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By David Futrelle
So there are a couple of videos up on YouTube that simulate what it would be like if you were to encounter all of your Tinder dating matches in real life instead of on your phone’s tiny screen.
In one, a young women was confronted with a line of 30 men and told to swipe left or right as they presented themselves to her one by one; she swiped left — that is, she rejected — most of the men. After sitting down and talking to the remaining men individually, she decided she didn’t want to go on a date with any of them.
In the other video, the genders were reversed, and a man had to pick potential dates from a group of 30 women. He ultimately found one he was interested in going on a date with, and got her number.
The first video of the choosy woman seems to have sent Daily Stormer writer Octavio Rivera into a rage. (It’s not clear if he watched the other video.) As he sees it, she’s not hot enough to be rejecting all these men.
“The woman is a 4 at best,” he complains in a recent post on the site, though my guess is that most people would consider her perfectly attractive.
Her face is the kind of face that gets ruined with an extra pound or two – jawline just can’t hold up. Her facial expressions denote bipolar disorder.
Er, what?
Despite her below average status, this slag is so entitled that none of the 30 men were good enough for her.
And the men who were her possible dates, Rivera goes on to complain, helped to feed her sense of entitlement by treating her with too much deference.
Women think they’re some kind of royalty nowadays. Treating them as such doesn’t help. You have to bring them back to earth.
Being all giggly and “te-hee nice to meet you your majesty” is not masculine and it reinforces their princess complex.
Back in the good old days, Rivera asserts,
good, average men had access to women and created their own families without having to play these games. Giving women agency as if they were something other than property was a grave mistake that needs correcting.
And if female agency is the problem, Rivera concludes, the only way to fix the situation we find ourselves in today is to remove that agency.
“Rape is the solution,” he writes, putting the words in bold.
Think about it. This slut was surrounded by like 30 men that wanted to have sex with her. Those men were subjected to stupid hoops and games and ended up gaining nothing and wasting a lot of time. It would have been easier for them to rape her, be done with it and move on towards productive stuff. …
Make Rape Legal Again? It would save so much trouble.
He even has an idea as to who, specifically, should be the first to suffer from this new policy, suggesting that the
government-sanctioned public gang-rape of Ariana Grande would probably be a good thing to strike fear into the hearts of blackface thots, though it may represent a sanitary risk to the men doing the rapes.
He then begins to imagine what his own personal rape utopia would look like.
Once the government has been purged of Jews, we will have to debate the merits of rape punishment administered by the public, or whether we should have professional rapists, or even rape-machines in order to remove the human element from the corrective rape.
In the meantime, he urges his readers to make rape memes — and to come up with an easily recognizable (and memeable) “patron saint of corrective rape” who could help convey “the salvationist nature of rape.”
Now, it would be easy enough to dismiss Rivera’s post as a joke, albeit one in extremely poor taste, especially given his call for memes at the end. But Nazis have a long history of using jokes as a way to get their ideas out there into the world without having to take full responsibility for their awfulness.
And in fact, a now-notorious style guide prepared by Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin urged those writing for the site to hide their serious intent behind a veil of ironic jokiness.
“Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred,” Anglin wrote. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not” — even though, he made clear, they really aren’t joking at all.
While Rivera may not think that the government should immediately begin work on literal rape machines, it’s pretty clear that he really does feel that women shouldn’t be allowed much of a say in their choice of dating partners — and that they definitely have no right to reject the men he thinks they should be dating.
Unfortunately, it’s not only the famously misogynistic Nazis of the Daily Stormer who feel that way. These are views shared to some degree by many if not most incels and Men Going Their Own Way. And they have a disturbing resonance with a surprising number of men.
Indeed, this spring, after a self-identified incel deliberately ran down pedestrians with his van in a busy neighborhood in Toronto, killing ten, a number of prominent men – among them Canadian psychology-professor-cum-self-help-guru Jordan Peterson and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat – began to wonder aloud if the real problem underlying incel rage wasn’t aggrieved male entitlement but the excessive pickiness of women who for some reason don’t feel like dating the sort of maladjusted men who think mass murder is a reasonable response to sexual and romantic frustration.
