At face value, the phrase “nice guys finish last” makes some sense. What I think people are essentially saying is that without a bit of a mean streak, one can’t get ahead in the cut-throat world of American capitalism. People who are “nice” get pushed around and thus don’t get what they want.
So far, nice guys seem like they can finish far enough from first and close enough to last that the phrase isn’t totally useless. One who uses it seriously fails to take into account factors such as whether there is any good in the world, but I can believe there are cynics who subscribe to the idea there isn’t much.
Where the phrase becomes annoying is when dejected, would-be suitors use it. They complain of being put in the nebulous but seemingly inescapable “friend zone” by women. They express their concerns that women don’t like nice guys and always go for the wrong type – a type of guy different from them.
People need to stop with this line of thought. All they are really doing is blaming others for their own shortcomings; it’s men trying to say women lack discretion because they prefer “bad boys” to “nice guys.” This is an excuse men use to fault women for not liking them, when in reality their failure has nothing to do with either women or men and everything to do with them being the kind of person who makes that type of excuse.
Of course, this is an excuse that women don’t and can’t use. It’s only men placing the blame on women. The problem is this philosophy reflects a couple of larger cultural patterns. One is the privileging of men over women, positioning females as less capable of intelligent decision-making or exotic friend-zone demons, when in reality the dudes who they reject probably just smell weird.
The second theme is harder to pin down, but it has something to do with responsibility. Comments made with the intention of redirecting blame, removing personal ownership and alleviating responsibility have become commonplace. It creates a sort of paranoid polarization among people. It separates, but takes place less between individuals in the specific (i.e. “Reed, it’s your fault I forgot my lines”) than between larger social groups in the abstract (i.e. “Women don’t go for nice guys”).
The danger in this line of thinking is that it’s not thinking. It’s letting blanket statements do all the work. Generalizations like this allow myths such as the nice guy narrative to permeate our culture and damage the way we view others. Once ideas are thought of in broad, unspecific terms, they can go unquestioned. As a culture, it is important we distance ourselves from generalizations and quit blaming others in passive-aggressive ways before they become the norm.
Jake DeVirgiliis is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at devirgiliis@umdbk.com.
