By David Futrelle
Fellas, is it gay to date a woman?
Signs point to “yes,” at least if the person reading the signs is a MGTOW Redditor called DannyTTT55.
In a recent post on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, he suggests to his fellow men that unless you’re a true alpha male who doesn’t give a shit about the women he has sex with, dating a woman makes you a cuck in her eyes.
Why? Because you’re dating her, and she known she’s just a worthless slut who deserves nothing better than blatant disrespect.
“At least on a subconscious level, these women know they are a dumpster fire of a human being,” Danny writes,
that’s why if you try to date them normally and treat them with respect, they can’t have any respect for you
It’s like the old Groucho Marx thing of not wanting to be in any club that would accept the likes of him as a member. Except that this version of the old joke isn’t funny, and it involves the word “cuck.”
How can they possibly treat you any more than a cuck while you’re sitting across at dinner from them, waiting at least three dates to hold their hand, while in the back of their mind they’re remembering the gang bang they had a couple years back when they were still “having fun”
Like a lot of manospherians, Danny has a vivid imagination when it comes to the sex lives of other people he knows nothing about.
That’s why the only guys they respect are bad boys who treat them like crap, because deep down inside they know they are crap. They need to constantly boost their ego somehow so they aren’t ashamed to be treated like a regular human being, because they know all they deserve anymore is to be pumped and dumped
Huh. No wonder women want guys like this to make good on their promise to Go Their Own Way, far away.
Commenter Chadrith_Thundavisht agreed with Danny, writing that women are
so desensitised to compliments and all that happy horseshit that it probably engenders frustration to the point they actually WANT a piece of shit to treat them like a piece of shit. Look how many douchbags they go out with and you think to yourself “wtf is going on here!? That guy?!”.
I am shocked — shocked! — that straight and bi women are sometimes shallow when it comes to picking out men to date, because clearly no man would ever make that mistake.
The only other explanation for this is the negative animus complex but I bet my left nut most women are sick of the blue-pilled grovelling and seek out fuckwits to date just to break up the monotony and go ‘southy’ for a bit. They know there’ll be plenty of blue fishies in the ocean when they’re about to walk down washout lane.
Speaking of shocks, it’s also quite stunning (not) to see one of these guys citing some half-digested bit of Jungian theory to explain why women are bitches and hos.
A commenter called Evergreen35, meanwhile, reported that his
biggest Red-Pill was realizing how turned off my last girlfriend was when I told her that I loved her.
Ok, but maybe that was because you’re the kind of guy who reads the fucking MGTOW subreddit for advice on women?
When I ignored her and showed less interest, she always came back to me looking for attention. The less you care, the more she wants you, and vice-versa.
Maybe because she knew you were a shitty dude and was glad to have a less-then-fully-committed relationship with you?
Just spitballing here.
A commenter called breakingthebarriers said he thought that the OP was overanalyzing the whole thing.
From what I’ve seen I don’t think it’s even this deep though.
When I look at the behavior of women, I see a simple creature controlled by an ever-changing volatile melting pot of unchecked emotions. A simple creature unable to comprehend the chaos it creates.
Ok, but how exactly does a melting pot control a creature? Does it have little arms it uses to manipulate the creature like a puppeteer would? I don’t think this guy is able to comprehend his own metaphors, much less the inner life of women.
But it wasn’t just breakingthebarriers who thought the OP was overestimating the cerebral powers of women. According to Zevren_LT,
You are implying, that a woman has even on the basic level the ability of self-reflection.
Which is, in my opinion, far too generous.
Reading too much into them – elevates them needlessly. So we should stop sugarcoating something – which is in truth far simpler and sadly also crueler.
Our minds like to read something more into it as a cope mechanism, when we cant believe the simple truth.
I think these guys have it all backwards. I don’t doubt that a good number of the unfortunate women they go on dates with treat them with disrespect. Not so much because the women in question hate themselves but because they hate you guys for believing the shit you do about women, which I don’t doubt you share with your dates.
Dating while MGTOW must be an ordeal, but that ordeal is nothing compared to what dating one of you — even for the length of a dinner — must be like. And on some level these guys (or at least that portion of them capable of self-reflection) know that they’re the problem — that they themselves are the ones who deserve the disrespect.
Put that in your melting pot and smoke it, guys.
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@Lumipuna
Another explanation is that in our society, men are usually expected to make the first move, and on an online dating app that could consist of liking someone’s profile.