In an interview with the New York Times, Peterson said the solution to this unjustified female pickiness was a system of “enforced monogamy” that would i somehow – he was a bit vague on the details – compel women to date and marry men who currently have trouble finding partners. Douthat, drawing on a blog post by George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, suggested that “sexual inequality” was as serious a problem as economic inequality and that some sort of “redistribution of sex” might be in the offing. Both think the root of the problem lies in women’s poor sexual choices.
Now, both Peterson and Douthat would be aghast at the suggestion that their solution to what they see as women’s unreasonable refusal to date certain kinds of men bears any resemblance at all to Rivera’s only semi-ironic proposal of mass rape.
Indeed, Peterson has insisted that women wouldn’t be forced to do anything they didn’t want to do – which makes one wonder why he used the word “enforced” at all. How exactly does he think this new monogamy will come about, especially since it would require women to date and/or marry men they now, often with very good reason, reject. Would there actually be much of a difference between Peterson’s sexual utopia and the Handmaid’s Tale’s Republic of Gilead?
Maybe the real difference between Peterson’s “enforced monogamy” and Rivera’s rape robots is that Rivera has taken his ideas to their logical conclusion, and Peterson has not.
Unrelated, but my goodness! I just strayed into the comments section of a Steven Crowder FB screed and now I need some antiseptic applied topically to my frontal cortex. I guess it’s not so unrelated … the distance from that style of looking at the world to Anglin and Co is pretty short. I’m guessing there’d be a fair bit of overlap.
I started down the Crowder rabbit hole when I discovered my sister has bought his infamous Che T-shirt. What do I even say to her if I see her wearing it? We’re quite different politically, obvs, but I’ve never been one to deliberately troll others for a reaction so I can’t think of what the best reaction would be. Grr! Why do family always have to make life more difficult?
(In other news, long time no see! I do hope you’re all well or, if that’s not quite possible, being as alive as you can. I’ve been away because I had a mental health relapse and was flat out just existing. New meds have sorted things out, hopefully, so I may be around a bit more – I missed all the lively debates!)
Additional (on topic) thought:
How does one pick bipolar disorder from examining facial expressions??? I’m totally stumped. Is this some common school of thought in the alt-right/manosphere/neo-Nazi circles? Is there a chart I can download to learn this arcane art?
I had forgotten who Michelle Trachtenberg was until I had a look at that page. Oh dear, it looks like the confused paedophiles are angry with themselves again. She has a Jewish surname.
Nazi cock donkeys are the ones with the problem.
Which page is there a picture of Michelle Trachtenberg? also I thought her name is german, not necessarily Jewish. I know may Jewish people have names with berg at the end, but it’s not 100% to say if it’s Jewish or not.
edit – becuase I am using ship internet I am blocked from “hate sites”
@Valentin
Hi! It’s David’s third link — but it is a hate site. Wikipedia says that Michelle Trachtenberg is Jewish. I hope your voyage is going well!
@Kat thanks))) I was only on board for 6 days but so far it is so good. I am chief officer now. To be fair, even if hate sites are available on board I probably still wouldn’t click on the link to them. I usually don’t follow the links here because David already went into the hell-hole for us ?
You’ve misrepresented the positions of Peterson, Douthat, and myself. Peterson was just talking about marriage, not some other system, and Douthat and I did not blame poor choices by women.
as I see it, that’s not how Tinder works….
@Valentin
Chief officer? Congratulations!
thanks?
@Steph
I think this is a very good point. Also, I wonder what the correct number of men she would choose to date would be. Because, ok, so rejecting them all was being picky and choosy. But picking just one man would still leave 29 poor men dateless. What about them? At the same time, I strongly suspect dating them all would be considered slutty and thus bad.
But I guess the real problem here is that she gets to choose at all.
I recently read ”Look who’s back”, a novel about Hitler being transported to modern Germany by some random space-time distortion right before he was gonna commit suicide. When he realizes what’s happened, he decides to go for power again.
