UPDATE 9/19/18: Yes, this is the same Mark Judge who allegedly helped Brett Kavanaugh allegedly try to rape a 15-year-old girl. For more on his creepy writings and even creepier videos, see my post here.
By David Futrelle
I hope you’re happy, white ladies. You have tempted fate with your evil white lady ways, and now you will be paying the price: Some dude named Mark Judge will no longer be dating you.
To be fair, he won’t be dating white men either — he’s straight — but he seems a bit more worked up about the women.
In a post earlier this week on Real Clear Religion, Judge, a right-wing Catholic who is himself white, explained Why I Won’t Date Secular White Women. It’s really quite simple: they’re soulless sluts who don’t know how to love:
White women in the West — like white men in the West — have lost their souls. Triangulated between a feminism that preaches perpetual outrage, a porn culture that turns love into a biology lesson (and which has made it into our sit-coms, movies, and music) and a hard conservatism that ignores art, many Western women have lost the capacity to appreciate and create beauty, to wonder and delight, to genuinely love.
I guess before “porn culture” and raunchy sit-coms, love was chaste and pure and didn’t require anyone to put any part of themselves inside of anyone else.
Oh, and he’s apparently not a big fan of iPhones, or women with a sense of humor.
Bombarded into spiritual catatonia by rage politics, digital devices, easy sex and irony, American women don’t seem to have wisdom, but sarcasm. Instead of joy, they trade in snark. They take flirting to be sexual harassment. Claiming to be “spiritual but not religious,” they are neither.
As he sees it, the western women of today just can’t compare to the much higher quality of western women in days gone by.
[I]t wasn’t so long ago that there were women in the West who had both brilliance and the capacity to wonder … Sophia Loren, Annie Leibovitz, Bille [sic] Holiday, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Taylor, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Audrey Hepburn — to name just a few — were women who have no contemporary equal, at least in the decadent Western world.
It’s an odd list for many reasons. For one thing, nearly half the women on it (Sophia Loren, Annie Leibovitz, and Joan Didion) are very much alive. The “contemporary equal” of Annie Leibovitz would probably be … Annie Leibovitz. The “contemporary equal” of Joan Didion would be Joan Didion.
But let’s let that slide, because, aside from these six white gals, and “Bille” Holiday, we still don’t know what sorts of ladies he would date.
The answer? Foreign ladies who are all “receptive” and shit.
Compared to white women, women from other parts of the world offer genuine substance. I was lucky enough to date someone from another culture for several years. She was from India, and had in abundance what most women in the West have lost: what the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand called “receptivity to values.”
And it helps if they’ve never seen an ocean before.
Dating someone from India brought me into contact with a culture that is still receptive to values as von Hildebrand understood them. My girlfriend clutched my hand in delight at dance concerts and wept when she saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
Also, fans of 2 Broke Girls are definitely OUT. Total dealbreaker!
India — like Africa and Japan and other non-Western cultures — still sees with open eyes. They have dance that flatters rather than degrades the female body, colorful and embodied religious ritual (hands folded, my girlfriend would greet the sun morning at the beach), and food as soulful restitution and not just bodily nourishment. We have cupcakes and 2 Broke Girls.
I haven’t ever watched 2 Broke Girls, but what the hell is wrong with cupcakes?
Weirdly, Judge seems to have forgotten that there are a variety of not-white women in the US that don’t come from exotic foreign lands. Aside from a brief snarky comment about Jennifer Lopez, he seems unaware that there are quite a few other latina women in the US. He mentions Africa, but doesn’t seem much interested in American-born black gals.
Of course, he might still be sore because a couple of years ago a black person stole his bike.
Well, he thinks it might have been a black person. In a 2012 post on the Daily Caller, Judge wrote about the day his feelings of white guilt ended forever — the day someone stole his beloved bike, which he’d left locked to his car in a predominantly black area in Washington DC.
