Too Nice For Your Own Good

The cost of 'Be Nice' culture is women's agency

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Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

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We’re about to wade together into a territory of discourse that is potholed with bad faith interpretation and floodlit by brittle egos. I figure that a column on gender is only really worth writing when it’s attempting to do something completely honest, because it’s invariably going to annoy both women and men in different ways and for different reasons, no matter how I go about it. So look, if you ascribe to a kind of feminism where women are an inherently victimised category of vulnerable person, it might be best if you don’t read on. And if you’re a cranium-measuring internet misogynist who thinks women are internally incoherent and oh my god why won’t they have sex with you, you too should stop here. I’ve got nothing for either of you.

This week, during a video call with my friend in Ireland, I made a flippant comment about not being ‘nice.’ We were talking about work, and my remark was a slightly glib, underthought nod to the fact that I consciously avoid cultivating niceness as a virtue. Predictably, my friend responded the way supportive female friends often do. She laughed a little awkwardly, then countered by insisting that of course I’m nice.

Her reaction felt like the right thing to do—a reflex rooted in female solidarity. We’re taught to reinforce positive narratives, even when we haven’t really stopped to consider whether they’re true. This interaction left me thinking again about the perniciousness of ‘be nice’ culture, especially after reading Kat Rosenfield’s article On What Women Want. Niceness isn’t a virtue; it’s a maxim—a social expectation that subtly undermines women’s autonomy and agency, and one which women perpetuate.

So listen, I’m not nice. In this nuanceless universe of tedious absolutes, that may read as saying I cultivate the art of being a total asshole. Not so. Between ‘nice’ and ‘total asshole’, there is a veritable panoply of options. Not being ‘X’ doesn’t mean being ‘Y’. It means being ‘not X’. Niceness is not kindness or compassion or honesty. It isn’t friendliness or charitableness. It is, among other things, the prioritisation of other people’s comfort. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily, except when it isn’t what you want to prioritise. Except when you hate it and it makes you feel furious and hard done by and as though you’ve harmed yourself to please someone else. When it makes you lose respect for yourself.

I make a sincere effort not to consent to anything that I don’t actually want, even if the consultation is a false one (and it often is in a world where women are expected to be nice, accommodating, and to prioritise the needs of others). If you ask me my preference, I’ll treat the question like an actual question, and not an optical courtesy. If you suggest Turkish food for dinner and I really don’t feel in the mood for it today, I’ll tell you that I’d prefer not and suggest some other options so we might find a mutually appealing one. If you ask me to go to a gig with you (Weeknd tickets, anyone?), to read something you’re working on or to be the godparent to your baby, I’ll think carefully about whether these are things I can freely do without reservation or resentment.

If the answer is no, I’ll politely decline, even if it means you think I look bad. I don’t want to resent you. I don’t want to disrespect myself. I don’t want to diminish my own agency, which I do each time I consent to something I don’t truly want. And I really don’t want to find myself feeling trapped at a Weeknd concert entirely of my own volition, listening to Fuckboy anthems at the decibel level of a volcanic eruption and wishing I’d never met you.

In its various, conflicting modern forms, feminism has a tendency to overcorrection and unprincipled endorsement of behaviours which, when exhibited by men, are (correctly) dismissed as sexist. I’m not suggesting that people should be ‘not nice’. I’m not suggesting that a woman exercising her agency to behave like the worst male stereotype you’ve ever met, or that being a hostile, uncaring person is liberating, actually, when women do it. I’m suggesting that ‘be nice’ as a blanket maxim is not as straightforward or positive as it first seems. It often means ‘don’t make others uncomfortable’.

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Image credit: Hadas Weiss

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Niceness is the female virtue, and not generally one we’re consulted on. It can look like an expectation that you intuit the physical needs of others — devote your mental space and energy to anticipating without prompt whether they are too cold, too hot, hungry, lonely, upset, bored or unhappy, and then suggest ways to rectify it. That you orchestrate the boring part of what makes a fun event fun — make sure there are enough cups, and enough clean ones, so that nobody is left thirsty or neglected. Calculate the timing for everyone’s arrival at the barbecue or organise transportation for the family holiday. Be the person to ensure that someone comes to feed and walk the dog while you’re away, so he isn’t neglected or lonely or bored.

These are not expectations which are tied into our concept of a man’s value. His consideration for the unspoken, the invisibly required, the anticipated or intuited need of others. If he’s good at or attentive to these things, we consider him an especially good human being. If a woman is good at these things, we consider her to be adequately in line with the expectation of natural female impulses and instincts. However, in this story of the unfair standard of gendered expectations, we forget the bit about female agency. We omit the part where we participate – often resentfully – in the maintenance of these standards while maintaining the right be feel victimised by them.

It isn’t coercion when women routinely choose to abide by an expectation that they put the other person first in almost every sort of interaction. It’s a bad choice. Being ‘nice’ can be a cover for powerful negativity. It can veil (often ineffectively) deep resentment at this dumb expectation of managing everyone’s needs and feelings while electing to do it anyway. There’s a point at which we become complicit. It’s vaguely upon realising that you hate this and continue to do it anyway, in circumstances where you have agency you are choosing to let atrophy.

