“Dating in your 40’s,” explains a Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of JasHanz,
is all young Women looking for Daddies and 40 something Women who’ve left their marriage, got the kids and the house, along with support, and now they’ve done a cleanse, lost 7 lbs, got a makeover and are ready to start “living life on their terms(TM)”.
But no one wants these old ladies — especially those with kids in tow.
Then they’re shocked when that good looking guy with the great teeth, with his own contractor business isn’t interested in them.
“But I have my shit together!!!” they say, and they honestly cannot see that any truly successful Man, the kind of Man they’ve decided they’re worthy of, isn’t going to trust someone who already cleaned someone else out and brought the kids along with them.
So how can these 40-something single moms understand just how unappealing they are to 40-something men who are regularly “being contacted by the little 20 somethings looking for Daddies?” Well, Mr. Hanz has developed a mathematical formula they can use to determine their true sexual marketplace value. It’s really very simple.
[I]f they really want to know their worth on the dating market … they need to combine their kids weight and add it to their own. So you’re 115lbs, you’ve got two kids, not even teenagers yet, and their combined weight is 150lbs? Congratulations, that super cute contractor with the big house and the shiny new truck sees a 265lb Woman now.
Oh no! These slender women have all been turned into virtual fatties! And obviously no man wants a fatty, either of the real or the imaginary kind.
MRAs are some of the shallowest and most casually misogynistic people in the world. But you sort of have to admire their sheer ingenuity..
Just kidding. You don’t have to admire anything abut these guys.
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If you add the kids’ weight to the mom’s…
it’s probably still less than that of the manboys who post this crap.
I doubt the hot young women looking for a daddy are interested in them, either.
And maybe she’s tired of the “manly” pickup driving type and is looking for a nice nerd who drives a Prius.
If your contractor has a shiny truck I doubt he’s a very good contractor.
Hey, let’s avoid being sizeist, please. It’s extremely upsetting to see.
I wish these guys weren’t interested in fat women, what actually happens is the are and they are scared their ‘friends’ will find out so they treat us like crap and expect us to be so grateful they even talked to us we’ll instantly drop to our knees.
pfff,
What an idiot. What if the 40 years old woman has an 18 years old daughter who has a massive daddy kink? Even as creepy perverts they are failures.
/sarcasm
Based on that recent discussion about those guys who want to get into knitting, that super cute contractor with the great teeth, big house, and shiny new truck is actually a techbro who thinks he is about to revolutionize roofing or something.
Well, at least he has money, or will until his latest venture fails.
But anyway, if we take JasHanz’s argument as fact, then I have been interested in some women well over 300 pounds. Fortunately I am not a super cute contractor with a shiny new truck, so I reckon it’s OK.
All I can say is, what the actual fuck…
GSS ex-noob:
Let’s not fat-shame, even such vile persons as these. It’s tantamount to going “Haha, Trump is gay for Putin!”
And this MRA is enraged that these women in midlife have a much better chance than he does of living life on their own terms. That’s because they’re not wallowing in hatred.
MRAs are convinced that every single divorce ends in the woman getting most of the assets, aren’t they? Even though I think there’s been studies that show, on average, women actually end up slightly poorer after a divorce? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I know, let’s try some math of our own. Take the total IQ of these guys (which isn’t much to begin with) and subtract one point, or hell, .5, from every shitpost like this that they make online. Whoops! Suddenly their IQ is in the negatives! And you guys can’t even qualify as “himbos” because you’re not good looking enough, I mean, just look at that cranial slope and hunched over spine. (Am I doing this right? Should I add something about wrist circumference?)
While I don’t exactly think we should fat shame anyone, I do think it’s worth pointing out their hypocrisy in wanting rail-thin women while many of them are overweight themselves. Weight really shouldn’t matter, but they’re so fixated on it, while very few of them resemble anything close to a well sculpted gym god that would be the male equivalent of what they’re demanding. Same goes for almost everything they demand of women, really.
@sunnysombrera
Dingdingding! We have a winner!
They also apparently think children are just chips you can cash in for that sweet, sweet child support money, rather than living human beings that require love and care, and probably a lot of reassurance if they have a resentful, sexist, deadbeat dad who doesn’t really care about them, but still insists he deserves full custody so he doesn’t have to pay their mother.
Somehow I get the feeling that if a woman was 40-something and didn’t have children, he would be asking what was wrong with her, and criticize her for waiting and not making proper use of her eggs.
And now I will go a bit OT because I just have to tell you about the unexpected no-children-thing that happened to me the other day. Long story ahead, feel free to scroll past if you want to read about other things.
I was at work and my day was really shitty. I was stressed, tired and sad. One of my colleagues thought this was a good time to chit-chat, which means to ask me (again) why I don’t have children:
Colleague: “Gatecrasher! How are things going? Children on the way?????”
Normally, I just say “thing are good, no children, no” and then try to dodge all the follow-up questions. But this time I was out of patience, so I said:
“Oh, no, not that again! Everyone asks me that all the time, I am tired of answering the same fucking question over and over. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Colleague: “But that’s because you’re the age when the children come, and people are curious!”
