The Atlantic Report: Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante

Much of the reason that mainstream media reports are so infuriating is not because they are biased--that's obvious--but the condescending journo-speak that writers believe masks their bias.

Case in point, Olga Khazan's "Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante." The title is representative of another online trend:  the article is about 5% creep-busting vigilantes and 95% examples of boorish behavior.

“We can't win,” [Alexandra] Tweten told me recently. “If we don't respond, they come back and say, ‘you're a whore.’ If we do respond, we get yelled at and called names. I hate that men think they can talk to women like that. They should be publicly shamed.”

It's time to be honest. The proliferation of online dating is about expanding one's potential dating pool with minimal costs. One of those reduced costs is danger; it's much safer to hang one's shingle on the net and entertain offers than it is to, say, wander streets with a sign around one's neck reading, "Looking for Love."

Because that's what an online dating profile is about, isn't it? It's flipping a pink light above one's front door announcing one's willingness to engage in a romantic relationship. One can even specifically describe the type of relationship one is looking for, from sexual preferences to intensity of feeling.

I don't know what's going to be the watershed, but there's no doubt that flogging the "online harassment" horse is going to end. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, there's no "there" there. We hear quite a bit (unconfirmed) that the "FBI is investigating" but we never hear any results.

It's typical semantic trickery, just like the nudging of "rape" over to vagaries of "consent." Any random woman online can claim "death threats" and, at the phrase, we are to respond as if a man in a trenchcoat is standing outside her door with a survival knife. What this article is really talking about is men being rude and angry in a medium that not only allows blocking but can be turned off entirely.

The Internet may not be a "civil" place but it's really not a "dangerous" place unless one is sensitive beyond all proportion. As Seanbaby said many years ago, being offended on the Internet is like seeing "Fuck you" written on a bathroom wall and thinking, "Fuck me? How dare they!"

But even that overblown phenomenon is not what is at issue here. Instead, it's the near-criminalization of being a jackass of the male variety.

Bombarded by all these "admirers," many women feel overwhelmed and leave scores of messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and five fake female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection, day after day, can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters. 

“They're trying to make us feel bad about making them feel bad,” Tweten said. “They're just trying to strike at whatever our insecurities are. You were just interested a second ago, and now you're saying, ‘you have a fat ugly nose.’” 

The shift from a "marriage market" to a "sexual marketplace" has altered standards for men a great deal and the new standards are much more stringent. Attractiveness, cockiness and suavity are less achievable than loyalty, reliability and virtuousness. It's no wonder that men online would rather play the numbers game with an overt sexual goal--it's easier to be diligent than artful.

The boorishness is also a result of the phenomenon I discussed here:  Red Pill attitudes--being the leading set of rules that "work" in the sexual marketplace--are creating an arms race between the sexes. Men affect that they are not impressed with women. Because the average man is, well, average, he is clumsy at feigning the mystique the Red Pill promotes. The blase, take-no-crap attitude is supposed to be challenging, but that's very near hostility, and hostility is pretty easy to achieve after sending message after message with no response.

The article represents another cycle in the environment that produced the Red Pill. Men are lectured to be "respectful" but being respectful doesn't get the results they want--it only filters out the "nice guys," who, it should be said, are simply listening to what they've been told. One can make an argument that saying one thing but wanting another is feminine coyness but logical males don't see the difference between this and lying. Being lied to makes most people angry.

Let's be honest:  women want the men to whom they are not attracted to disappear. For every man who is shamed on one of the sites the article discusses, there are probably about twenty who sent a simple, "Hi," and were ignored as if they never existed. A man singled out for being especially crude is at least acknowledged.