Not Nice

100 Day Project Day 19

There’s a bit of discourse on the socials about the word nice, and some people are just finding out that being nice isn’t the same thing as being kind, or being good, and that being nice, Nice, is more of a facade that covers a lot of nasty.

It’s not nice to call out nasty, of course, and it’s usually the person calling out nasty who ends up being spurned. I am minded of a time in a group setting where a woman who didn’t like me stood with another woman fantasising about choking me. She gave it the full energy, using her hands to demonstrate the crushing of my throat, and I will never forget the way the flesh of her knuckles stretched taut.

She was so Nice, so adored, that she was perfectly comfortable behaving this way in the room with everyone around, including me. She didn’t try to hide it, she didn’t even flinch when she realised that I had seen and heard them. The next morning she came up behind me as I was sitting eating breakfast, and she put her hands on my shoulders and neck. It was chilling.

I’m thinking about that because Len Pennie’s experience of stalking and domestic violence has triggered my own trauma, because, as she says, the trauma never really goes away, and I’m thinking about the way that woman’s behaviour became part of my trauma record, enacting, as she was, things that had happened to me.

She was so Nice, so adored, and not a single one of those women wanted to hear it when I spoke about it.

I was never as surprised by the woman enacting violent fantasies about me as I was by the bystanders who maintained silence so as to maintain their nice, cosy group.

That is how Nice works, whether in the microcosm, or the macrocosm.

I’m thinking about Niceness as International Women’s Day is coming, and a lot of Nice women will join the hashtags, and celebrate themselves, and allude to themselves as feminists, when their Niceness precludes them from actually challenging abusers, and especially precludes them from speaking up about Gaza, and the women who have been murdered, maimed, starved or left without medical care during pregnancy or miscarriage, using tents scraps to clean up the blood.

It’s a funny kind of feminism that glosses over that, pretends it isn’t happening, to keep the peace.

Nice mixes vanilla icing and smears it over shit and calls it a cake.

Today’s art practise is working in my Strathmore Toned Grey sketchbook. This is a sketchbook where I only use graphite, and almost all the faces are created using intuitive mark-making, with no references or models.

She isn’t Nice, perish the thought.

Til the morn,

Suzanne