There are situations, cultures, customs whereby there is limited choice or none at all, of course. My mother, raising us alone in the 90s and early 2000s, was perpetually overwhelmed. She did an astonishingly good job in the circumstances, but ultimately strove to meet an impossible standard that could only harm her. She would frantically clean the house, complaining of the pressure of being expected to work two jobs and have a spotless home, before anyone came over to our already incredibly clean house. Like all of us, my mother was a product of her time. She was not totally free but she did have some autonomy. She had some agency. Often, she elected to use it in ways that made her life harder.

Women in Afghanistan, legally bound to silence, do not have the option of saying ‘plan the barbecue yourself, Ronald’. They can’t snap ‘Stop shivering dramatically in my living room and just ask someone to shut the window, Annabelle.’ They are neither being invited, nor declining, to attend a Weeknd concert. Those of us who are not living under violent and coercive control still have to care for those more vulnerable than us who need care. We have to do the boring life tasks that must be done. We don’t have to be ‘nice’. We don’t have to assent to every request for assistance just because our mothers made us feel that we’re failing if we don’t. We don’t have to volunteer time we don’t have to help that colleague we consider undeserving. We don’t have to go to a Weeknd concert to make someone else happy if the thought of going makes us feel burdened and resentful and kind of grossed out. We don’t have to remove our own choice from scenarios where we do have one in order to preserve another person’s inaccurate conception of who we are.

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Image credit: Sarah Cooper

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Those of us who do have agency regularly use it to make other people happy and comfortable, even in instances where we don’t want to, and for people who are not deserving of this extreme consideration. This training in, and prioritisation of niceness increases the social cost of subversion. It makes a woman not ‘being nice’ look closer to shockingly uncaring behaviour.

It perpetuates the expectation that a normal woman will be amenable, accommodating, and, possibly, psychic. The problem is that niceness turns women into liars. It isn’t necessarily consideration. It’s often evasive. It prioritises imminent comfort over truth, even when the truth would be helpful and leads to outcomes that are anything but ‘nice’. If I behave unprofessionally in a dispute with a work colleague and a friend tells me she thinks I’m in the right (though she doesn’t – she thinks I’m being an ass but she’s just trying to be supportive), then I can internalise that feedback and become a worse person. It spurs me into building a self-righteous story of the justice of my cause instead of gently pointing out that I’m behaving poorly and helping me to effectively resolve a difficult situation.

Honesty and niceness can be incompatible in a world where being nice means preserving comfort over truth. I need my friend to take me by the shoulders and tell me that I could have handled it better if that’s what she thinks. That is love and support. It’s ‘nice’ to reassure someone (and it’s what we do when we go into interactions with other people assuming responsibility for their emotional equilibrium and physical comfort) but it’s harmful, dishonest and disrespectful if we’re not being truthful. It leads us to say one thing and mean another, which is very bad for women.

The idea that this is standard female behaviour generates fuel for those aforementioned skull-measuring misogynists. If women don’t say what they mean, think and want in conditions where they can (which is most conditions because we are not a collective of fragile victims), the consequence is not just diminished individual agency, but diminished agency for all of us. We cannot maintain that women have agency and then take seriously the idea that when a woman unequivocally consents to anything from to going to a Weeknd concert or having Turkish food for dinner to having sex with someone, that there is a sense in which she might not mean what she says. That, like a child, she is too vulnerable a category of person, so fragile or sensitive to atmospheric cultural pressures that we cannot take her own account of what she wants or thinks seriously, even when she is explicitly telling us to.

Kat Rosenfield articulates the problem with shifting definitions of female agency in her article discussing consent culture and the recent Neil Gaiman exposé: “The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure…”

It's deeply unpleasant to go through life feeling that you don’t have the entitlement to be honest in case someone else doesn’t like it. To say, ‘actually I don’t care for red wine’ or ‘I’m not interested in a second date with you but it was nice to meet you’. It’s terrible to feel as though it’s your primordial responsibility to believe that you need to maintain a particular façade which is utterly inauthentic in order to deserve the respect of people you resent, or maybe even dislike.

This perhaps isn’t a good time, culturally speaking, to be making a point like this. That an unfair collective expectation we have of women is not one women are powerless to counteract. Some women are, obviously. That really just escalates the responsibility the rest of us have in instances where there is a choice to model modes of respect and care for others which don’t entail emotional subservience to their needs. In not being ‘nice’, you may increase instances of conflict when other people’s expectations of you go unmet. It may open you to judgement. It may require unlearning some deeply rooted gendered nonsense about who you need to be in order to be valued. It may require embracing new ways of being compassionate, loving and supportive to people you care about.

Niceness is a self-abnegating trap. The result of deprioritising it, for me, anyway, has been less internal fury and more self-respect. A healthier sense of what I have control over and responsibility for, and what I don’t. A deeply liberating consciousness that other people are responsible for their own feelings and that my responsibility to them is not determined by their expectations of me. That soiled feeling of complicity when someone treats you poorly and you let them to keep the peace has gone and, I hope, relationships with friends have become more trusting, honest and safe. Niceness may be the female virtue, but it isn’t one worth cultivating.

My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By is out now! If you’d like to order the hardback, audio or Kindle editions, they’re linked below.