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.
@Joe
Also, if you can find a “cooperative / anarchist / non-coercive / voluntaryist” activist in history without some Marxism in their intellectual pedigree, I’d love to see it. Orwell was a card-carrying member of the Independent Labour Party, which was openly Marxist, among other things.
well you’re just an all-purpose paranoid reactionary arent you? thatll make a great t-shirt.
Yeah Russia under the Romanovs was a fucking egalitarian paradise before the Bolsheviks came along and divided everyone into classes.
You made me LOL for real, not just on the internet.
I’m gobsmacked that some people posting are unfamiliar with Stalin’s democide* of the Kulaks, or are unaware that Stalin’s regime murdered circa 20million people. Likewise there seems to be a lack of awareness that Mao’s gov’t / party / cult slaughtered between 20 to 35 million people. Crack open a book sometime why don’t ya.
*http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP2.HTM
And somebody upthread actually had the gall to say that saying that linking this to Marxism was like linking the Nazis mass murders to Hitler’s mustache. Duh. How about linking the Nazis mass murders to …uh, Nazism!!
Seriously, if you have political entity X that adheres to doctrine Y and slaughters millions of people and it happens over and over again in multiple instances where political entities adhere to doctrine Y, it is asinine to deny that doctrine Y leads to / facilitates / is an apologia for mass murder.
Re: Genderqueer, there was already a word for that too – androgynous.
Re: pronouns, what the fuck, I just don’t care that much to continue this argument. Like I said I think you’re doing yourself a disservice with all this “zie” stuff, but hey, it’s your call – carry on.
Re: yes different societies have assigned different roles to men and women, and have also recognised different sexes (e.g. Native Americans identified gay blokes as Two-Spirited) but the use of the term “gender” to apply to those roles is a part of the whole PC project descending from the Frankfurt School, so considering the source, I consider it unlikely to produce results that will be good for people.
Two-Spirited did not mean “gay” in the sense that we understand it now, dumbass. Opening books is only the first step – next you have to understand what you read.
Why, thank you.
Sometimes it seems that all I’m doing here is giving props to people who are more insightful, better educated, more eloquent, or faster on the keyboard.
Every now and then, though, I hit one out of the park. That feels real good.
we’re aware of atrocities committed by the ussr, were just also aware that the connections youre trying to make are lazy and nonsensical. you want to rant and rave about marxist conspiracies like a fucking john birch pamphlet, go ahead, just dont expect us to see it as any more than paranoid bedwetting.
why is it that any time you try to inject examples into the conversation you get things blindingly wrong. do you not know anything about anything?
@Joe
I actually said that linking the pronoun zie to Stalin’s genocides made as much logical sense as linking facial hair to the Holocaust. I stand by that statement. Look up “associative fallacy.”
Haha how dare academics refer to explicitly different gender identification as genders?
Also, you keep ragging on the Frankfurt School, but you keep using the books of a card-carrying socialist as your examples of how society should be run. But your own rubric, doesn’t that make your statements the least reliable on this thread?
I’m almost afraid to do this because of the bigoted response that it may provoke, but Joe…are you aware of the gender category known as khatoey in Thailand, and what do you think it means?
Hint – it’s not “gay”.
P.S.
In all actual seriousness, I do mean this.
I am indirectly responsible for maccaronis
Alternate spellings include kathoey, katoey, if you need to go look it up.
@The First Joe: Goddammit, you know, the creationists love to pull that shit you just pulled. “Nazis followed Social Darwinism! Charles Darwin is directly linked to the Holocaust!”
How about “Stalin was an atheist! Atheism leads to killing twenty million peasants and all the doctors you can get your hands on!”
What the folks upthread are telling you is that you’re mixing up Marxist apples with Leninist-Stalinist massmurderfruit.
And dividing the populace and turning one group against another isn’t something Stalin or Marx came up with. Using the Ukrainian Jews to collect taxes from the Ukrainian peasants, using the Anglo-Saxons against the Celts, turning poor white people against poor black people, this is a popular strategy of long standing.
