Caoimhe

EMCSH: Nice to Men

Caoimhe ⬥

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving mind alteration and violations of consent as well as misogyny and suicide.

Kinks often explore concepts that would be horrible to actually happen outside of fiction or safe, mutually agreed-upon play. There can be a fine like between fetish writing and horror and all it can take to push from the former into the later is taking the premise just a small bit more seriously. This Erotic Mind Control Story Hour gets a bit depressing.

Nice to Men by Limerick is a story about anxiously refreshing Twitter as the world falls apart. It centres on Noelle, Molly and Aden, three baristas who go on a mission to kill a man who’s tweets were arbitrarily given the power to reshape reality1. Anything @KillaDaKilla303 posts becomes true and unfortunately the world’s new god is a misogynistic dumbass. He cured cancer—simply made it stop existing—but now after a few days he is starting to indulge himself a bit more.

Noelle tries to slap Aden and the thought of it makes her sick. She is nicer now. She has been changed, fundamentally, by some gobshite with a username that’s a reference to Kill la Kill. Is she still the same person that she was before? Is she still meaningfully Noelle?

But she also thinks that she might know who Killa is. His name is not on his Twitter profile but going his likes indicates that (along that they have good reason to worry about what he might post about women next) he probably lives in Denver and just generally seems a lot like her anime-obsessed ex Adrian. It’s tenuous, but on the off-chance that she’s right they decide to go on a road trip to kill God before he can make things worse.

As they make their way across the country, things get a lot worse. Killa is, as I said, a misogynist and a dumbass. He is not malicious exactly, but he is impulsive, unthinking and would like it if women were hot and sexually available. But he also wants this to be a positive thing for everyone, women included, and so to be generous he offers to women something he thinks that they would like: He declares that all women now have five hundred dollars to go buy new clothes with. Time for a makeover! This simply appears in Noelle and Molly’s purses and come with a compulsion to use it to buy cute clothes. Immediately. The roadtrip is delayed as they (and every other woman) descends on the nearest clothes shops they can find to spend five hundred dollars before they run out of stock on everything. Noelle wonders what exactly is going to happen to women who live out in the middle of a steppe or a scientist stationed in Antarctica who presumably just received five hundred US dollars and an urge to go to travel hundreds of miles to find a shop to spend it in.

Killa doesn’t think about that. Killa thinks it would be hot if women had bigger breasts.

Early on the protagonists wonder what the rules are about what Killa posts. Is there a Monkey’s Paw situation? Some loophole or flaw in the wording of his magical decrees that they could possibly exploit? But no, they soon realise that he simply gets what he wants, however vague, wishy-washy and ill-thought-through that might be. When he tells women to be “nicer” that does not simply mean amicable or considerate, it means his thoughtless, patriarchal idea of what women being “nice” is. And that means being deferential. Not making a fuss, putting men’s feelings first, putting men’s wants first. Things that patriarchal society classes as women being nice. More and more Noelle and Molly find themselves using what they think Aden might want as a guide for how they would act, how they would make themselves attractive to him, despite knowing that he is a very gay-leaning bi man who is not interested in them and they have no idea what his taste in women actually is.

So while Molly is wilfully stopping herself from saying “Killa, give me the boobs” in spite of the temptation he has shoved into her head to do so—to avoid changing herself further and playing a more active part in making herself less herself—she is eventually cornered by a man in a petrol station who suggests that maybe she should. That he wants her to. That it would be hurting his feelings if she doesn’t. That it would make him unhappy. And making him unhappy would not be nice. So she cracks and gives in to the pressure weighing down on her mind of patriarchal ideals given magical force.

As things get increasingly more fucked up by Killa’s decrees, Noelle, Molly and Aden aren’t the only people who think of killing him. The US military tries to strike his home and in response he makes everyone fall asleep for the a day (aeroplanes fall out of the sky, cars veer off the road, people fall sleep mid-shift at factories and hospitals, who knows how many people die) and sends the entire US military, government and all cops to Greenland2. And as more and more people get mad at him the people who show him the most appreciation are incels who start lovebombing him in his replies, saying that they “need to ask the hard questions about the role of females”. Soon he starts planning a future vision of humanity in the worst Discord server in the world.

