‘A Particularly Non-Self-Aware Man’

Posted on | May 12, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Online dating is a bad idea. Every time I repeat this warning, someone in the comments will say, “But I met my [husband or wife] on [name of online dating site] and everything was awesome,” as if this anecdotal exception disproves the rule that online dating is a bad idea.

People who engage in online dating are self-selected. What they all have in common is, nobody they know in real life wants to date them. Think about that — if a guy is on OKCupid or Tinder, the one thing you know about him is, he couldn’t find a girlfriend any other way. Simply by signing up for a site, he’s advertising the fact that he’s a loser.

Why do losers lose? In 2009, Christian Rudder did an analysis of OKCupid users and found that two-thirds of messages from men go to just one-third of women on the site, i.e., the most attractive. A very good-looking woman “gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages” as a woman rated in the lower 20% by looks: “So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.” Female preferences were even more remarkable: Women on OKCupid rate “an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium.” Was this because the OKCupid dating pool is mostly ugly guys, or because women on the site judge men by an unrealistic standard? Without going any further in our analysis of why these patterns exist, we can nevertheless say that the results shown by the OKCupid study demonstrate typical patterns of losers — men who waste their time in a futile pursuit of beautiful women, and ordinary-looking women who foolishly imagine that Handsome Princes are as common in reality as they are in Disney fairy-tale cartoons. (Hat-tip: Badger Pundit.)

Overestimating your chances is a basic trait of losers. An unrealistically high self-appraisal — a misguided belief that you deserve better romantic partners than are actually available to you — is one obvious reason why people engage in online dating. And it evidently does not occur to these people that the online dating pool is polluted with people just like themselves, because another basic trait of losers is a lack of self-awareness. That is to say, the loser is seldom aware of why he is losing and, indeed, may refuse to recognize that he is a loser.

 

This is what produces guys like Elliot Rodger, who declared himself “The Supreme Gentleman” before his 2014 murder/suicide rampage. He was an extreme example of the loser mentality, a half-Malaysian guy who seemed to believe he deserved a perfect blonde girlfriend. He actually wasn’t bad-looking, and he was born to fortunate circumstances — his father is a film director — but he was doomed by his lack of self-awareness. All the feminist lectures about “misogyny” and “male entitlement” inspired by the Isla Vista shootings missed this point: If Elliot Rodger was typical of anything, he was a typical loser.

All of that 500-word discourse was preamble to this: A lesbian decided to go on a date with a male-to-female transgender who “was extremely well-passing as female in their photos” online:

The only reason I knew this person was trans was because I found a web page documenting their transition during my reverse image search, which I always do when meeting people from online just to make sure they aren’t using someone else’s photos. I felt weirded out by this, because I felt like, if this person is not my preferred biological sex (as a lesbian), I should at least know this before being asked out on a date. I probably should have cancelled, but I’m “open-minded”, so I didn’t.
This person appeared to be specifically targeting lesbians, and not bisexual women. In fact, this person had a rant on one of the pages that turned up in my google search about how it was not necessary to be bisexual or pansexual in order to be attracted to a trans person, and people should always date trans people as the gender that they identify as, no matter what.

We should applaud this woman for her cleverness in researching her online dates before meeting them, but even such diligence can never overcome the inherent toxicity of online dating (i.e., everybody involved is a loser). So her research revealed the attempted deceit, but because she is “open-minded” she decided to accept the date anyway without telling this transgender person that she knew “she” was actually a he.

The “trap” was trapped, so to speak.

 

So here is this “extremely well-passing” transgender person, chasing lesbians online without revealing his/“her” secret, evidently hoping to succeed in this deliberate deception, without realizing that his/“her” profile photo can be used to search his/“her” online history — loser!

Well, how did this date go?

