A nice poster for a nice festival in Nice. Image via dalbera's Flickr.
I am becoming increasingly aware of a fundamental misunderstanding on the behalf of lots of loud-mouthed idiots and bullies. A deliberate misunderstanding designed to make other people feel inadequate, deceived and weak.
This misunderstanding is of one simple, four letter word: nice.
The meaning of nice has been taken over, twisted and manipulated into a negative. Nice is now a weakness. I find it hard to associate the word with anything other than a snide mocking tone and an attempted insult.
This isn’t the first time I’ve observed this worrying trend. I wrote about it a couple of years back, when fashion was going through a distinctly fugly and edgy phase. I got sick of seeing the phrase “subverted sweetness” in fashion magazines. I wanted to scream “LET THE SWEETNESS BE!!!!”.
A self-help book* called Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It by Lois Frankel and Carol Frohlinger has prompted this current rage. The advice given in the book isn’t bad. In fact a lot of it is practical and helpful, especially around assertiveness and confidence building. My issue stems from the author’s assumption that nice is bad.
Lacking confidence is bad, being a walkover is bad, making yourself miserable to please others is bad. Last time I checked, these traits have very little to do with being nice.
Nice is charm, nice is politeness, nice is making a room a better place by simply being in it. Nice doesn’t mean avoiding conflict, but it does mean not actively seeking it for kicks. Oh, and nice isn’t just for girls. Women, men and boys can be nice too.
Nice people don’t have to finish last. It is all another line of mythological bullshit from the bullies to hold us back and weaken us. Being successful has been linked with ruthlessness and rudeness for too long. Every time someone tells a nice person that they are “too nice”, they are planting subconscious seeds of weakness and doubt.
I am Jen and I am a nice person. Take advantage of that at your peril, because I sure as hell don’t “feel invisible” or “unable to articulate my needs”.
BBxx
* I really need to stop reading self-help books, they don’t agree with me. The only one that I find d genuinely useful is The Mind Gym. I think that The Secret is one of the most deeply dangerous and unethical books ever published, but that is a different blog for a different day.