I could be pretty certain that on Good Friday a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor, which is across the street from where I was parked, had not nicked my bike. Neither had the monks at the Dominican House of Studies on the corner. The students at Catholic University were on Easter break. That left the neighborhoods around the university. Since the time I was an undergrad at Catholic University in the 1980s, most of the crime that has occurred on campus has come from those neighborhoods, which are predominately black. … I knew that the odds were very high that a black person had taken my bike — maybe one of the [neighborhood] kids … .
You know, Mark, it might be a good idea if you didn’t date anybody, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin.
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Would it be snide to note that he didn’t marry the value-receptive, from-an-exotic-culture girlfriend whom he “dated for several years”?
Would it be crass to ask if he respected the sanctity of marriage and traditional relationships by refraining from sexual activity with her?
“Receptivity,” in the von Hildebrand sense, is a willingness to be shaped by something external. He wants an exotic woman he can manipulate, who is willing to be shaped by his “values.” Great.
Reading his description of non-American culture makes me vividly imagine commercial-land; where all the non-white folks are decked out in foreign clothing, the food is filmed crisply against the setting sun, and the colors are super-saturated eye sugar.
And, as in commercial-land, the comparison is between smiling people nodding along to triumphant music and people frustrated with simple tasks shot in black-and-white with a wa-wa trumpet.
I completel agree with him. Cupcakes are the worst kind of cake.
Everything else he said was toss, but he’s right about the cakes. And that’s the main thing.
“Bombarded into spiritual catatonia by rage politics, digital devices, easy sex and irony, American women don’t seem to have wisdom, but sarcasm. Instead of joy, they trade in snark. They take flirting to be sexual harassment. Claiming to be “spiritual but not religious,” they are neither.”
Perhaps it is just some women responding to his PUA attempts. I imagine that the more men use their game on women, the more women will be suspicious of men generally. When PUAs advise men to use game, in the long run they just make it more difficult for all men.
Von Hildebrand is an interesting choice for a source of “values. While admittedly an opponent of the Nazis, von Hildebrand was an admirer of the Austrian clerical-fascist leader Engelbert Dolfuss, and the author of a work entitled Der Christliche Ständestaat (“The Christian Corporative State”).
He explains it in the very paragraph you’re quoting: He wants “food as soulful restitution and not just bodily nourishment.”
That said, I don’t see how it’s the cupcakes’ fault. It’s his own fault for eating them. He could just donate them to the local soup kitchen as restitution for his various sins, and if it’s a church-based soup kitchen then I think that counts as “soulful restitution”. Anyway, if he doesn’t eat them, they won’t provide bodily nourishment.
Who eats cupcakes for bodily nourishment?
Seriously though, “soulful restitution” comes from a state of mind, not from your food. A cupcake could be the most spiritual, profound, divine bite of spongey sugar-frosted goodness you’ve ever had if you ate it with the right attitude.
He clearly hasn’t had a really good cupcake.
Also, I would be interested in hearing his (presumably) ex-girlfriend’s account of their time together. Call me cynical, but I suspect it would be divergent from his.
I think you aren’t supposed to eat for pleasure, because bodily pleasure is sinful and also because fat chicks = totes gross and not spiritual.
Also, I love the hell out of Elizabeth Taylor, but she was an adulterous multi-married diamond-laden materialist, one of whose finest roles was as a foul-mouthed promiscuous drunken harridan. How does THIS guy see her as anything but decadent and porny and angry? I think he might be confusing “capacity for wonder and brilliance” with looking stunningly beautiful (as Taylor unquestionably did).
@Robert
Alleged ex-girlfriend from India. Kinda like everybodies’ alleged squeeze from Canada.
Well, I don’t think it’s odd that the author of this profound think piece has included still very much alive Sophia Loren, Annie Leibovitz and Joan Didion on his list of ghosts of brilliant and wonder inspiring past.
After all, these women have made the mistake of becoming old. True, with the wisdom of their years, they might offer the genuine substance so sought after by Judge. But, I ask of you, can they still dance in a way that flatters the female body?
