she dumps you (that did happen to a lady friend of mine), get out there and find more interests, develop a better personality and when YOU are happy with YOU, maybe a girl will be too.

Ah, thank you. Succinct, and no more blunt or harsh than needed.

All in all, I’m glad to have found the ‘nice guy rant’ and the follow-up anti-rant. This gives me a superior grasp of one of the more disturbed and disturbing characters in my wildly arcing, multi-part beast of a novel.

I may even give him his own book.