This could be part of it, seeing as women are more likely to be killed or raped by intimate partners, and even when neither of those occur, cis women have more to worry about in terms of pregnancy, higher chance of getting STDs, or other problems.
@Masse_mysteria
It also fails to account for the men who know they are unattractive (or think so) yet still think they are entitled to the most attractive women in the world.
@Naglfar
It would actually be interesting to hear whether those guys do realise they have unattractive looks or if they think a guy’s looks shouldn’t matter, because women aren’t allowed to be shallow and so haven’t thought about it.
Anecdotally, there seem to be a lot of guys who’ll complain about women being able to pretty themselves up while men can’t, like putting time into your appearance was somehow impossible for men. I mean, I sure aren’t interested in pondering on what to wear to make the most of my figure, spending time styling my hair and lifting weights to make myself more appealing or whatever, because there are other things I’d rather be doing, but at least I know that’s technically an option.
Are the men that women like on Tinder in large numbers the most physically attractive in reality, or is their physical attractiveness taken as given, since they get a lot of likes? In other words, did this “study” rate the men’s attractiveness without first knowing how many likes they got, or did they rate it after having that information? Or did they rate men’s attractiveness at all? I didn’t read it, and don’t plan to, because it sounds ridiculous, but I admit to a little curiosity on this subject.
Women have to be more selective on online dating apps than men, simply because men can be dangerous and so women must be careful to mitigate their risk by selecting men who seem like they are likely to be not-dangerous. If a man who is reasonably good-looking creates an attractive profile that portrays him as not-dangerous, he could easily get a ton of likes, and then someone with an agenda comes in later and rates him as a Chad due to all those likes, and not due to his physical looks at all.
@Masse_mysteria
I don’t know about all of them, but I know that amongst the incels, they appear to think they’re ugly (but as far as I can tell are about average looking) and believe that men are just entitled to sex regardless of looks.
@Policy of Madness
And since most manospherians aren’t very subtle, they often give off tons of red flags and as a result will not get many likes.
@Masse_Mysteria
TBH I think what they’re griping about is more that it’s frowned upon for straight men to look feminine, outside of some pretty specific contexts. (Being a rocker, horsing around in drag with your bros, basically anything that can be reframed as “ironic” so it fits into toxic masculinity.) And, like, that is a real thing.
Not that it in any way exempts them from male privilege and their responsibilities as far as women’s liberation. (See again rockers, so many of them are steeped in textbook toxic masculinity while looking femmy as hell.) But like. This is part of how patriarchy cuts off men from understanding themselves, and of how it redirects their repression into entitled rage towards women. At the most extreme IMO, being cut off from what’s seen as their “femininity” encourages them to covet what they believe they don’t have. And yeah, I see transition as a road out of this (though definitely not the only one).
This was part of why I spent so long as a bi man dating other men before I transitioned, even though I swing mostly lesbian – I needed to have my femininity accepted *at all*, and straight culture simply does not do that. Even when individual straight women aren’t homophobic (which is sadly rarer than you’d think), having a boyfriend who doesn’t ooze virility and strength all the time puts them in emotional and physical danger – without a Big Strong Man To Protect Them, straight culture sees them as easy prey.
TL;DR there is actually a huge cultural bias against men truly embracing their feminine side, in a non-ironic and non-toxic way. It’s not as overtly murderous as straight up misogyny, transphobia, or homophobia, but it’s still ugly and IMO it plays a catalyzing role in other oppressions.
(Men who use it to evade responsibility re: male privilege are still utterly full of shit though.)
@Policy of Madness
From what I gathered, the method was creating a fake Tinder profile as a handsome guy, then chatting with women to get to know how they choose who to “like” on Tinder.
For what it’s worth, the author also points out that the sample size of 27 is small. MansVoice had no qualms about that or anything, it seems.
@Cyborgette
I hadn’t thought about that. I guess my use of the expression “pretty up” came off different than I thought. I meant to say that I’ve seen and heard a lot of men complain about how “easy” it is for women to make themselves more desirable, as if that was all just make up and pretty dresses, even though there are a lot of gender-neutral things like just wearing clothes that fit you and combing your hair (not to mention wiping your butt).
I absolutely believe some guys are jealous of women for all the feminine things, but the guys I was thinking about were more in the “well it’s easy being an ugly woman, you can just wear make up” vein.
You know, I know I haven’t been around or been apart of the conversation much right now. Things are really stressfully and busy with work, school, and my husband being sick. But I just want to say that these people always make me sad. They can’t look past themselves to fall in love. They can’t see any potential partner as a person and they will miss out so much because of it.
