Is being nice to women weakness? That’s a question that came up in a discussion about being a simp. If you don’t know what being a simp is, it’s basically a guy who does things to please women but gains no reward or respect for it. He’s simply being exploited. He sucks up to women with the hope that it will get them to notice him, but they take the benefits and focus on other, less pathetic and groveling men. Why bother giving him any status when you’re already getting what you want from him?

So a simp is a kind of extreme. He’s a chump because he’s never going to get back anything for all he’s putting in. He’s giving value, but not maintaining any. He’s the male counterpart to a woman of loose favors who never gets any respect or status or commitment from any of the men she gives herself away to.

And this raises a general question among some men of how you preserve masculine value. Is being nice and giving women what they want a kind of weakness, a disadvantage? And here is what I think.

Being nice, or overly nice, is a kind of weakness, not morally, but from the standpoint of negotiation. If you’re willing to give up everything, but demand nothing or have no reasonable expectation of reciprocation, you have no bargaining position and therefore no value in any negotiation.

Let’s say that you’re a particularly generous and chivalric man, accommodating, eager to please, and ready to give. In the current dating market do women feel they have a moral or social obligation to do these sort of things for you, for men? They don’t. Why not? Well, partly because women have never felt any need to be chivalric and indulgent toward men. Men are big and dangerous. Women have never felt they needed to open doors for them or fight and die to protect them or put them on the lifeboats first or lift heavy loads for them or give them extravagant gifts. That doesn’t mean that women haven’t done anything for men, far from it. But they haven’t felt any obligation to treat men the way men feel obligated to treat women.

And in the current dating climate, which is pretty fearful and hostile and uncertain, more and more women especially feel no obligation to be indulgent to men. “I don’t need to be nice to men because they’re men, and men suck. I’m a woman and we deserve to be indulged and they don’t. So I’m justified in getting mine.” That’s a very cynical attitude, but it’s perfectly common and perfectly understandable.

When relationships sicken and the terms upon which they are conducted break down, exploitation and hostility emerge on both sides. Attractive men no long feel the need to commit to women and freely exploit them, and attractive women feel free to exploit men for their benefits, including through institutions like OnlyFans. Both side are wary of giving anything up, wary of being taken advantage of, and would prefer to be independent and secure and let someone else take the risk.

The question about simps is a question about being nice. Women want men to be nice. But in being nice to them, are you just giving them what they want and letting the exploit you? Should men take a more defensive position toward women? Because being nice isn’t their default, it is a special effort and a kind of deferent payment, a tribute to earn good standing with a hoped for return of approved status. So why do it if there’s no hope of gaining that status?

   Men don’t do these things for each other, or for everybody. This is a unique kind of indulgence and sacrifice, and one that often is pretty costly to their own personal status and wellbeing. But they’re doing it as an investment, or rather as a kind of entry fee. This is the price women make you to pay be considered worthy of their attention, worthy of doing business with them, worthy of being in the running. It’s the fee you pay to be allowed to enter the Indy 500. It doesn’t mean you’ll win, but you’ll at least be able to be in the running.

Being a simp is like having to pay all the entry and membership fees, but they won’t let you race. So you just keep sending gift baskets to the commissioner, that he might be giving out to other racers he likes, in the hope that some day he’ll indulge you enough to let you take the wheel and show him what you can do. That’s not being nice, that’s being exploited. And some people, some women, do feel like they have a right to exploit you.

Plenty of guys feel the same way. They think they have a right to just get what they want because they deserve it. It’s not that men or women are worse, but they do have different ways of being exploiters and of being exploited, of taking advantage and giving it. So if you’re a simp, yes, you’re being exploited. Just like a women who give themselves away too easily are going to be exploited.

But that doesn’t mean that the whole game itself is nothing but exploitation, or that being nice is fundamentally a suckers game, unless all women are absolutely corrupt. And both men and women who have been exploited have come to that conclusion. Watch a few episodes of Judge Judy and you’ll see plenty of fights between former lovers. And a vast number of them conclude the case by stating that they’re done, respectively, with men or with women. Their experiences have made them cynical about relationships, and no wonder. Plenty of men and women have lost enormously to the other sex.