Nice Girls, Badasses, and Something Else Entirely

"I don't trust her," I said, as we dished the dirt about our fellow grad students.

"She's nice enough."

"Exactly. I don't trust nice. If the only thing you can say about someone is 'she's nice,' there's a problem there."

The girl in question was doe-eyed, seemed a bit inept, the kind of girl who doesn't have a lot of presence in the room. The kind of girl who nobody thinks is capable of evil. She hung me and my interlocutor of the above conversation out to dry the first chance she got.

People pleasers, nice girls? They have no souls. Fake-ass fakers. And I always knew that when it came to falling for girls, even if I didn't always know it for myself.

===

"I think you two might work out," said Al of me and Mary. "She's a bitch...but you're into bitches."

"Al was wrong," I explained to Marlene when the (of course doomed) relationship in question came to an end. "I'm not into bitches. I'm into badasses."

I've always gone for powerful women, girls with withering glances, girls who kicked ass and took names, girls who didn't apologize. Ever. Women who filled up the room, who "let me" stick around to admire them. Women who were never mistaken for nice girls.

At some point, though, as She - a variety of Shes, really - filled up the room, I began to run out of oxygen.

===

"Did you ever notice that, in the top five things we say when we're talking about a girl, we never use the word 'nice'?

"I don't like 'nice,'" says Al.

Oh. Yeah. Me neither. Huh.

===

Nice always scares the hell out of me. Maybe it's because I was raised to be a nice girl, so I knew what was going on underneath; we are told to be nice, no matter what might be going wrong, no matter who might be taking advantage of us, no matter how much untruth is in it. "Just suck up and be nice," says Ani in her inspired take on the flat characters women are asked to be, "Pixie," but you know that the creepy sweetness of that song masks incredible rage. Nice girls resent all the constraints they live under, and like my former fellow grad student, they may exact revenge before you see it coming.

But badasses--beautiful, mesmerizing badasses--can easily tip into narcissism. I've spent hours on the phone, listening to girls tell tales of the injustices they've suffered and the foes they've vanquished only to have my own problems and triumphs dismissed as petty and small. I've followed after women who seemed to speak louder than I ever could, and found myself silenced along the way. When these badass women are too cavalier with the people around them, perhaps Al's moniker is the better one, after all.

Maybe this is just another version of the virgin/whore problem. I know that most women are both and neither. I know, too, that I can't add "nice" to the list of traits I'm looking for in a mate. I can't stomach it. But something's gotta change.

Lately I find myself wondering what the badass girl looks like when she uses that power well, when she kicks ass at being open-hearted. Not nice, mind you. But deeply, deeply kind. The kind of kind that takes names, dammit. I'm not sure I've ever really seen those qualities working together before.

Yep, the compassionate badass. That's what I'm looking for these days.
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