Naturally, people seeing Hitler just being Hitler thinks he’s a spot-on imitator, and he gets picked up for a comedy show on TV. He’s earnest while the audience is like ”such edgy satire!” Gradually, though, people are more and more like ”he’s telling it like it is!”, and towards the end, the path lies wide open for a political comeback.
It’s funny first, then scary. Because if you accept the time travel, the rest is sadly credible.
This basically sums up Peterson’s whole modus operandi. Bring up some tertiary “can’t really argue against” facts in the context of some controversial topic, but then never elaborate on the conclusion those facts lead to, because those conclusions were terrible. Case in point: during a discussion of workplace sexual harrassment, he brings up women wearing makeup and saying its red to mimic sexual arousal. Yeah, part of it might be that, but so what? Peterson never elaborates, he just says “We’ll see if the genders can work together.”
No, jackass, you don’t get to just leave that floating out there. You brought that up for a reason and I really want his interviewers to catch on to that and take him to task for bringing up irrelevant bullshit that his mush-brained followers internalize as a new talking point.
But more to the point of how cutthroat and vulnerable dating apps and sites are… there’s room for some sympathy there. I’ve been there myself: back when I was in university, I was feeling pretty depressed, and I thought it could be that I was lonely, so I tried out LavaLife. Don’t think it was quite the place I should have been looking, but it was the largest one at the time in 2005 or 2006. I went on a couple dates through it, but didn’t keep up with it due to the cost, but I definitely felt the hit to the self-esteem looking at the empty inboxes on those days I didn’t get any hits back. It can feel crushing, but as time went on, I realized that I wasn’t really interested in a relationship, just some human connections and I made the most of the friendships I had, ultimately feeling much better for it.
What I did not do was collect those rejections as grievances and stew in those grievances to the exclusion of all else. There’s critiques to be made of how apps like Tinder reduce people to commodities, but that’s what social media does. Don’t act shocked that you get treated in that manner when you’ve bought into it yourself, incels.
I actually have a male friend who went on Tinder a couple of years ago and got quite a lot of responses? So I guess he’s a Chad? Or maybe not, because he was trying to find a steady girlfriend?
Anyway, I thought it was a bit interesting because I’ve heard so many stories already of women ending up with really strange dates through Tinder or other dating apps, but apparently men can also end up with pretty… weird people.
So his girlfriend of several years broke up with him, and he was really sad for quite some time, but eventually he decided he was over her and he was gonna try to find love again. Through joining Tinder!
So first he was on a couple of dates with women who ditched him because they thought he spoke too fondly of his ex and suspected he wasn’t really over her after all. He said he felt they were unfair to him; obviously he’s gonna speak fondly of his ex since he loved her, but he wouldn’t go on dates unless he was ready to move on. But that’s just his side of the story, maybe he really sounded like he was still in love with her.
Then he was on a date with a woman who announced that although he looks fine in himself, he’s got bad taste in clothes, so on the second date they were gonna go shopping and he was gonna buy what she pointed out to him, and then he might look really good. He was like wuuuut no, no second date for you.
THEN he was on a date with a woman who had seemed completely normal from her Tinder profile and when they chatted online, but on the date, she said one thing after another that made him think like uh… she starts to sound a bit… like a nazi!? A bit vague, sort of like dog whistling… And then suddenly she goes “By the way, I wanna have a family one day, also, I want to have lots of children, so I hope you’re down for that, but I’m sure you are, I’m sure you’re a guy who loves children” and he was like WTF girl it’s our first date and there will definitely not be a second one!
But after that he went on a date with a woman he really clicked with, and now, after a couple of years, they’re engaged to get married, so all’s well that ends well!
But jeez about nazi girl.
@Dvärghundspossen:
My husband has some dating horror stories, from the year or so between breaking up with his ex and meeting me:
1. The date that turned out to consist of the woman running her booth at a craft fair while he walked around looking at the other booths; when he came back after fifteen or twenty minutes she insisted he couldn’t really have been observing closely enough if he’d seen the whole show in so short a time, and told him to go look around the hall *again.*
2. The date that consisted of watching movies with the woman’s younger brother while she did other stuff, which led him to suspect she’d really just wanted a babysitter.
