A month ago, a friend from Russia contacted me and told me that she
had been in love with me. But because she was a "nice girl" and did
not want to appear too forward, she never told me about her feelings
for me, and I never knew about them until now.

She was at the top of the class, along with me, a Korean girl, and a
tall beautiful blonde named Katya. The Korean girl is now an editor
for an international magazine; Katya is an interior decorator and had
a honeymoon in Egypt. My friend, and I, are both married. Me, to a
wonderful woman; she, to a brute. In her second letter, she told me
that her husband had beaten her badly for contacting me, and that she
could not write to me any longer.

In 1995, on a Usenet forum alt.romance, a woman named Kay was writing
that she was in love with me. We had a romance. Another girl wrote me
to say that Kay was not "a nice girl" because "nice girls" do not act
that way. The woman who said that is my age, and although she is
legant, accomplished, hard-working, financially secure, smart,
compassionate, ethical, and drop-dead gorgeous, she is still single.

A long time ago, a kid was writing that women should "share in the
askout." He got attacked for that by people claiming that his saying
so was due to his lack of social skills. But that's not the issue here
at all. If the woman does not ask a man out, then she does not get the
man that she wants. And then she either gets a man whom she does not
want, who treats her like rubbish, or she does not get to be with a
man at all.

This is an outrage. For people who have such great things to offer
others, to have such tragic existence, is a huge waste of human
potential as well as a great and unnecessary wrong. The false concepts
of what makes a person "nice" hurt mostly those who abide
such concepts, while denying them the right to what they legitimately
may seek - and the right for others to benefit from what they have to
offer. Not only do they lose, bigtime, but so do others as well -
anyone who would appreciate them and respect them. Instead they
become food source, cannon fodder, punching bags, for those who not
only have no intention of practicing similar ethics in their own
lives, but also want to portray them as weak and stupid for having
such considerations.

Nobody should be taught that taking initiative or making one's
interests known is incompatible with being a good human being. It is
to people who do that that is owed all improvement in history of
mankind, and anything that militates against that seeks to create a
passive population that is bludgeoned, manipulated, controlled and
deceived. The false concepts of what makes for a "nice" person injure
those who have these concepts, while empowering only the unscrupulous.
And for as long as this perversion of ethics is aught on a large
scale, both the "nice guys" and the "nice women" will continue to live
tragic existence, while those who do not have such scruples run things
and laugh at them.

Ilya Shambat
http://www.myspace.com/ibshambat
http://ibshambat7.blogspot.com