I have never been more attracted to someone then I am to my husband, and that’s not because he’s some perfect Adonis or something. For me that was just apart of falling in love with him. His personality and all the little things that made me fall in love with him just become his face. It’s how I know that as he ages and what ever changes his body might go through I’m still going to want to be with him and desire him. He is the most beautiful man in the world to me. and only a fraction of that beauty has to do with his looks.
I can see his very soul and the things that make him a person. I’m in love with all of those things. I’m in love with his goodness and his nature and his drive. his brown eyes, jaw line, and strong arms made me desire him when we first met, but it has turned into something so much more then that. And people like our troll here will never have that because they refuse to let themselves become anything other then stereotypes and media trash. They will continue to live their lives shallowly, have shallow interactions, and never know the depths of what they can feel and have with another person. That makes me sad to say the least.
@Masse_mysteria
Well, it’s still more than the average sample size of a manosphere study, which is 0 and comes from the Journal of My Ass.
Holy cow, that’s even worse than I had anticipated. That’s “interviewing” a self-selected, non-randomized sample of women. Forget the tiny sample size; the sampling method is so far beyond invalid that I don’t even have words adequate to describe how much bullshit it is.
And then he relied on self-reported behavior for his “data.” That’s not data. That’s a bunch of anecdotes.
Where is the control, even? You know, let’s say I wanted to do research on Tinder behavior. I can think of at least two way better methods of setting up that study. Of course, they would require actual work, and not just dicking around with women, and multiple profiles with controls in place.
I bet this “study” design didn’t pass the local institutional review board for human research.
@Masse_Mysteria
Ah, gotcha, sorry about that (and no offense!). Yeah, men who say that are just being sexist. And wrong. And stupid. If makeup were easy, I would wear it all the fucking time, instead of focusing on skin care and hoping for implanted programmable chromatophores some day.
Using Tinder to study relationships in the general population seems rather like assessing the art market by checking out DeviantArt. You’d end up with Sotheby’s stocking up on sexualised images of cartoon characters.
I’m not sure it’s a representation that can be extrapolated generally.
If they bother to counteract the algorithms that DA uses for filtering what gets seen they’ll stock up on “teenagers’ drawings fit for the fridge”.
Literally anybody can register there and post whatever they want, so the overwhelming majority of users are hobbyists of varying (but generally low) skill levels who do art for fun. I’m not saying there aren’t seriously good or even professional artists there, but those tend to migrate off the site after a while because DA is dreadful at protecting the users’ intellectual property.
@Alan Robertshaw
Is that necessarily a bad thing? I mean, art tastes change over time and sometimes you have to provide before the market changes its taste. It would be different, but change can be a good thing.
“For some reason a few dates I can watch the interest dying in their eyes in realtime and they never call back and move on to someone else. I don’t even know this guy, but I presume he must be inferior because I’m a supreme gentleman who wants a traditional wife who doesn’t need to worry about anything beyond raising my offspring, which as I spent our final date lecturing her was the ultimate fulfillment of her potential. But every woman is simpleminded and craves that, so surely I couldn’t be the common denominator!”
@Genjones
Or, in xkcd form:
Tinder behavior definitely cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the world. There is a self-selection problem just in Tinder as a whole; people who get onto Tinder may have things in common that are not common amongst non-Tinder users, for instance.
But you could definitely study Tinder behavior if you were interested in Tinder behavior as its own beast, and not as a representation of non-Tinder users. I would propose a four-pronged study.
The first prong would have identical male profiles, let’s say 3, with the only difference being the relative conventional attractiveness of the profile pictures. The profiles would be otherwise the same. All pictures would be of white men, because we already know that black faces are less well received by the general public than white faces, so let’s control for race. The second prong would be male profiles with the same (middling attractive) photo, but the profiles are otherwise different, positioning one as a very progressive person, one as a more centrist person, and the last as a very conservative person.
The third and fourth prongs would be the same as the first and second, but with female profiles instead.
No “interviewing” of the Tinder users is done, because the data comes out of the number of likes any given profile receives.
My hypothesis would be that the supermodel-photo profiles would be heavily favored on both the male and female sides, and that the progressive man would get the most likes, while the conservative, or maybe centrist, woman would get the most likes.
@ naglfar
Art advisors check out all sorts of sources of data as to trends. As you rightly say, it’s good to be first.
