I wrote for Glamour magazine last week, about how men who’ve perpetrated appalling acts of brutality are often commemorated as “nice” and “kind” people – as if the brutality was just a blip, and their true selves are much more benign. It got me thinking about the many ways in which those words – “nice” and “kind” – are used against women, and especially so in our present moment.
When I was working on In Her Nature, one of the books that had the biggest effect on me was a study by Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown, called Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. Gilligan and Brown went into a single-sex school in Ohio in the 1990s, and interviewed girls as they went through adolescence. They wanted to observe how girls’ characters, and their ways of being, changed during these formative years – and what they saw shocked them. As they grew older, the girls started covering their mouths as they spoke, repeating “I don’t know”, talking more quietly, and being more afraid to move loudly and playfully around their own homes. In particular, they worried about the pressure they were under, from parents and teachers, to be “nice” and “kind”. I write about this on p. 211 of In Her Nature:
Brown and Gilligan concluded that the “tyranny of nice and kind” amounted to a “kind of psychological foot-binding”, in which girls and women suppressed their own needs and desires. If anything, I think that the tyranny of nice and kind has only intensified since the 1990s - so much so that #BeNice and #BeKind are well-known hashtags and that girls and women can buy any number of #BeKind t-shirts.
But when I find myself yelling “just be nice!” at my occasionally feuding daughters, I realise that what I’m really saying is “shut up!” And isn’t that what is really being asked, when girls and women are told to #BeNice and #BeKind? Aren’t girls and women really being told to “just shut up”?
It strikes me that the very words “nice” and “kind” are being used today in a subtly different sense than at other periods in their history. “Kind” refers to a class or group of animals or plants: a species, or, more commonly in humans, one’s inner circle: “a group of people united by shared beliefs, interests, or character…the people with whom a specific individual has a great deal in common” (OED). So kindness is how we behave towards our “kind”, towards our closest friends and family. When we’re told to #BeKind in general, we’re being told to extend that behaviour to people (usually strangers) who haven’t necessarily earned it.
Ditto with “niceness”. The etymology of the word nice is fascinating, and I keep meaning to write an article about it (if any commissioning editors are reading this and are interested - hit me up!). Since the 1300s, its meanings have shifted from foolish; to wanton and lascivious; ostentatious (of clothing); finely dressed; scrupulous; fastidious; fussy; particular; refined; respectable; in good taste; unmanly and effeminate; and modest. And, surprise, surprise, the word often takes on negative connotations when it is associated with women and femininity.
But it seems to me that our current use of nice to mean “indiscriminately pleasant” is actually a deviation from its etymological history. Nice has more often been associated with “discernment” (so much so that it shares an origin with the word niche). But in our present moment, when girls and women are told to “be nice”, they’re often being told not to be discerning, but to be pleasant (and acquiescent) to everyone, regardless of the treatment they’ve received.
So when girls and women are told to #BeNice and #BeKind, we’re being told to extend our affections and sympathies - affections and sympathies which should be earned by people, on the basis of their moral behaviour towards us - far more widely. Historically, niceness and kindness have had to be earned. But in our present moment, girls and women are being encouraged to suspend our judgement and discernment, and to lift the boundaries around our inner circle, to become universal care-givers who dole out niceness and kindness indiscriminately. This contemporary usage of niceness and kindness clearly enforces female acquiescence and subservience, and it lays us open to abuse. It tells women that it’s a transgressive “unkind” act to set our own boundaries around our inner circle, and around our emotional energies.
In my teens and twenties, it was hugely important to me to be thought of as a “nice” person. The idea of being talked about as “not nice” was horrifying: it’s always reminded me of Othello’s Cassio wailing that “I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.” In retrospect, I was prepared to suppress a great many of my own desires and needs in order to be thought of as “nice” - especially for men.
But, as I’ve grown older, I’m no longer prepared to do this. A horrifying aspect of bereavement is that some people behave in extremely cruel ways: perhaps they sense vulnerability, and perceive that the time is ripe for their own attacks. Once upon a time, I might have been conflicted about how to respond, wanting to preserve my reputation as a “nice” person. But grief and loss strips you bare, and I’ve found that I simply don’t care very much about how the wider world perceives me, and I certainly don’t care about conforming to standards of “niceness” and “kindness” that require me to acquiesce to people who are not nice and kind in return - and often the reverse.
But I do care about my kind, in the older meaning of the word: about my daughters and my closest friends. And, in order to defend them, I’ve realised there’s something much more importance than being nice: which is recognising our needs, assessing the propriety of them, and fighting for them. So I won’t be buying my daughters any #BeNice or #BeKind t-shirts. Instead I’ll be encouraging my girls to recognise what they want and need, and to give short shrift to anyone who seeks to deny those needs, even if it means they’re accused of being “unkind”.