Every woman I know who’s tried online dating has gotten all sorts of weird and sleazy messages from guys, from crude sexual come-ons (“sorry for being forward but id love to cum on your glasses :)”) to terrible “sexy” jokes (“So ay girl, you looking for a stud? Because I got the std, all I need is u :)”) to fetish-tastic examples of Too Much Information (“I WISH I WERE A DOG SO I COULD SUCK MYSELF OFF”). (No, guys, appending a smiley face emoticon does not make it ok to be a grotesque douchebag.)
You always wonder what guys like this are thinking. With the dog lover at the end, it’s clear he was trying to rattle a woman who hadn’t replied to two earlier messages of increasing creepiness. With the others, I suppose they think there’s always a tiny chance that some woman out there is as desperate and horny and undiscerning as they are.
What’s stranger are those who lead not with sexual come ons but with blatant misogyny. Do men really think that women melt at the thought of dating a man who hates half the human race? Or are they just looking for yet another chance to mansplain their Men’s Rights bullshit to the world?
Here are a couple of examples of this strange and unsuccessful approach to winning over women which I found on the delightful and disturbing blog The Ladies of OkCupid, which documents the quests of three women searching for love online.
Sometimes the misogyny sneaks up on you, as in this OkCupid profile from a “laid-back” slut-shamer (who was clearly not an English major):
This fellow, by contrast, launches into the misogyny right from the start, suggesting that the woman he’s writing is exceptional, simply because she’s not stupid and illogical like the rest of her gender:
This “edgy” fellow tries to break the ice with some lovely rape jokes:
But the strangest one I’ve seen so far comes from this dude, who uses his OKCupid profile as an opportunity to mansplain why feminism is eeeeeevil:
Oh, and that list keeps going; it’s one hundred items long.
As Jasmine from The Ladies of OKCupid writes,
Delusional and repulsive takes on a whole new level with this one, because I really don’t think he’s kidding. He has every social media outlet known to man with all the same crap, and his profile is HUGE. So either he’s attempting to become the ultimate Canadian troll, or he really thinks there’s a woman out there who exists like this AND would be interested in him, of all people. Really? He offers little more than a receding hairline and an outrageous sense of entitlement in return.
To paraphrase Animal House, delusional and repulsive is no way to go through life.
Happily for The Ladies of OKCupid, and the rest of those ladies seeking love online, not all the messages are like this. For example, take this message about a basic but delicious foodstuff:
Also, the woman who got the message above about that thinking-outside-the-box use for her glasses? She stayed on OkCupid, and is now in a happy relationship with a dude she met there who is not a shitlord.
Isn’t the point of newspeak to confuse people? I’ve almost only seen it being used between feminists, so are we trying to confuse each others? Because it’s not working. Once again we seem to be terrible at scheaming.
The one thing I’ll never understand about the conservative mindset is this obsession with how other people present themselves to the world. Seriously, if someone wants to be known by a gender neutral pronoun or to present themselves in a gender neutral way, how does this in any way affect you?
which brings up the next point. mikey, get back to fucking work.
Since we’re talking linguistics, Varpole, maybe you should look up the concept of “linguistic inflation.” It might help explain why, when you use the word “vile”, it no longer produces any sort of emotional response in your audience.
did it ever?
Okay, use of Newspeak was an analogy, not a homology. And as Newspeak did indeed get RID of words, it’s a bad one, mea culpa.
Everyone jumping on is employing “gender” – again in the PC sense. Words have gender.
Humans don’t. Humans have a sex – male / female or intersex. When you transition you move from one sex to another (as far as society around you is concerned – as far as you’re concerned you move to your true sex). There’s no need for a new set of pronouns, because there’s no need to tell everyone your biological history. It’s no-one else’s business but your own.
Adopting a specialist set of pronouns just marginalises you unecessarily. And there are people out there who want trans folks marginalised – see Radfem’s “born-women-only” shit, Germaine Greer’s attempt to block a trans woman’s appointment to a Cambridge women’s college (Newhall, as I recall, could be wrong)
The invention of the idea of “gender” as a “social construct” is a big chunk of feminist theory which is entirely of a piece with its conception as a Marxism-by-sex movement. I reject it wholesale on the grounds that Marxism is one of the most genocidal movements in all history.
