Everyone is incentivized to demonize the nice guy.

Of course, hard core feminists don't need a reason to shit on men and blame them for everything. But other women also benefit from demonizing the nice guy, because it assuages their guilt and deflects society's judgment away from them for saying one thing, but yet doing another about their preferences with men. After all, they are the victims of a manipulative nice guys, don't you know?

It also provides ordinary women with a narrative that allows them to excuse the jerk's behavior. This is useful because, despite the mistreatment, the jerk is the one who they still yearn for, so they need some pretext to soothe their cognitive dissonance as they continue to pair with those who actually exploit them. So instead of blaming the group of men who actually mistreat them, they blame a group of men that has not actually mistreated them. Guys who they don't want are a convenient receptacle for these negative emotions.

Jerks are incentivized to demonize nice guys because it deflects blame from themselves. After all, the jerks are the ones who ACTUALLY manipulated and used the women. So of course the jerks would welcome a narrative that excuses their transgressions. Not only does the demonization of nice guys excuse the jerks, it highlights that the jerks are actually the heroes! I mean, at least the jerks are being honest, right? Unlike those devious nice guys.

Even some nice guys demonize nice guys. The guys in this subset of nice guys are known as "white knights". The incentive of white knights for demonizing nice guys is two-fold. First, white knights and truly nice guys both live similiar lives of sexual loserdom. For the white knight, demonizing nice guys is a way to try to separate himself from the shame of being a relatively sexless or completely sexless loser nice guy. The white knights would have you believe that they aren't sexless because they are sexual losers; no, white knights are on a higher moral plane of existence. "See, I'm not like those other guys, those evil nice guys who (gasp!) want sex!"

Second, white knights pedestalize women more than any other group. Demonizing nice guys for being "manipulative" allows the white knight to preserve his worldview of women as pure and innocent in the face of what should be undeniable evidence that women are not always perfect. According to White Knights, it's not women's fault that they say one thing and do another thing, and that they often are the makers of their own misfortune. The problem is those evil nice guys that manipulate women!

Fortunately, our gallant white knight stands ready to ride to the rescue. There is nothing a white knight loves more that trying to ride to the rescue of a pure and innocent damsel in distress. (Ironically, while white knights are always demonizing nice guys as manipulative, the white knights come the closest to embodying the caricature of the evil nice guy; much closer than the typical nice guy.)

Your average, actual nice guys are not manipulative. They are misguided. Just like every single one of us, when they want something, they do the things that they think will provide the best chance of getting them the things that they want. Just like every single one of us, they want sex. There is nothing wrong with that, and there is nothing wrong with trying to get sex by being nice (morally speaking, I mean; it is wrong tactically speaking because it is ineffective).

When we were all young, most of us learned that if we took our nap, we get a cookie after. If we sit still in class, listen to the teacher and do as we are told, we get an A. It gets etched into our brains that if you do good you'll do well. If you are good, you will receive your just reward, eventually. This is a reasonable conclusion based on our lived experiences up to that point.

Then at some point as we get older, the rules change. Some of us figure that out quickly. Some of us are slow to get the memo. Some never get it. Life as an adult is not "fair." And there are few realms in which it is truer that life isn't fair than in the realm of sex. Sexual attraction is largely not a choice, and the outcomes usually aren't fair, in the traditional sense of the word.

Yet nice guys continue being nice guys because they truly believe that that is the right and effective way to be. They are truly baffled that being nice doesn't work, like it used to. Far from being manipulative, nice guys are just about the least manipulative people in the world, because they don't have a clue how the world really works. The proof that nice guys are sincere but misguided, not manipulative, is that they keep attempting the same ineffective things over and over again. If they were truly "the most manipulative", then they would be adjusting their tactics. But they don't.

When discussing the nice guy issue, some people talk about manipulative people who pretend to be nice to get something. These aren't nice guys, and never were; those people are sharks. The difference between nice guys and sharks is that nice guys don't understand how the world actually works. Nice guys really are who they say they are (at least until they have their teeth kicked in by the world one too many times) and they really do believe what they say, however misguidedly. Sharks don't believe what they say, they know perfectly well how the world works and they are merely striking a pose for tactical reasons. These two groups of people have almost nothing in common, yet it serves peoples' interests, as described above, to pretend that they are one and the same.

If you look at various subreddits where women describe what a so-called Nice Guy is, you will see that the phrase "Nice Guys" is an empty vessel into which women dump all of their grievances about men in general, often having nothing to do with Nice Guys. As often as not, women's descriptions of Nice Guys (whom they spurn) are actually more accurately descriptive of the jerks that they sleep with than the Nice Guys. By dumping their complaints about jerks into the empty vessel labeled "Nice guys", women soothe their cognitive dissonance over their own choices.

So what is the takeaway for young guys? Don't take women's complaints about nice guys seriously and don't overthink it. Trying to make perfect logical sense of the shit women say to deflect any blame from themselves for their own choices is a fool's errand. Instead, just watch what they actually do.

One big takeaway is that you do not want women to categorize you as a nice guy, even though there is nothing wrong with being nice. Fortunately, you don't necessarily need to be a raging asshole to achieve this.

Although I have used the word jerk above because that is usually the terminology used in these discussions, the real dichotomy is not nice guy versus jerk. It is weak versus strong. You don't necessarily need to be an asshole. But you need to be strong enough to live your life on your own terms instead of being coerced or guilt-tripped into living your life on the terms that women or society try to impose on you. A lot of times that comes down to just saying "no" and sticking to it. Or saying "this is what I want/need" or "these are my boundaries if we are going to be together" or "Sorry. That doesn't work for me." Don't be afraid to challenge women; in fact, make a point of doing so every now and then.

If you live your life on your own terms, even if you aren't an asshole about it, plenty of people are going to call you an asshole because of it. You have to be okay with that.

But if you think about it, if someone calls you an asshole because you live your life on your own terms instead of being guilt-tripped into living on their terms, who is the asshole really?