Even though this person had the physical appearance of a women, I could not stop reading this person as male. The way that they talked to me, the way that they bragged to me, the way that they kept talking over me, the way that they kept trying to “teach” me things, and go on monologues on subjects that pertained to them (and not me)… Everything read “male privilege” to me. Honestly, this was the biggest part of the evening, but I don’t feel like I need to explain it much, because I’m sure every woman understands what I mean by this. Even just as a date between a straight man and a male-attracted women, this was all totally eyeroll inducing and out of line, let alone as a “date” between a person who is basically a straight man, and a lesbian that was tricked into accepting the date and then felt pressured into not cancelling, because that would be “transphobic”.
This person was around 28/29, and had only transitioned within the past couple years. . . .
Anyway, I excused myself from the date during a break in one of their monologues and lectures, saying that I should get going. (At which point I got a total non-response like “I need to get going for practice”, as though they were ending the date and not me [eyeroll].)
I honest to god felt like I had, not only gone out on a date with a man, but a particularly non-self-aware man who was making every stupid male mistake imaginable on a date with a woman.

Lack of self-awareness — gosh, doesn’t this seem familiar?

Why is this common trait of losers described as “male privilege”? That’s what really puzzles me and, while there may be many possible explanations, my hypothesis is that it is a matter of selection effects.

The only male behavior feminists ever notice is bad behavior. A thousand innocent men may be riding the New York subway train with the feminist, but if just one of these men behaves in a particularly obnoxious way, his groping or grabbing or staring will be the anecdote that inspires her to write a column denouncing males quite generally. Never mind all those innocent guys, minding their own business, quietly reading the Wall Street Journal on their subway ride to work — the feminist never writes about decent ordinary men, because she never notices them at all. Good men are essentially invisible, so far as the feminist is concerned, and so the entire vocabulary by which feminism describes male behavior is about “misogyny,” “male entitlement,” etc.

Stereotypes and Anti-Male Hate Rhetoric

Describing the obnoxiously domineering behavior of her transgender date as “male entitlement,” the lesbian says, “I’m sure every woman understands what I mean by this” — that is to say, she believes this particular pattern is how “every woman” expects men to behave.

Is this generalization true? Or is it a negative stereotype of men, based on the non-random selection of men with whom feminists interact?

If it is fair to demonize all males on the basis of the obnoxious behavior of the worst men, what other stereotypes are valid? Can we speak of the greedy Jew or the inscrutable Asian or the lazy Mexican with as much confidence as the feminist speaks of “male entitlement”?

However, it is not my purpose here to condemn the unfairness of feminist discourse, but rather to demonstrate how selection effects introduce bias in their appraisals of male behavior. One thing I’ve striven to do during my four-year-long research into radical feminism is to avoid generalizing about female behavior. To critique feminism, as an ideology, is not to be “anti-woman,” because feminists are not typical women — they are a non-random selection. Generally speaking, feminists are college-educated women from upper-middle class backgrounds. It would be interesting to do a survey of, e.g., members of the National Women’s Studies Association to obtain information on their socioeconomic background, but given what we know about the general correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic background, it’s fair to say that very few tenured Ph.D.’s grew up in poverty.

Feminism is, to a great extent, an expression of the class interests of college-educated women pursuing particular career fields. If you are a high-school dropout waiting tables at Waffle House, or a nurse working in the hospital pediatric unit, the issues that feminists obsess about aren’t really representative of your daily life. Beyond the matter of socioeconomic class, however, the feminist is different from most women in terms of her attitude. The feminist views males as hostile rivals in a competition, rather than as potential partners for cooperation.

Seeking personal advancement in her career, the feminist views male influence as an obstacle to her ambitions. Her male co-workers are rivals for the promotion she hopes to get, and she believes her male supervisor is a sexist who’s trying to oppress her. The zero-sum-game mentality of feminist ideology tells her that male success is always the result of “male privilege” within an unjust patriarchal social order. No man has ever succeeded honestly, by his own merit and hard work, the feminist believes. Rather, men only succeed by depriving women of opportunity, so that the most successful men are always the worst sexist oppressors.

This bizarre worldview (reflecting the Marxist influence on feminism) does not appeal to happy, successful women, but rather to women embittered by frustration over what they regard as the unfairness of life.

And also, lesbians.

At times, I solicit conservative lesbian Cynthia Yockey‘s opinion on my work about radical feminism: “Am I engaged in lesbian-bashing here?”

Very early in this research, I became aware (as any intelligent observer must be aware) of the non-random disproportion of lesbians in the leading ranks of the feminist movement. Most critics seem to consider it unfair to call attention to this aspect of feminism, even though many feminists agree that “historically, lesbianism and feminism have been coterminous if not identical social phenomena,” to quote Professor Bonnie Zimmerman, a pioneer in the field of Women’s Studies first at SUNY-Buffalo, and later at San Diego State University.

