A big smiley face, the familiar yellow one that many people sign off e-mails with, the Have- A- Happy-Day one, opens The New York Times’ Sunday Styles section’s story about the return of the Nice Guy in films and advertising. Paul Rudd stars as a sweet guy in the new comedy, “I Love You, Man”; Kris Allen wins about 100 million ballots on “American Idol”-all in all, as a nation we’re going for a less arch, sarcastic and smug kind of hero these days. We’re liking the likable, in politics (is there a nicer guy, let alone a smarter one, than Barack Obama?) , in business, at home.
Which is….nice, because advertisers historically have had trouble spinning the nice guy; they just don’t know what to do with such an obviously saleable entity. How to get our attention. “There’s more spark to nice–it is really in,” an advertising planner at Ogilvy & Mather is quoted as saying in The Times piece, revealing the essence of their dilemma, which is How Do You Make Nice Sexy? You can see them gathering around to figure out how to make a sweetheart as sensational as Mr. Mean; how to translate what they’ve already decided is bland, dull, and boring as ….erotic.
Tell you what: forget their sales problems. You want a nice guy. You want him as a friend, as an employer, as an employee, as a colleague and as a date. You REALLY want him as a lover. (Okay, you’re entitled to a few borderline abusive guys when you’re young and feeling your way around and experimenting with what’s exciting…..but leave it at that: an experiment. Don’t buy into the myth that they’ll get better and sweeter once they know and love you. They won’t. They’ll get more abusive. Statistics prove it.) Too many women are used to the image, if not the fact, of withdrawn and withholding fathers, and to mothers knocking themselves out to establish relationships with such men.
Somehow we feel that the old paradigm of the chilly guy and the sweet girl; the heartbreaker and the homemaker, is an attractive one, a sexy one, and that we women should just keep trying to extract whatever shreds of kindness we can from that paradigm. Tell you what: Start out with a kind guy and you won’t have to bash your head against the wall in the first place.
I’ve blogged about this before (“Of Nice and Men”), and I’ll no doubt blog about it again: Kindness, niceness, gentleness are not gender-specific qualities. Not embarrassing you, not hurting your feelings, not being rude and dismissive….that’s all sexy stuff. What’s sexier than going to bed with a man who approves of you, who wants you, who thinks you’re great and isn’t afraid to show it? Let advertisers struggle with their spark problem while you snuggle up to a nice guy. 