The myth of the bumbling nice guy
No, your husband isn't actually just a clueless nice guy.
“Our husbands are nice, decent, well-meaning guys. They just never learned how to balance household obligations.”
It’s the premise of every book on household equality, and every how-to guide for getting husbands to take on more of the labor. Just communicate better and it will all work out! He’s just too stupid to know any better!
Writers of these guides believe they’re offering a soft feminism that will appeal to the masses. They think that you have to be nice to men to get them on board. Apparently they’ve never met men, most of whom will do anything to avoid household labor no matter how nice their partners are.
The insistence that men who exploit their partners’ labor are “nice” does a lot of heavy lifting for patriarchy. It gaslights women, gives men more credit than they deserve, and deliberately avoids getting to the root of the problem.
If men can steal their partners’ time and lives, ignore their partners’ needs for decades, emotionally check out, or weaponize emotional abuse to get more free labor, they are not nice. Yet we insist, culturally, on labeling virtually all men as nice and decent.
Women, no matter what they do, can never live up to the standards applied to us. But men are “nice guys” and “good dads” if they manage not to murder their entire families (and even then, rest assured that some headline writer somewhere will talk about how a “nice guy” “just snapped.”)
So why is the distinction so important? And why do so few “experts” refuse to make it?