Silicon Valley’s Safe Space
I&#x27;d like to dive in to one of the specifics. It&#x27;s easy to disagree about which values people hold when you don&#x27;t back up those assertions. From the NYT article:<p>&gt; He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books.<p>This isn&#x27;t very informative because feminism has become such a generic broad brush label. Feminists of different eras believe different things because the people identifying as feminist changes, and people change their opinions. &quot;Feminism&quot; now basically means you&#x27;re talking about sex&#x2F;gender issues and you think some of those issues are hurting women. Both the trans-exclusionary and trans-inclusive communities will identify as &quot;feminist&quot; because they are both discussing sex&#x2F;gender issues, and they both think the other side is hurting women in particular. Your opinion about the various sides depend heavily on the specifics of what those sides are advocating for.<p>With that said, now let&#x27;s look at what Alexander&#x27;s article says:<p>&gt; And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – ~~are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”~~ EDIT: ARE TOTALLY GREAT, NO NEED TO TAKE THIS ONE SENTENCE OUT OF CONTEXT AND TRY TO SPREAD IT ALL OVER THE INTERNET.<p>Yeah, calling people &quot;Voldemort&quot; is a super minor aspect of the article he wrote. Let&#x27;s examine the context, which is his analysis of the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label. This is my summary of his article (which he has conveniently divided into 7 sections):<p>1) He describes one guy who&#x27;s poor as setup for his complaints about the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label. He says the <i>worst</i> response to someone complaining they&#x27;re poor is as follows:<p>&gt; You keep whining about how “unfair” it is that you can’t get a good job. “But I’m such a hard worker.” No, actual hard workers don’t feel like they’re entitled to other people’s money just because they ask nicely.<p>2) He describes a terrible guy with 5 ex-wives whom he abused, beat, and cheated on. He asserts that people complaining about not having a girlfriend despite being a &quot;Nice Guy&quot; are mystified because they&#x27;re nicer than this terrible guy who&#x27;s had lots of sex.<p>3) He quotes 5 articles talking about &quot;Nice Guys&quot;. He asserts that the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label unfairly maligns many men who are legit nice guys. (I believe the harassment he&#x27;s discussing is mostly the mocking on the &quot;Nice Guys of OKCupid&quot; blog, but it seems like there&#x27;s a bunch of subtext about other instances which he doesn&#x27;t link to or discuss.)<p>4) Alexander quotes &quot;Barry&quot; (IDK who this is) who says &quot;I feel my ability to enjoy complaining about my single state has been ruined by MRAs and anti-feminists.&quot; Alexander says that the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label predates the &quot;manosphere&quot;, so it can&#x27;t be a response to bad behavior by men. In reality, feminists are acting like people in the manosphere because:<p>&gt; People were coming up with reasons to mock and despise men who were sad about not being in relationships years before the manosphere even existed.<p>5) Alexander says the manosphere exists because women are being mean, and the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label is one instance of women abusing men. He says that shitty male behavior is radicalization caused by feminists verbally abusing genuinely nice guys.<p>6) He states that &quot;Nice Guys&quot; aren&#x27;t trying to date for just sex because otherwise they&#x27;d just hire a prostitute. Everybody deserves companionship and pair-bonding, and feminists complaining about &quot;Nice Guys&quot; are denying these dudes needs which friendship can&#x27;t fulfill.<p>7) He concludes his article by saying that virtuous people can have trouble dating, and unvirtuous people can do a great job dating. That seems unfair, and the manosphere is doing right by saying &quot;yes that&#x27;s unfair&quot; but feminists are doing wrong by saying &quot;Nice Guys are a problem&quot;.<p>I hope you find this summary accurate. It should give enough context for people who would agree with this article to follow along with why I think this is a shitty take. Alexander isn&#x27;t doing a enlightened analysis of the &quot;Nice Guy&quot; label because he never acknowledges that the articles are complaining about the men who say they are &quot;Nice Guys&quot; because they are in fact not nice. One of the articles he cites (Feministe) addresses this very criticism:<p>&gt; As discussions like this happen, inevitably someone gets defensive about the idea that “Nice Guys” are really assholes in disguise, because there are plenty of guys (and girls) who are actually very decent and respectful, just perhaps too shy to make the first move, and so on, and that they may appear to be “Nice Guys” even when they’re not. … I dated a “Nice Guy” for a while. It was suffocating. I never felt like I could relax and just be myself around him, because he had constructed some kind of idealized version of me, and that was who he was dating. He was also damned hard to get rid of.<p>He just blunders through a 7-section article complaining about dating without once addressing whether the &quot;Nice Guys&quot; the women are complaining about are actually being nice.