Reclaiming 'Nice' — Can We All Stop Acting Like Being Kind Is A Character Flaw?
On our cultural aversion to niceness.
Adrià García Sarceda | Unsplash I knew I had to leave New England when I almost hurled a rock through a stranger’s windshield. I had just finished a run on an unusually sweltering summer day, and as I neared the end of Blackstone Boulevard, the trees around me started spinning. I realized I must be severely dehydrated, and as I slowed down to walk, or rather a shuffle, across Hope Street, the truck at the crosswalk got impatient.
Other people, upon taking note of my scarlet cheeks, glistening forehead, and lame shuffle, might have responded with concern. But not the men sitting in the cab of this truck.
They began to honk and yell at me. The driver rolled down his window and snarled, “Hurry up!” That’s when I saw the rock at my feet, and that’s when I found myself resisting, with every fiber of my nice being, the overwhelming impulse to pick it up and hurl it through his windshield.
When I reached the sidewalk, I knew with more clarity than I’d ever previously admitted to myself that it was time to move. New England was making me mean.
Of course, I met plenty of nice people in New England, and I’ve met plenty of not-so-nice people elsewhere. While that specific corner of the country does take a perverse pleasure in its reputation for jerkery, our cultural aversion to “niceness” extends across all 50 states, including the West Coast state where I was born and raised.
Throughout my life, people have told me I’m nice, and it’s usually not a compliment.
Prostock-studio / Shutterstock
In high school, a former friend was rumored to have told another former friend that she thought I was nice, but not much else. People at work have told me I’m “too nice,” which I’ve learned is code for “lacking leadership qualities.” My daughter also frequently tells me I’m too nice, by which she means I’m not strict enough with her younger brother.
Whatever the implications behind the descriptor — whether it suggests blandness or naiveté or spinelessness — the assumption is that niceness simply cannot coexist with street smarts or depth or fortitude. People see my niceness and use it to dismiss me. Even when people are trying to be nice by telling me I’m nice, I still instinctively cringe.
As women, we’ve got to be careful with “nice” because the patriarchy loves nice women.
“Nice” means we’re fulfilling our feminine duty to be pleasant and agreeable. Nice women smile a lot and often blush, and generally keep our society running smoothly by deferring to the menfolk.
Women who aren’t nice are nasty, and/or difficult. They are the ones who persist nevertheless.
Men, on the other hand, aren’t really supposed to be nice at all. To succeed in work and life, the patriarchy dictates, men must be ruthless, fearsome, decisive. We all know that “nice guys” finish last. Nice guys are weak.
They have no allure. They cannot lead companies or win campaigns. They are made from different stock than the enslavers, rapists, and mass murderers who have been enshrined in statues and lauded in generations of history books. Those men were not nice, and we loved them for it.
“Nice” is both an utterly bland and complex word. When paired with a superlative, like “incredibly” or “really, really,” it is unambiguously positive, but on its own, it flounders. At its best, it suggests indifference or lack of enthusiasm.
The writer in me objects to “nice” simply because it lacks punch, specificity. It requires adverbs to make its meaning clear.
But as a human being, I still believe in the power of nice.
I believe I can stand up for myself, work through tough situations, challenge the status quo, take on leadership roles, and be nice about it. Not insincere, not shallow, not overly agreeable, but authentically nice.
Just as Susan Cain helped introverts claim the word “quiet,” — another adjective that haunted me throughout my childhood and young adulthood — I’d like to claim “nice.”
So if you want to call me nice to be nice, I’ll thank you, and perhaps suggest that you also acknowledge my grit and fortitude. And if you want to call me nice to be mean, I’ll take it as a compliment and thank you anyway. I’m just nice like that.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