@Sharculese – I’m against mass murder, and I distrust doctrines that support it – in what way does that make me a reactionary? I didn’t get the memo that progessives were actually for mass murder. How do you justify your support for mass murder?
@Ugh – Orwell was a Labour party member true (the alternative was to be a fucking Tory!), and he was fiercely critical of his own party / the political establishment / the hypocrisy of central statism – or did you not read “1984” and “Animal Farm”??
Orwell fought with the anarchist POUM against the Fascists in trench warfare during the Spanish Civil War (he was shot through the neck at one point), he was forced to flee Barcelona for France when the Communists betrayed the anarchists and attacked them at the behest of the International Comintern. This experience was the inspiration for “Animal Farm”.
@bathrobe – Sure the Czars were arseholes, but Stalin was even fucking worse – which considering how high Imperial Russia had set the bar makes him one of the all round pentathletes of evil (to mix a metaphor). Him and Mao and Hitler, on the podium.
I have no interest in defending Marxism or any other kind of communism, myself. I just think some people should be called “zie” and women should be treated equally in society. And also that people who make 100-item lists of “ways you must allow me to abuse you” are poopheads.
I don’t think I have to support Stalin to think those things.
@TheFirstJoe
Why, it’s almost as if Orwell was a complex human being, who engaged with and responded to intellectual trends of his time, and whose opinions were not automatically “fruit from a poison tree” because of it!
Could it be? Is it possible,,, that a woman might have similarly complex engagements with political thought? But, wait, if that were true, then maybe the belief that woman should not be treated like shit might actually be valid, even with its engagements with the Frankfurt School!
Everyone: Joe is against mass murder. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with Joe on anything, even pronouns, is supporting mass murder. Clear enough?
The First Joe, you look like a person who takes shits in toilets. How often do you take shits in toilets? You really like that, don’t you? You know who else took shits in toilets? STALIN, motherfucker! THAT’S WHO!
HOW DO YOU JUSTIFY YOUR SUPPORT FOR LUXURIOUS FACIAL HAIR, YOU TOILET-SHITTER?!
@Joe
Also, you know that POUM’s literal English translation is “Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification,” right?
No one tell Joe about anarcho-communists or anarcha-feminists. It will blow his tiny mind.
it’s the transparently lazy chain of inferences from ‘this leftist engaged in behavior x’ to ‘all ideas associated with anyone associated with this person are tarnished’ that makes you a bedwetting reactionary. because it makes it clear your looking for excuses to reject things you just want to reject.
@Whoever and Sharculese, Two-Spirited encompasses both gay and trans conceptual divisions as used in Anglo cultures: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Becoming-Two-Spirit,673076.aspx
@CassandraSays: yep, katoey are considered the third sex in Thailand. Like the Hirja in India. Or the Fa’afafine in Samoa. “Gender” is not a Thai, Hindi nor Samoan word / idea. :p
@Ugh – I’m saying that the whole “genderize” movement / intellectual construct comes out of a very dodgy source, via a couple of obfuscating stepping stones. Not many people are aware of it either, and I think they should be.
You don’t have to buy into an entire new dictionary of jargon to recognise people as human beings and to respect their right to live their life.
Actually the only one of Orwell’s books that demonstrates a sort of ideal society in practice was his autobiographical “Homage to Catalunya” – whereas the rest of his works “Down and out in Paris and London”, “1984” and “Animal Farm” were observations / dsytopian visions / warnings on how NOT to run society.
also the fact that the whole ‘thing i dont like is MARXIST because MARX’ is pretty much like play 1 in the reactionary manual
@Ugh – yeah, but POUM were cooperative anarchists. Marxists in name only. :p
So if you admit that people who fall outside the gender binary exist, and that different cultures have different words for those people, why does the fact that the modern Anglosphere has evolved pronouns specific to people who fall outside the gender binary have to mean OMG Stalin? Language evolves.