So they’ll look at everything, from auction sales, to student art shows; and indeed online publication. So DeviantArt might well be one source of data. But it would just be a small part of the overall picture (geddit!).
The art market covers everything from hedge fund investments to mass produced high volume copies. So you need to be able to see the entire landscape.
DeviantArt can’t be a microcosm of the entire market; in the same way Tinder isn’t a microcosm of society. So that’s the point I was aiming at.
@Alan Robertshaw
I was joking earlier, but yes I understand the point.
@ naglfar
Thinking about it; maybe we should invest in dodgy cartoon art!
@ naglfar
Right; let’s get our art business set up! $60 Billion. There has to be some for us 🙂
@Alan Robertshaw
Hmmm…seems like furry art is quite popular. Watch out, Mona Lisa, soon you will be outsold by an anthropomorphic fox!
@Naglfar:
(Sure, you’re joking, but just to take it seriously for a moment…)
There are reasons why furry art is popular that don’t scale up to masterpiece levels quite so well.
The modern furry fandom is this really odd accident of history, when you get right down to it. It started back in the days of bulletin boards and the early Internet, just when groups like that became a lot easier to get together. Unlike anime fandom, which started around the same time, it didn’t really have any sort of ‘canon’, so people could make up whatever they wanted, like fanfic on steroids. As people met up at parties at SF cons, you had a lot of artists drawing in each others’ sketchbooks to share ideas, and work with themes. As online games started up, even text-based ones, people started building their own characters based on that.
By the time the first dedicated furry conventions started up at the end of the 1980s, you already had a whole bunch of hobbyist artists building off each other, along with several folks who actually were professional artists in other fields anyway but were having fun here, meeting up with people who had created very personal characters and who were very interested in seeing them drawn by the artists they’d been seeing work from both online and off. Things kind of exploded from there, as the number of people interested in drawing art and the number of people commissioning it have both gone up; furry fandom has from its inception been a much more collaborative creative fandom than many others.
(For professional artists, one of the earliest furry comics during the mid-80s black and white boom was done by someone who had been a technical illustrator for the U.S. Air Force.)
Thing is, while that produces a lot of art, most of it is also commercial, done on commission, and mostly of value primarily to the people directly involved.
And I say this as someone who probably doesn’t want to total up the amount of money spent on commissions over the years.
@ naglfar (and probably also Jenora; but don’t tell them!)
Right, you see in that video the guy talks about ‘conversion’ and how it’s important to concentrate on people who don’t just like art, but actually spend money on it…?
First engage the
markpotential customer.@ jenora
Hey, you seen that new paper suggesting the fine constant is growing larger in one direction of the universe and smaller in the opposite?
That sounds like the sort of news that should be celebrated by purchasing some art.
@Alan:
Hah.
(Admittedly, my ‘investments’ in that tend to be more along the lines of ‘spread the wealth’ and ‘support the local and/or struggling artist’, so I’m not necessarily the best person to try and attract with promised high rates of return. Any sort of investment in collectibles is based on the ‘greater fool’ principle: in order to make money, you have to find someone who’s a greater fool than you were when you bought it.
And, of course, with all the conventions and meet-ups cancelled due to the current situation, there are a lot more struggling artists than usual.)
No, I hadn’t seen that paper. That’s an interesting result, but one that I would take with a really big grain of salt. The cosmic microwave background is extremely even; there’s a dipole moment that’s caused by us moving against that background which is 1/800th of the strength of the background (which isn’t all that strong to start with) and any variations we’ve seen on top of that are 1/100th of that. Anything that messes with fundamental constants in a directional manner has to have some way of explaining why this doesn’t cause large-scale issues we would have seen already.
Here’s an article talking about that X-ray paper from earlier:
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/no-the-universe-cannot-be-expanding-differently-in-different-directions-3b889c68ed85
Basic breakdown: the X-ray paper is interesting, and there’s little doubt they saw something, but differential expansion of the universe is probably not the explanation. Another possible explanation is that they’re just seeing two clusters of galaxies moving in different directions relative to the cosmic microwave background.
@ jenora
Ooh, ta for that paper. Some nice evening reading. Yeah, I’m a bit wary of the latest findings. Apart from anything else, some of them suggest Earth is at the centre of the universe. So I’ll reserve saying “Hah, in your face Galileo!” until they’ve ruled out some local phenomena. After all the original CMB results turned out to be pigeon poop.
As for investment, the test I apply is “If I knew I could never ever find a buyer for this, would I still want it?” And as I only buy art I like and want to keep forever the answer is always, yes.