Apparently there was also quite a lot of “I know your profile says you’re not interested in having kids, but….”
My sympathies to Tinder users.
I did video dating back in the early 90s and never met anyone I wanted a second date with. Among the fellows I was matched with, one had an apartment that smelled like an entire frat house, one actually lived in a frat house, one started calling me his girlfriend ten minutes after we met*, one was just trying to evangelize me. But the worst was one I really thought I clicked with. We had several long phone conversations before we decided to meet in person and go to a fancy steak house (his idea, not mine.)
He picked me up in his work van which was fine as I didn’t know if he had another vehicle, but it was pretty dirty and I was afraid I’d mess up the carefully chosen outfit I was wearing. He also was still in his work clothes (he was a house painter.) Trooper that I was, I was still rolling with it at this point.
At the steak house, he proceeded to treat both the hostess and waitress like dirt under his paint-spattered sneakers. I was horrified even though he treated me much differently. I was so freaked out by the end of the dinner, I considered calling my dad to pick me up.
Some things never change.
*He was actually the best of the bunch but still a no because I am no one’s girlfriend before the first date is even over.
Edited to delete an extra “and”
Combo brain bleach and bad dating ads (sadly no longer updated).
http://cuteanimalsbaddates.tumblr.com/
This would be a HUGE red flag to me. Don’t talk about your ex on the first few dates. Just don’t. The date is about you and the person you’re with and how compatible you are with each other. It’s not about your ex at all.
@ Hambeast:
Why…? (lyric to Robert Earl Keen’s “Furnace Fan”)
You can fry an egg out there on the city sidewalk
You can fry your bacon and and and and
I understand why lizards live in sunny Arizona
Why people do and call it home I’ll never understand
I figure he couldn’t think of a rhyme….(emphasis mine)
Professional rapists. Wow….I wonder what the requirements will be to go from amateur to professional status.
Wasn’t there a “rape machine” in a movie with Julie Christie, “The Demon Seed?”
Also, returning to comment again since I hadn’t watched the Tinder videos before commenting the first time –
I HATED watching these videos. It’s just kind of a stark reminder of why I am incapable of using dating apps. I tend to empathise with others far too much and feel unbelievably guilty saying no to anybody, because a) I’m terrified of hurting their feelings and b) I don’t want to be seen as an empty-headed, shallow bimbo who cares only about, like, looks and money or whatever.
Which is also why these alt-right lot who complain about “picky” women really get under my skin. These sorts of comments tend to stick in my brain and make me extremely self-conscious that if I ever reject a guy, then I’m turning into this “picky” girl they all complain about… I’ve said yes to and dated guys who I had a bad gut feeling about, purely because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings… and sure enough they turned out to be kinda terrible people. Of the four people I’ve dated in the past year, I stuck with two of them a lot longer than I should have, because they managed to guilt-trip me very easily (they’d say things like “I understand why you wouldn’t want to be with someone as fat/ugly/etc. as me…”). Despite the fact that I knew I had nothing in common with them (one of them was very self-absorbed and controlling, the other was quite childish), I stuck with them. And regretted it.
@Kiwiwriter:
I do recall a line in a book of typos, which quoted a student essay on the Industrial Revolution that mentioned the “mechanical raper” that “did the work of ten men.”
It still wasn’t as good as the typo that described Sir Francis Drake as the first Englishman to “circumcise the globe, with a 100-foot clipper.”
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants : something cannot be that vile without being human.
Seriously, how can anyone argue that freeze peachs should protect thoses people ? And yet, some say that no message is horrible enough to get censored. I know censors have a really bad history of enforcing the power of the strongs unto the weaks, but not everything is worth diffusing.
Well, the “mechanical raper” really “plowed” its targets.
And Sir Francis Drake? I hear he was a “cut above all the others.”
Is anyone going to say hi to Robin Hanson up there? ???
I seem to recall Scildfreja knew rather a lot about Hanson, unless I’m thinking of another Mammotheer?