“Genderqueer” is about how you feel / act / your sexual orientation and doesn’t need another pronoun, in the same way that gay blokes don’t. They’re men.
Attempts to mix up feelings / orientation with a pronoun which just expresses biological sex is to confuse two things that are not the same. IMO.
Also, ugh, at mangled language. :p
Precisely. Which is why it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for you to tell other people what pronouns they should prefer. You can choose to go by “he” or “she” or “they,” because that’s your business, and someone else can choose to go by “zie,” because that’s zir business.
joe stamps his feet and demands that he gets to tell other people what gender they are, tells other people to get over themselves
it’s not just that it’s a bad analogy, it’s that reactionary language goons like you always scream about newspeak when words they dont understand come up. youre not just using a bad analogy, youre proving youve made an argument you havent thought through yourself
which you pretty much confirmed with that hand-wavey crap about ‘well gender is only what i say it is, anyway’
Joe, I kind of get what you’re saying except a) no one was using zie/hir etc. to describe trans people, but instead where the person’s gender (for whatever reason) doesn’t fit into those boxes and b) genderqueer is not a sexual orientation.
Finally, Marxism isn’t one of the most genocidal movements ever, Leninism and Stalinism were. but please enlighten me as to how pointing out that ideas of gender are based on society/ies instead of biological determinism leads to genocide I would be interested to see your corkscrew-logic at work.
@Joe
LOL at the reasoning here:
Claim that gender as a construct is a Marxist idea. No citation, just stated as if it were fact.
Claim that Marxism is wrong based on deaths caused by Communist governments. This is a logical fallacy known as associative fallacy. You could make the exact same argument that facial hair is wrong because of Hitler, and it would make exactly as much sense.
Obviously gender is a social construct. Ever read up on how, in Elizabethan England, wanting to have sex a lot was considered a feminine trait, while now its considered masculine? Or how in West African society women could marry women, provided that one of them owned property and thus had the “male” role while today in Canada anyone can marry anyone whether or not they have certain characteristics? Or how Navajo society and the German language had four genders?
It’s almost as if, *gasp* the definition of genders is something that changes depending on society!
But not you, eh Joe? You’re just EXTREMELY CONCERNED that trans people who don’t want to be idenitified by a gendered pronoun are plunging the English language into an Orwellian nightmare. Or, at best, claiming that they are associated eith the deaths of millions under Stalin and Mao.
“Genderqueer” is about how you feel / act / your sexual orientation and doesn’t need another pronoun, in the same way that gay blokes don’t. They’re men.
But what about the people who *want* another pronoun? Is it possible? Could it be? Could we have a society where everyone gets to represent themselves however they want?
blockquote fail.
even if this argument werent obviously fallacious, it’s would be funny because, mr. ‘words means things’ apparently does not know what genocide means, and insists on throwing it around anyway
@Sharculese
I think there’s an argument to be made that Stalin’s Russia was genocidal in approach. The famine hit Ukranians by far the hardest, and there definitely were racial politics at play.
However, I would bet that “Gender Marxism is wrong because Stalin” Joe here is not up on the debate about ethnic tensions in the USSR.
Well… for that definition of Movement, maybe. But if we reverse-define that movement–point it against the context it was spawned from, point to the large-scale genocides against First Nation people’s around the world by (to generalize in a terrible way) precisely the people Marx was ranting against–well. I’m not nearly as fluent in history as I would have to be to develop this idea, but basically, if you contextualize Marx, then even if you wholesale run with the idea that Stalinism and Leninism are really his ideological descendants, even then you’re up against an ideological monstrosity that, hmmm, seems to dwarf that way-too-loosely-defined way-too-uselessly-defined ‘movement.’
TL;DR version: I’m going to go ahead and call this ‘fractally wrong.’ Even though my math is worse than my command of history.
I think being told that my gender isn’t real marginalizes me.
Using “she” tells everyone my biological history. Using “zie” does not.
(Personally I’m actually in a state of Pronoun Moratorium where “she,” “zie,” and “he” are all okay with me, but that’s just my personal wishywashyness. [And my reluctance to have this argument every damn day.] Some people feel very strongly about going by “zie.”)
Pronouns don’t express biological sex. Pronouns express gender.