A bunch Twitter incels of course have very particular ideas about how men and women should be that Killa is more than happy to be talked into (and nothing really drives home how innate and natural gender roles are like having be enforced on the world by magical decree). Playing with misogyny and enforcement of gender roles is often a feature of these kinds of stories3 and I will spare the details but Nice to Men frequently straddles the line between playing with it as a source of eroticism and as a source of horror (and comedy; Killa is a clown) as the characters, from the word of God, experience being transformed into an oversexed anime nerd’s ideal visions of men and women—into almost parodic caricatures of humanity.

But Killa is not really a true believer, he is an idiot who got talked into something that sounded fun and gratifying by people who can’t control him. He wants people to be out there having fun but everyone is at their wits end, terrified when not mindlessly horny, and getting mad at him in his replies for tearing the world apart while treating it as his plaything. When someone reminds him that trans people exist he offers free magic transition to any trans woman who wants it (he’s just happy if there’s more hot women out there), which pisses off his incel base enough to start them turning on him too. He just wants there to be a big party, for everyone to have fun with how much cooler and sexier he’s made everything, but people are getting more and more desperate and angry as civilisation unravels from his decrees turning everyone into sex maniacs4. As Killa starts to spiral he lashes out more and more, knowing that he has fucked up immeasurably but doubling down every time anyone asks him to undo anything.

The effects of all of this is experienced by Noelle, Molly and Aden, checking Twitter for updates as they lumber towards Denver, constantly waylaid by the chaos and endless sexual reverie of this strange, altered world, and heavily altered themselves. There’s a lot of sex scenes. This is still porn, existentially horrifying as it may be. And eventually the question comes back: Is Noelle still Noelle? Is there any meaningful way in which she is the same person that she was a week ago? Are any of them? And Noelle eventually decides that no, she is not Noelle, he is not Aden, Molly isn’t Molly. Noelle would not want to be a puffed up sextoy and the person who is here now wants and needs that more than anything. Their minds, personalities and biology have been fundamentally alerted beyond recognition.

But Aden doesn’t want to accept that. He grasps at straws. Decides that Noelle even considering the concept of her identity and if she really was Noelle at this point is a sign that she still is fundamentally Noelle in some way. That part of her is still there. That it’s better if she’s still Noelle and Molly is Molly. The idea is a comfort to him. So Noelle agrees with him. If that lie makes him happy, she will gladly pretend to believe it too. To let him delude himself into thinking that it matters at all. He is a man and that is all that really matters, so she will pretend to still be Noelle for him; it would not be nice to do otherwise.

Despite it all they still try to follow through on their original mission, desperate to try and stop Killa as he continues to spiral and burn down the rest of the world, but when they do manage to track down Noelle’s ex he isn’t Killa after all. Their entire journey was pointless. Killa, miserable, kills himself to avoid facing anything he’s done, not undoing any of it. Nothing goes back to the way it was. Noelle, Aden and Molly try to adjust to life in the world created by a mad Twitter god-king5.

  1. I have seen stories with the premise of someone’s blog magically getting the power to reshape reality a few times, though I think Nice to Men was the first time that I’d seen it. ↩

  2. Nice to Men was published in 2023 so this wasn’t a political joke. ↩

  3. I’ve sometimes joked that there are kinks that are split between extremely self-aware feminists and also the worst men in the entire world. ↩

  4. Like many kink stories that feature widespread changes to the world in service of a fetish, Nice to Men mostly ignores the existence of children and hopes the audience understands that bringing that up is too much of a can of worms to ever want to address. ↩

  5. Well I didn’t say that there was no political valency to the story, just that the Greenland bit wasn’t a reference to current events. ↩