This is highly relevant, you see, to my own critique of feminist ideology because, whatever else you might say about lesbians, they are scarcely qualified to advise women on how to successfully pursue heterosexual relationships. Gay men never ask me for advice on their amorous pursuits, nor would any heterosexual man ask a gay man to tell him how to woo women and yet, for some reason, lesbians consider themselves qualified to advise heterosexual women, advice deceptively packaged as feminist “gender theory.” Then, when women foolishly heed this misguided advice and experience failure in their relationships with men, the lesbian feminist says, “See? All men are terrible!”

Selection effects, you see. Feminists are a non-random sample of women, and it takes a special kind of fool to believe that feminist theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — could be a practical guide to a successful and happy life.

Why are feminists typically so bitter and frustrated? Why are they constantly complaining about bad male behavior? Selection effects — if a woman is fortunate enough to find a good boyfriend when she is young, and to turn that relationship into a happy marriage, you are not going to find her writing columns about “misogyny” and “male privilege.” She will be too busy enjoying her life to bother with any crypto-Marxist theory of heteropatriarchal oppression. She’s never gone trolling for dates on OKCupid, and she’s not hanging around with smelly anarchists at “Antifa” protests, either. The happy woman is a winner, and she does not perceive the world as an oppressive system of social injustice, for the same reason that men who are winners don’t become “transgender.”

Demons, Cults, and ‘Brainwashing’

If you are successful as a man, why would you want to be a woman? This is the existential mystery of Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner and other such high-status males who become obsessed with the delusional idea that they are “women trapped in a man’s body.” I blame . . . Satan.

Seriously, back in February, when Da Tech Guy gave me a ride home from CPAC, my devout Catholic friend insisted on stopping by the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C. He and his sons attended Mass, while I as a Protestant had lunch in the basement cafeteria and then visited the Basilica bookstore, where I purchased a copy of An Exorcist Explains the Demonic, by Father Gabriele Amorth, who offers this explanation (pp. 72-73):

Diabolical obsessions are disturbances or extremely strong hallucinations that the demon imposes, often invincibly, on the mind of the victim. In these cases, the person is no longer a master of his own thoughts. . . . The objects of these hallucinations can be manifested as visions, as voices . . . as monstrous figures, horrifying animals, or devils. In other cases it can be an impulse to commit suicide or to do evil to others and, particularly in the young, it can lead to confusion about one’s gender.

Well, you can believe what you want and, as I say, I am not Catholic, but Father Amorth was often called the Vatican’s chief exorcist, after all, and his assertion that “confusion about one’s gender” can be a result of demonic possession seems to me more plausible than feminist theory.

One of Father Amorth’s chapters is entitled “The Cult of Satan and Its Manifestations” (p. 29), including the influences of “Evil Spells” (p. 41) and “Wizards, Fortune-Tellers and Witches” (p. 45). You may scoff at such possibilities, but if Satan actually exists, and if evil people are under satanic influence, shouldn’t we suppose that the Vatican’s chief exorcist would be an expert on their diabolical methods?

Is this relevant to a discussion of transgenderism? The feminist Tumblr blog that offered the lesbian’s account of her date with the transgender who manifested “male entitlement” also offers a lengthy article with the headline “Ideological Totalism and Trans/Gender Theory as ‘Cult,’” which I recommend for your consideration. It is a well-known fact that cults use certain “mind-control” methods (sometimes called “brainwashing”) on their members, and the description of this as “ideological totalism” originated with a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, who studied how Chinese Communists successfully “brainwashed” American prisoners of war during the Korean War.

What makes people vulnerable to “brainwashing”? Among other factors, we might identify a lack of self-awareness as putting us at risk of such influences — demonic, Communist or otherwise. If you think you are too smart to be deceived, your arrogant self-confidence in fact makes you susceptible to deception by cunning sociopaths who know how to leverage your arrogance as a weapon against you. Beware that anything which seems too good to be true is usually neither good nor true.

And never do online dating. You’re not a loser, are you?

 

 

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