Because:
1. Biological sex is complicated. Some people are XXY and some people are XYY and some people are XY with high estrogen and some people are XX with high testosterone. Easier to just let people use the words they want.
2. It makes no sense that trans people should have to change their bodies to change pronouns. (And are you really going to look in their pants and check before calling them “he” or “she”?)
Anyway. We already call each other by names. Not many people make a fuss about that. “You don’t look like a Joe! And Joe isn’t a real name anyway! I’m gonna call you Bob instead.” If we’re able to respect people’s wish to be called by their preferred names, it’s not any harder or more “incorrect” to also call them by their preferred pronouns.
@howardbann1ster I’m confused (blaming the lack of tea). I was saying that the only way one could conceive of Marxism as genocidal would be to believe that the worst excesses of the USSR were representative of Marxist ideas, and I don’t think that’s the case.
Agh, sorry. Lack of antecendents makes me unclear.
I was saying that even if one does accept the garbage idea that you just soundly spanked, that just makes him more wrong.
Because in order to accept Leninism and Stalinism as being the same thing as Marxism you’ve opened up the defintion of “movement” so large that I’m basically going to call all the other genocides in the world “part of the opposite movement.” (anything I can reasonably call being caused by oppression of the many by the few, basically–which includes European conquests)
But clarity and I are not friends when speed-posting. Sorry.
there is an argument to be made that the holodomor was a genocide, and there are people on this blog who know a lot about the topic and will happily play the argument out for you (i am not one of them, sadly)
but that wasnt what joe was intending with his sideways stab at an undifferentiated thing he calls ‘marxism’ and i dont see why we should be so charitable as to improve his argument for him. he certainly hasnt extended a similar courtesy.
@howardbann1ster I gotcha 🙂
Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism, not to mention the Khmer Rouge, were Marxism (collectivist central statism) in action. All were mass murdering regimes, with Stalin and Mao’s gov’ts killing more of their own citizens than any other gov’ts in history – yes, more even than the genocidal Nazis.
The (2nd?) wave of feminism that got revved up in the 60s came out of US university campuses – directly inspired by the Frankfurt School of Marxism and the books produced / classes taught by its adherents.
The essential tenents of Marxism are: divide society by class, identify enemy class, attack enemy class. The division selected by 2nd wave feminism was sex. The insane objective of the Frankfurt School was to destroy Western society (enemy of Marxism) from the inside by attacking its base unit (the family), the idea being that Marxist utopia could fill the resulting vacuum.
Check out the state of the family in the ex-Soviet Union, after decades of weakening the family to strengthen the state.
So, yeah, I don’t buy the whole “societal construction of ‘gender'” on the grounds that I consider it fruit from a poison tree.
Particularly as I aspire to a cooperative / anarchist / non-coercive / voluntaryist form of society, which was achieved in Catalonia prior to the Spanish Civil War (and is cropping up again in depression hit Greece) but was then crushed between Fascism on one side and Communism on the other. See: George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalunya”.
@Sharculese
Fair enough, sorry if it was a depressing derail.
Also, there’s an amazing irony in Joe’s simulataneous hatred of anything tangentially connected to Marxism and his use of George Orwell as an authority. I guess he’s never looked up Orwell’s politics!
I’m not educated enough in Marxism to give a full response there, although I don’t particularly want to destroy the family. I want to destroy the concept of a certain kind of family as mandatory/privileged, though! If my family is me and my close friends, or me and my boyfriend and his girlfriend, or me and my children and no one else–I’m not “destroying the family” when I call those my family. The opposite actually.
Anyway I don’t think it’s a very cooperative/non-coercive thing to demand everyone conform to an arbitrary “your pronouns reflect your genitalia!” rule.
And who was it arguing a second ago that men and women are fixed social groups that never change?
2nd wave feminism was also inspired by the fact that it was legal to beat and rape your wife in every major Western country, and illegal for the wife to initiate no-fault divorce. Was being upset at this also needless class warfare?
@ugh
not depressing, im just not the one with the skill to lay out those arguments (but like i said, others here can, and probably will)
Of course, no family problems in Russia can be linked to poverty, or to Western men going there to purchase women to marry, a practice lauded by the MRM. No siree, it’s all that feminism that the Soviet Union had going on that’s to blame!