Tired of his crap, this time, I went for brutal honesty:
“Yes, but when I say I don’t have children people want to know why. They demand explanation, but no explanation is good enough. If I say I don’t want children, people nag me that I must have them anyway, they try to scare me that my life otherwise will be empty and I will never know what real love is. They don’t hesitate to say literally these things to my face. If I say I’m infertile, they nag me about IVF and adoption, while knowing nothing about either.
Whatever I say, people act like my life is inferior, a child being the only salvation from the inherent emptiness of life . And I think that is not only untrue, but also deeply insulting and depressing. And I’m tired of having to defend myself and the value of my life to others. I don’t want to talk about it.”
My colleague went silent. And then the weirdest thing happened. This colleague, himself a father of one, who has asked me repeatedly about when my children will come, said:
“I didn’t want a child either. But my wife wanted to.”
And then he told me how his wife felt she couldn’t wait any longer and he agreed to children because he didn’t want to lose her, even though he wasn’t interested in parenthood. He loved his child now it was here, and he was content with his life, but still didn’t actually like being a father, although he tried to make the best of it. He told me how he struggled with shouldering a role he didn’t really want, and said:
“You don’t know what it’s like before you have them”
When people say this to me, they usually mean if you think you don’t want children, it’s because you are a pathetic person who don’t know any better. Once you have the children the Magic of Real Love will bless even that ice cold heart of yours. But my colleague meant it the other way around. When he agreed to his wife’s wishes, he didn’t really know what it was he was agreeing to. He said:
“If I had known, at the point in time when I made the decision, what I now know, I don’t think I would have agreed to it.”
And then he told me how people are now nagging him and his wife about when child number two will come, and expressed support for me choosing my own path in life.
I think we both learnt something that day.
@Gatecrasher
Thank you so much for sharing.
As someone who decided very early on that I didn’t want kids and most likely didn’t want to be married either (especially since I still thought I was heterosexual), I feel you. I haven’t been nagged nearly that much, but from time to time my mom would try to go the “never say never” and “it’s different when you have your own” route. She never really pressed, but I think she believed that I had just been too burnt out from caring for my siblings (true!) and other kids, but once I settled down with a good man, I would certainly welcome having cute widdle babies of my own.
Well, at least I gave her some cute “grand-kitties”.
I feel bad for your co-worker. Even though he was being an ass by repeatedly asking about something that was none of his business, I guess he felt somehow obligated to perpetuate the cycle of trying to “convince” people that they “need” to have kids… despite not wanting them himself. I feel bad that his wife pressured him into it. I’m glad if he’s adjusting to the one, but I feel like under no circumstances should they have another. He has already compromised enough of himself and I don’t see it ending well if they have more. They will either grow up knowing/suspecting he resents his parenthood in spite of his best efforts or a divorce is likely looming on the horizon, so then he’ll end up losing his wife and having kids he didn’t want.
Here’s to less shitty, stressful days for you in the future. Keep living your best child-free life and tell everyone who questions that to mind their own damn business. I also have some good Captain Awkward articles I could link for dealing with this subject.
I was actually fat, 40+, with a kid – I did not struggle for 1st dates. I could have had.a lot of 2nd dates, too if I’d chosen to. I have a wonderful partner now, who treats me well, has what I consider to be a prestigious job and puts more effort into my son’s future happiness and success than his own father does. We work together to be good parents and stepparents (he has kids, too), and I’m genuinely happy with my family life. So, yeah.
Basically this is just stochastic terrorism trying to keep women in shitty marriages. My ex did this, too – instead of working on the relationship he made sure to tell me about articles in the Daily Mail about women who left their husbands and couldn’t find anyone else. Spoiler above – but I ain’t the one who’s still single.
If they get to add the children’s weight to the mother’s weight, then we get to add the shiny truck and house’s weight to the cute contractor’s weight. Look, now he weighs 110,000 pounds!
Then we get to subtract their combined cost from his net worth and then multiply by the cosine of WTF, because what even is this nonsense.
@Gatecrasher – Thanks for sharing that. If people don’t have children, it’s because either they can’t, or don’t want to. Either way, it’s nobody’s business.
Also, he’s forgetting to subtract the 180(ish) pounds she lost in the divorce.
But he clearly has no idea what people weigh anyhow, if he thinks the average woman weighs 115 lbs. and the average “not even teenager” (presumably 11-12 yo) weighs 75 lbs. Maybe he should go date on Mars, where everything weighs less.
This is perhaps kind of insider humor, but I once had the whimsical idea that you could measure a person’s kinkiness by the total mass of their sex toy collection. In this scheme, live partners would be counted as toys if they consent to that.
@Gatecrasher: Thanks for sharing. My mom was also of the ‘you don’t know until you know’-variety, but that was more a ‘you might feel different if you meet the right person’ reasoning than ‘the miracle of birth’ (I don’t know the exact job name in english, but she helps out young couples who have just had a child with childcare) which I thought at first.
