This was in the comments of a prom proposal where the girl referred to the guy as her best friend......yikes

Ok, I don’t like to talk about this much there was a time when I was just like them: Fedora, the obsession with martial arts, the “times I respected women card”. I can’t necessarily speak for every one of them but there is this a semi-logical thought process that led directly towards that behavior/lifestyle and imagine many men followed the same path.

For me it came down to a rejection of what I saw was traditional masculinity. My dad was a “manly man” and he wanted me to play sports and work on cars but I wasn’t really that interested in that. To add to it I was physically weaker and the guys that played sports were not shy about beating the hell out of me just for fun.

To put it simply I didn’t fit in, I didn’t like the things that the other boys liked and at the time there was this fear that I might be gay because I liked to read books, I hated violence, and loved musicals. After determining that I was heterosexual (despite the insistence to the contrary by the football team) I was in desperate need of a masculine model while still rejecting the masculinity of my father and the bullies at school and still get girls to like me.

I hated everything about those people that rejected me so I rejected them and everything my teenage mind believed they were: mindless, uncultured brutes.

While trying to find my way in the world and survive high school I ended up stumbling face first into nearly every neckbeard cliche and now all these years later I think I can explain why:

An obsession with intellect: I was never going to be physically superior to any of my bullies but I knew I could outsmart them. For them it was “Do you even lift bro?” for me it was “Do you even read Nietzsche good sir?”

The Fedora: Everyone watched the latest movies and listened to the hottest pop songs so of course be being the smartest guy in the world made me above all that. I only watched critically acclaimed films from the early days of cinema and listened to classical music or jazz. The fedora was a symbol of class and elegance. Humphrey Bogart got all the girls and he wore one. Why wouldn’t it work for me?

The fascination with asian culture and bladed weapons: For me the allure of Japanese art and history was clear. Asian culture didn’t appear fetishize brutality for the sake of brutality and overt displays of strength. As I had understood it, strength came from within, from channeling some unseen energy. I was fascinated with samurai and ninja. They were powerful. They spoke softly but carried a big stick.

“Respecting” women: This one came from an desire to do good that went wrong. At the time I had never considered the transactional nature of my behavior (be nice=get girl). I saw these girls that I was attracted to going off and getting with the same people that had hurt me. I projected onto them, I assumed that the way they treated me was how they would treat them and I was determined to be better than them. I would be kind and generous. I would “listen” to women and understand what they wanted from a man. I would be what they asked for. I hadn’t realized at the time that I was essentially using women that just wanted a friend. All I felt was frustration as I bent over backwards to give women what they asked for only to get what I perceived as nothing in return.

After all that came the echo chamber. I finally got what I was looking for, a place to belong. But we ended up just confirming and reinforcing our own faulty beliefs. In the end we were nothing more than a hodge podge of sad little boys adorned in bastardized cultural signifiers, removed from context. We just wanted people to think we had value because we couldn’t value ourselves.

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