Does it matter? They are old and thus not on Judge’s radar anymore. As he clearly measures women’s worth by his narrow standards for dateability, how can he refer to them in any other way than the past tense?
“Thank you for giving me the Atlantic Ocean to gaze at, Great White Father! Now please teach me more about your traditional Western values while I strike a prayerful pose on the beach.” -No Real Woman Who Ever Actually Existed
I know, right, Jackie? I suspect he’s never spent more than five minutes in a row talking to a woman from India unless she was dealing with him at her workplace. Most of the Indian women I know personally are cosmopolitan, thoroughly modern women. The only ones that seem old-fashioned are their grandmothers.
The idea that women, or people in general, were “classier” back in the day is bullshit. It’s just that the media only focused on middle-class and upper-class white people and social standards meant they couldn’t be as open about their vices.
Audrey Hepburn was divorced twice. Of course, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t an amazing, stunningly gorgeous, fabulous woman who raised money against the Nazis with ballet and worked tirelessly for UNICEF in her old age at all, but it does mean that the rose-tinted image of yesteryear’s women as virginal and conservative is shallow and unrealistic when applied to real people.
And as for the rest of the list…it’s like, dude, are you even trying? Elizabeth Taylor is almost as known for her seven marriages as for her great beauty. Billie Holiday was a prostitute at 14 and had drug problems. And Edna St. Vincent Millay…wait, what??? The second fucking line on her Wikipedia page mentions her “feminist activism and her many love affairs.”
I’m so sad you won’t date me, Mark. So sad.
Oh, oops, sorry. I think I actually meant “glad”.
“It’s an odd list for many reasons. For one thing, nearly half the women on it (Sophia Loren, Annie Leibovitz, and Joan Didion) are very much alive.”
I’m going to go out on climb here and say that when mark Judge talks about women who exemplify his view of female virtue and quality, one of the things he’s assuming is that they aren’t over 30.
@friday jones
I’m pretty sure he just pulled an “example woman” out of his ass, too. Or he briefly knew and hung around such a woman and greatly exaggerated their relationship and her actions. Like, maybe he once met an Indian woman who got sand in her eyes at the beach.
This makes sense in the mind of someone who thinks women cease to be women the moment he ceases to be attracted to them. Over 25? Pretty much the same as being dead.
Well, he sounds like a load of fun. I know most of the single white ladies I know have “spontaneously emits tedious rightwing Catholic blather” in their top five list of desired characteristics in a life partner, so I’m sure they’ll all be devastated by the news
Smooth ninja skills rtk.
“India — like Africa and Japan and other non-Western cultures — still sees with open eyes.”
Yes, the magical Other is open eyed and naive and like children. There are no cultural dogmas and industrialised areas and culture clashes in these exotic places.
Do you think he’s really under the impression that “Africa” is a country? Probably one where the open-eyed, wonder-capable women all have bones through their noses?
In his defense, there’s absolutely no cultural differences across the whole African continent. Everyone there looks the same, speaks the same language and worship the same gods in the same way. I mean, the only reason there’s any borders there at all is so that the Western world doesn’t have to change its maps; they’re quite polite that way, those Africans.
(I’m an editor, and that tendency to lump everyone in Africa together – with its slightly less-common tendency to pretend that Asia is more-or-less homogenous – is a pet peeve that I doubt I’ll ever see the back of.)
Reason 1) His awesome white women of the past are all extremely famous artists. “I won’t date american women because the actresses and musicians and poets who create our television shows aren’t as creative as they used to be” is a pretty silly reason for turning up your nose at Stella from accounting.
Reason 2) In explaining why white women of today suck compared to women of the past, he would totally date Billie Holiday because she was awesome. She was indeed awesome, but not in any way Mark Judge would consider noble and pure enough for him. He clearly knows nothing about her life other than that he likes her voice. It’s not even clear that he knows she wasn’t a white woman.