After I had been with my partner for about two to three years, my mother eventually told me that she believed we didn’t want children (without judgment, she loves children but is also pretty honest about families where she had her doubts).
As for the OP: Great math, guy. Your worth as a human being decreases with every single word. Ew.
@Queen of the Harpies, Battering Lamb, Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Thank you, my best wishes for you too! May your lives rock!
Sadly, my mother’s nagging is the worst of all the nagging. Despite knowing that me and Mr. Gatecrasher wanted children years ago but couldn’t have them, and then decided we had a good life as it was, and went with that, my mother still nags. She tries to save me from myself, which is not very helpful. Because I don’t need to be saved, and neither does Mr. Gatecrasher.
Also she wants grandchildren, badly, and I feel guilty for not working harder to give her them, even though I know it’s not my responsibility. One time she sat crying at the kitchen table, my brother had to lie and tell her he had a girlfriend it was getting serious with in order to distract her.
Or the time when I told her I was considering getting a contraceptive so I wouldn’t have periods, which at the time were painful reminders of the failure of my body. I thought it was a great idea, that it would make me feel better, but she had a complete meltdown at me for taking away her miracle grandchild. I didn’t talk to her for two weeks after that.
I love my mother, but I don’t call her as much as I used to.
@Queen of the Harpies; those links sound really useful 🙂
@ queen of the harpies
Yes!! Reminds me of the turgid and gammony looking 50 year old who had the sheer brass neck to refer to my beautiful 21 year old colleague as “that dumpy girl”. Or the bloodshot homunculuses in pubs with crap personalities and too many miles on the clock taking a short break from their general invective and racism to discuss how ugly the barmaid is. Truly, it makes my blood boil.
It’s actually not worth pointing out any more than it’s worth pointing out that homophobic gay folks are hypocritical. The hypocrisy is not the problem. People are hypocrites all the time about all kinds of things. The problem is the fatphobia/sizeism. And commenting on a weight that is assumed because of a view the person holds? Straight up fatphobic.
ETA: I need to dip at this point because this is usually the point where everyone decides I’m being a horrible meanie for pointing out their bigotry, and then double-down on the fatphobia, and I can’t deal with a trigger to my ED right now. So if you reply to me, I probably won’t respond.
@Gatecrasher: I hear you. I am you.
Thankfully my mom never went in for the thing, and the Mr. has siblings who all procreated asap.
I once said to my mom, after a difficult babysitting gig “I guess it’s different when they’re you’re own?” and she honestly said “No, not really.” This from a woman who loved being a mom.
After a while, she was like “Yeah, with all the health problems in both the families and the way the world’s going, not having grandkids is totally fine with me.” Plus there were always kids around who didn’t have grandparents handy for her to hang out with.
I think it’s a good idea to speak less with your mom, especially if she’s not going to be understanding about your biology saying NOPE, which you have no control over. My own uterus issues at least got the few people who were still bugging me to STFU.
And now I am a post-menopausal fat crone, which at least makes me invisible to MRAs, and my uterus has stopped hurting me. Yay.
I’m guessing the toad in this story isn’t a buff contractor with the shiny truck, either — he’s just jealous of them. Many of those women (of whatever weight) with kids are perfectly nice people, but they’re smart enough not to expose their children to a toxic mess like him. Particularly if they were married to someone like him before. Double particularly if they somehow managed to be one of the mythical women who got all the money (lol) and don’t need another income.
For God’s sake, will you all cease the fat-shaming? You know who you are.
Firstly, I apologize if I have stepped on anyone’s toes, especially to you, kupo, and will think more carefully about how I word things.
@Lollypop
Yep. The main point I was trying to get at was just this: It doesn’t have to be weight or looks or anything specific, it’s that these guys will hold women, all women to impossibly high standards that they themselves wouldn’t meet a fraction of.
@Gatecrasher
Your mom has… issues. She needs to understand that grandbabies are not part of some guaranteed package you get just because you/your kids have reached a certain age. If she’s really dying to bond with cute, tiny humans, she should consider babysitting, nannying, or some other part or full time career in childcare.
Here are a few of the better CA articles on the subject:
https://captainawkward.com/2017/08/08/1005-mom-you-must-give-me-grandbabies-you-you-must-stfu/
https://captainawkward.com/2019/07/08/1215-so-about-your-private-reproductive-decisions-and-other-small-talk/
https://captainawkward.com/2019/10/22/1232-infertility-and-in-laws/
Bonus:
https://captainawkward.com/2015/01/24/help-im-dating-a-mens-rights-activist/
(WHTM gets a shout-out.)
Gatecrasher, sorry your mum is so hurtful, and your decision to have less exposure to her is wise. I hope you are able to stick to it.
We couldnt get kids normally, and went the IVF route unsuccessfully, soooooo many people insisted on telling us stories about their best friend or sibling of third cousin twice removed who “just stopped trying and had a lovely baby six weeks later”. Yeah, maybe not with the number chlamydia did on my tubes. And yeah a bit late, but my advice if anyone is going through that is tell no one you don’t absolutey have to tell.