No More Mr. Nice Guy

Product Information

When questioned about their childhood, Nice Guys frequently tell me they grew up in "perfect,""great," Leave It To Beaver, or “All American” families. Exactly as I wrote earlier in this article: there is a difference between what society (feminist and otherwise) actually says is the problem with men (what makes them useless or bad, which always comes side-by-side with what would make them useful and good), and what these men misperceive as what society is saying. He explains how they can stop seeking approval and start getting what they want in life, by presenting the information and tools to help them ensure their needs are met, to express their emotions, to have a satisfying sex life, to embrace their masculinity and form meaningful relationships with other men, and to live up to their creative potential. Nice Guys are over-attentive; or always absent; are propelled by conscious shame; or else by unconscious shame. Nice Guy (in reference to the sarcastic “Nice Guy” trope), is not a peer-reviewed academic work but a pop-market advice-manual.

We now live in a civilized world, which allows us the safety to turn delay and indecision into truer collections of beliefs over time. Likewise, to try too hard to “be nice” to a partner, without thinking to emotionally connect or communicate with them, need not have any such grand explanation in fossilized immaturity; it can simply be the behavior of an adult who was never taught anything about relationships and hasn’t figured this stuff out yet.

More problematic is when Glover gets to his “do be” list, outlining his idea of the Integrated Male Paradigm, where black and white thinking can lead anyone to misread him as saying it is “okay” to have bad qualities rather than making sure only that what you have been thinking of as bad qualities are actually of a kind you and those who love you would be okay with and thus you don’t have to hide or lie about. All Glover does is take what women have already been saying for ages (on the internet alone I could find examples from 1988 to 2002), and presents it as his own new breakthrough theory: that being a controlling, dishonest, secretive, passive-aggressive over-expecting non-listener is not “being nice. Nice Guys generally focus their attention on meeting everyone else's needs while trying to be "low-maintenance" kinds of guys themselves. By taking matters into their own hands – by practicing healthy masturbation – recovering Nice Guys can change the most basic dynamics that shape the bigger picture of how they do sex. But we still need “psychologists,” so we throw chump change at them that all they can do with is fund garbage low-powered, small-sample studies with disastrous failure rates and useless effect sizes.

There is a toxic masculinity you should not be making yourself comfortable with, just as there are attitudes about sex one should not. As another example of what I mean, Glover says, “Trying to be ‘good’—trying to become what he believes others want him to be—is just one of many possible scripts that a little boy might form as the result of childhood abandonment experiences and the internalization of toxic shame. Likewise “climaxing too quickly” is simply a product of over-heightened arousal; if a guy climaxes and doesn’t offer to keep going with his partner with any of the entire remaining arsenal of sexual pleasuring available (fingers, tongues, and toys, intentional and improvised, all do exist as things), then you may have a censurable behavioral problem. Remember, no such personality type has even been shown to exist; Glover has done no science here, just some field philosophy, proposing untested hypotheses based on some personal experiences and anecdotes.By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. In relationships, a life–and–death struggle is played out to bounce their fear of vulnerability with their fear of isolation. By contrast, IMO, Glover comes across as a lazy and incompetent copycat, borrowing ideas from Covey, and deploying them poorly.