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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.
Mish,
That you’re even talking about women’s collective poor choice of partner shows that David did not misrepresent you at all.
I didn’t register this at the time, but my wife told me that on our second date a waiter made a mistake with our order and instead of tearing him a new one I was apparently really understanding and sympathetic, and this was the point where she thought I might be a realistic long-term prospect.
I honestly don’t remember any of this, as I’m naturally nice to waiters (I have far too many friends who were “resting” actors/creatives at some point or other), but apparently she really noticed this because it was so unusual – and I got the distinct impression that rather too many of her other dates thought along similar lines to your one. Why, I genuinely can’t fathom: who wants to date an overbearing, arrogant arsehole?
Oh My God It’s Robin Hanson
Hello Mr. Hanson! I’m a big fan of your work, I found your blog, Overcoming Bias, to be brilliantly instructive. It was demonstrative in how someone could be so smart, so clever, so witty, and so close to correct while being so very wrong.
Let me get my paring knives.
Peterson’s a reverberating idiot. In specific, suggesting that Peterson was talking about marriage when he was talking about “enforced monogamy” is ridiculous, because we live in a society that encourages marriage and socially enforces monogamy through group punishment of cheaters.
What Peterson meant by “enforced monogamy” is that he thinks society should punish women who do not fulfill traditional gender roles by remaining single when they could be married. This is the only interpretation that makes sense in the face of what brought on the “enforced monogamy” comment was a discussion of how he felt Incels were acting out because they weren’t able to fulfill their own stereotypical male gender role – having a wife and family.
If you’d like to tell me I’m misinterpreting him, you have to explain it in the context of that discussion.
David didn’t claim you were blaming the poor choices of women. Read it again. He claimed that you suggested a sex redistribution scheme, which is peak Hansonian contrarian bilgewater. This doesn’t blame women, it fails to acknowledge that women are people at all, they’re a resource to be redistributed.
I mean, sweet fancy Moses, Mr Hanson, you were so eager to feel offense at being called out that you entirely misread what David wrote. For someone who writes a blog about overcoming bias you’re giving one hell of a poor showing.
In the end, Mr Hanson, you aren’t published and lettered because you’re right, you have those accolades because your words appeal to people with money. By your own writing on your blog, you should agree with that.
Overcome your bias, David! I believe in you.
For certain values of believe.
Hah! Robin, not David. You’re Mr Hanson. Mea culpa.
Scild isn’t the only one who knows from Robin Hanson. Occasional celebrity guest David Gerard awared me of him over at tungle dot blue hell, as one of the key reasons anyone has ever the hell heard of Eliezer Yudkowski, and also as someone who assigns his students at George Mason University to establish appropriate legal remedy or damages for cucking. (Yes, Hanson is the reason for the “cucked in the cuck my own cuck” tag. Well, one of the reasons, the one that doesn’t prove love real.)
@Kupo:
One classic red flag is whinedumping an injustice collection of the last eight ungrateful bitches who broke the heart of a Nice Guy like him. (Spoiler: fall for this and you won’t be special; you won’t be different; you won’t be the one to redeem him with your Healing Wuv–you’ll be number nine.)
(This type has also been known to deliver lengthy rodomontades about how Dames Are No Damn Good…to a female confidante (who, because he has firmly slotted her into the Unfuckable Zone, on the basis of age, looks, weight, or what have you, doesn’t count.)
I mean, maybe? I suppose location and circumstance likely play a big role, or possibly he’s just good at presenting himself online.
I shouldn’t make such sweeping statements. Still, most people I know who have tried Tinder have found it an unhappy experience, for a whole variety of reasons. And my advice to them has always been: delete your account. I think online dating can take a real, and damaging, psychological toll on those who aren’t so good at it, or who aren’t photogenic. I’ve long been interested in systematic studies of those who grew up using the apps.
@Moon_custafer:
The book is Anguished English by Richard Lederer.
As for the post, WTF? Talk about bending reality to fit your narrative, too. This –
– doesn’t fit what’s shown in the actual video, as not all of the men she initially “swiped right” on chose to go through the speed-dating round. And wanting to go on a date with someone doesn’t mean you want instant sex. Then there’s this:
It would have been easier for them to rape her, be done with it and move on towards productive stuff.
You may be like the guys in Titus Andronicus who are easily convinced that rape is a good replacement for consensual sex (plus, in their case, romance) but I’m preeeeeeeeeetty sure most people don’t think like this.
Eh, I’m sure it’s “satire” or something.
Yes, let him be like the guys in Titus Andronicus.
The meat is probably bitter and greasy.
I apparently no longer remember how to inline images here. Dammit.
… I’m pretty sure that the majority of men, if given the option to participate in the brutal gang rape of a woman or to have her just turn him down on a dating app, would choose the latter.
Yeah I agree talking about your ex isn’t the best move, although it’s even worse if you say bad things about them. The weird dates were make-over-girl and let’s-have-babies-nazi girl… Although I guess in the eyes of many of the people David writes about, the latter would be a real catch!
The NYT is a piece of shit.
Of course! There’s at least one critical difference: if Peterson got his way, no one would be trying to escape to Canada.
Weird Eddie – I already use way more than my fair share of commas and parentheses, I figure I can set the extra ‘ands’ free for someone else to use.
Wow, it’s been a long time since I was reminded of just how fundamentally dehumanizing and repulsive the manosphere/incel/”sex redistribution” ideological proponents really are.
And if this follows the trend established by the “Alt Right,” then these views on rape should start being shared with a more mainstream conservative audience in just a few years, tops. If they aren’t already, on some level.
At least “cucked in the cuck by my own cuck” is fun to say. Thanks for reminding me of that, lol.
These history deficient half-wits seem to be unaware that when women were property, they were the property of their MENFOLK (fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, and others male relatives), who did not take kindly to random men sexually interfering with them.
The usual corrective used on transgressors was for the lady’s menfolk to take them out behind the barn and horse whip some manners into them.
Are those the “good old days” these jerks want to come back?
And could someone ask Jordan Peterson, who seems totally oblivious to the social constructs that shape our behaviors, (like the clothes we wear), why he wears a suit jacket in 90° weather and a tie, which is the most useless garment ever invented.
Is he so insecure about his masculinity that he chooses these items to signal to others that “Yes, I am indeed a man”? Or, is he going with the social standards that this clothing is merely a statement that he is a professional man?
I love how the far right and Peterson get all kinds of marxist-socialist when talking about sexuality being equally distributed. Peak brocialism.
OK, maybe it’s a joke. It’s still nothing to joke about.
Why the hatred for Ariana Grande? I’m middle-aged, and not very knowledgeable about pop*/youth culture.
When I was a teenager, in the Dark Ages of the 1980s, I couldn’t get a boyfriend to save my life. It never occurred to me to blame anyone but myself.
*I almost typed ‘poop’ instead of ‘pop’. It might not make much of a difference.
I just don’t understand how anyone would want a sexual or romantic partner forced to be with them. I think rape is exactly what they want, not sex.
I once took a guy barn dancing for a second date to see how he treated all the other women. he was polite and talkative to all of them fooling me into further dates where I found out that he was mentally and emotionaly abusive
but it might be a good way to rule out more obvious ass hats.
They hate Ariana Grande because she is young, beautiful, sings about sex sometimes, and has female fans.