Women and niceness have a long history full of toiland trouble. Today women are still expected, andfrequently expect themselves, to be nice: soft, gentle,empathetic, selfless caretakers.

And if there’s beensome understanding gained in the last quarter centurythat women are human and may occasionallydeserve some “me time,” we are still expected to benicer, softer, gentler and more empathetic than men.

While the forms and degrees of these expectationsvary enormously across cultures, they seem equallypersistent. To deviate from the rules of nice foreither women or men is to be subject to the variouspunishments and ostracizations society has to offer.Gentle men are assumed to be gay, girl bullies areassumed to be pathological — it seems almost unbelievablethat one deviance doesn’t go with another.

Of course, “expected to be” is pretty different from“are uniformly,” and I’ve always found myself somewhattitillated by women being mean. I’m not sayingthat those various profs and bosses and relatives andfriends didn’t also make me cry more frequentlythan could really be good for me, but even as I’dswear to learn from these experiences to never makeanother person feel that way myself, I was alsoadmiring of the way some women seemed able toflout all these expectations of gentle perfection. Theyseemed more free than I was.

Certainly, a rewriting of the “good girl” blueprinthas been a main thread in modern feminism andsomething third-wave feminists have taken up withzeal. Reclamations of “slut” and any number ofalleged bad-girl qualities have been many, workingto turn shame to pride, judgment to power.

BITCH magazine, full of smart, feminist cultural criticism,flies in the face of that frequently launched bomb.Artist Shary Boyle’s series of illustrations featuringlittle girls exacting cruelties on grown men exemplifiesthe challenge young feminists are making tothese persistent rules for girls that in real life continueto leave the softer sex judged, forbidden fromthe full territory of their own emotional landscapes,which can foster low self-esteem and vulnerability tothe violence adult men exact on them. The malevolentfantasy of flipping that insidious power balancehas a surprising charge to it.

So why do I find myself thinking so much of lateabout how to be nice and why that is such a valuableway to be in the world? The question has morphedfor me over the last decade from “how can I be nice(because I have to be nice all the time or else I’m nota worthwhile person)?” to “how can I be nice(because I want to be for reasons of my own)?”

I canthank all feminism’s challenges to the good-girlimperative for that shift. Once I no longer believed Ihad to be nice, I was free to choose to be. (And, afterall, disingenuous niceness is among the most cuttingcruelties.)

That change also performs a magical shift that challengesthe idea of niceness as an inherent quality of aperson (or sex) and makes it a potential act of connectionand humanity in any given situation. It meansyou can feel good about having made that choice andhaving carried it out successfully — not always easy,sadly — and it also means that it’s appropriate andguilt-free to make other choices such as, say, to prioritizeyour health and safety, to stand up for yourself,to not be manipulated because of your niceness.

In a world that seems so full of hurt and violenceand alienation, “nice” can be a profoundly politicalact. Anything that fosters positive human connectionsand makes this world a little kinder is. In theend, it’s kindnesses that have meant the most.