“I’m not like the others”: nice guys, self-flattery, and the myth of uniqueness (reprinted)

From February 2008.

Following up on yesterday’s post on teenage boys and love, Amy comments below my post:

Guys who accepted the “emotional aspects of their identity” also often still accepted the myth that most guys only want sex and nothing else. As a result, they’d believe they were special and uniquely able to be the emotional guy that they were taught every girl wanted. They saw it as their advantage in the dating scene.

Is this where we ask for the show of hands? How many lads have ever said to a woman in whom they were interested, “You know, I’m really not like other guys”? How many women have had that line laid on them a time or ten?

Amy’s on to something important. The SUNY Oswego study makes clear that most adolescent males aren’t nearly as sex-crazed as we popularly imagine. The study provides welcome reinforcement to the notion that boys as well as girls are interested in love, romance, and relationship. But of course, the conclusion is counter to what our culture teaches us about masculinity. And among the many victims of the discourse about what a man is — and isn’t — are boys themselves.

It is axiomatic that in American adolescent culture, it is dangerous for boys to be too open about their feelings and emotions. The fear of being labelled a “faggot” or a “pussy” is as prevalent for today’s young men as it was in their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generation. (A point ably demonstrated by C.J. Pascoe in her magisterial “Dude, You’re a Fag”.) As a consequence, those boys who don’t feel as if they live up to (or down to) the masculine stereotype may well begin to imagine that they are unique.

Speaking from experience (my own and that of many men I’ve known), it is immensely painful to go through adolescence as an ostensibly “sensitive” boy. Particularly in junior high school, I endured my share of phyiscal and verbal assaults by the more popular boys, most of whom were in the traditional business of proving their masculinity through their willingness to engage in (or at least threaten) constant violence. I understand how tempting it is for a boy who is being victimized to begin to believe that he is fundamentally different from his tormenters. (Trust me, I’ve known a heck of a lot of shy, smart, unathletic, artistic fourteen year-old boys walking around with low-grade Messiah complexes.)

Because “boy talk” in American culture so rarely focuses on romantic love, a large percentage of teenage guys who are romantically as well as sexually inclined may begin to flatter themselves with the notion that they are “unlike all the rest.” They do what all teenagers do: they compare how they feel on the inside to how others look and behave on the outside. Inside their hearts, some of these boys see passion and an intense longing for emotional intimacy; in their peers, they see bravado, posturing, and vulgarity. It’s not so hard for an anxious lad to start to tell himself “I”m not like the others.” Perhaps, like many teens, he mingles together a sense of masculine inferiority (“I’m not as tough”) with a sense of grandiose superiority (“I’m so much more enlightened and sensitive.”) And as Amy points out in her comment below yesterday’s post, this is the genesis of the Nice Guy(tm).

Because the sensitive boy imagines that he is rarer than he actually is, he may be inclined to over-estimate his value to the girls he befriends and dates (or tries to date.) The classic scenario for such a Nice Guy works like this: Nice Guy gets very close to a girl. They become good friends, so much so that they are teased by their peers. Nice Guy starts to fall in love with his friend, while girl thinks of Nice Guy as “just a pal” or “more like a brother”. Eventually, Nice Guy confesses his love; girl rejects him. Nice Guy sulks or flies into a rage, usually saying something like “Why don’t you love me? Why do you like those jerks who only want to use you? I’m the only guy who understands you and values you!” Nice Guy, if he’s not careful, may begin the slow slide towards adult misogyny at this point. His own frustration at women (rooted in his sense that his unique gifts go unappreciated) may grow more toxic, as he starts to believe that “women don’t know what’s good for them” and they “always go for the bad boys” instead of who they “should” be dating (me).

For a long time in my adolescence, I did believe I was uniquely insightful. I did think of myself as a traitor to my sex; I did imagine that I was one of only a tiny handful of the be-penised who had a rich vocabulary for my own emotional terrain. I flattered myself that I was incredibly sensitive. And while I may have been a little bit more verbally dexterous than your average teen boy, it turns out that I was far less special than I imagined. It took years of men’s work — years of connecting with a lot of other adult men who carried with them the scars of adolescence — to realize that I wasn’t nearly as unique as I had thought. As it turns out, while the sixteen year-old Hugo fancied himself as extraordinarily perceptive, so too did a lot of my male peers. And to my chagrin, I discovered years later that many of my high school peers thought of me as arrogant and cynical rather than gentle, insightful, and sensitive. My sense of my own terminal uniqueness was sustained by my own unwillingness to communicate with other males, and my understandable inability to see who it was that they really were behind the anxious posturing.

One of the reasons why I love working with teenage boys today is for exactly this reason. While it would be a stretch to say that every sixteen year-old has the soul of a tortured poet, I’ve found time and again that the most outwardly callow and thuggish lads frequently do have depths that they keep remarkably well-hidden. Sometimes, they succeed in hiding those nooks and crannies of what used to be called “sensibility” even from themselves. Teenage girls have long suspected that inner recesses of profundity and passion exist, which is why so many idealistic gals spend so much time trying to dig beneath the surface of their often silent and uncommunicative boyfriends. (For many girls, it’s an ego thing; many young women love to flatter themselves with the idea that they are so extraordinarily loving that they — and they alove– can transform a tormented and outwardly dense ‘bad boy” into a prince.) But experience makes clear that it’s not a lover’s job to do for you what you must do for yourself.

Studies like that done at SUNY Oswego may, to some, be reinforcing the obvious. But what may be obvious to the feminist blogosphere or to those steeped in gender studies work is not always obvious to the public at large. Particularly, it’s not obvious to legions of young men who grow up in this country, generation after generation, with the impression that to be a “real man” means to be emotionally unavailable and concerned only with sexual conquest. To a few boys, perhaps, this news will be a mixed blessing. While it may be a comfort to realize that they aren’t alone, it may well be ego-deflating to discover that in their desire for emotional connection and relationship, they aren’t nearly as unique as they had believed!