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.

The Atlantic Report: IUDs and Implants

No serious journal has seen a greater decline in the Internet age than The Atlantic. As a sharpening tool, I'll be examining an article a day for the next month.

As we reach progressive domination, it is more and more clear that their real enemy is consequence.

IUDs and Implants Are the New Pill is a water-testing article. Look for agitation supporting long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) for teens in the future.

According to an important new study that will appear in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine, more than 16 times more teenage women would choose these options over birth-control pills if given proper information and affordable access to all forms of medical contraception. That would dramatically lower rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion, which cost the country billions of dollars every year.

That "if given proper information," et al, is fun. Teenage "women" respond positively to a sales pitch for LARC, in other words.

What is this a consequence of? Well, the Pill reduced the ostensible risk of extra-marital sex. The result was a general loosening of public sexual morals. "General"--not "responsible." The culture of "sex=no big deal" meant an increase of consequences:  unplanned pregnancies and STDs. Taking the Pill, or using condoms, requires a level of discipline that is not usually found in conjunction with teenage sexual activity.

The progressive vision preaches freedom, so, when it's necessary to compel, it relies on economics:

The United States has more teenage pregnancies than any other wealthy country, and the cost of that is around $11 billion every year─in the form of public assistance, care for infants more likely to suffer health problems, and income lost as a result of lower educational attainment and reduced earnings among children born to teenage mothers. 

That last, "income lost as a result," is one of those amusing line items that seems to always appear within alarming figures. How is imaginary lost income a cost?

The phrasing here is interesting:

But [unintended teenage pregnancy] is a stubborn problem in that it persists despite being, apparently, readily solvable. 

Writer James Hamblin falters at the word "stubborn" because he fails to realize that not everyone is as smart and responsible as he is.

Well, not really. The attitude reflected in this article is the sideways acknowledgement Progress gives to intractable human nature. Teenagers--even grown-up teenage women--aren't as responsible as full-grown adults. It's best, then, to make sure that they don't have a choice but to be responsible.

CDC has targeted the country’s teenage pregnancy rates as among a handful of what it calls “Winnable Battles.” Apart from the implication that some battles are un-winnable, it’s been a laudable initiative.

Implying that we can't do everything we want to is dangerously close to thought-crime!

Finally:

Like any public-health solution, the primary challenge is culture. No less than the bastion of sexual liberation the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that countries with the most sex-positive sexual instruction have the best outcomes in preventing unintentional teenage pregnancy, and that the public-health issue is best addressed with "societal acceptance of adolescent sexual relationships."

The long-running argument on the left has been that teenagers don't practice responsible sex because they are embarrassed. They are embarrassed because of social attitudes toward teen sex. Society must change so these kids can get it on worry-free!

What is the underlying assumption in this article? That sexual "freedom" is sacrosanct--its consequences must be managed. I say, fruit of the poisoned tree, and all that.

Transactional Love

Bryce LaLiberte is probably the best example of neoreaction's tendency toward enthusiasm over rigor but he makes a good point over at Social Matter:

While in the past one generally had a guarantee that their romantic partner would live and die with them, the breaking up of relationships is now the norm. The effect of this is neither inconsequential nor non-negligible, yet we rarely analyze it as a social ill, practically discounting heartbreak as not a real problem deserving of a solution. Yet the costs of heartbreak are tangible and for a majority of people heartbreak plays a role in the onset of mental disorders, a decreased pleasure from love and romance, and an eternal fear of ever becoming attached and letting someone else have power over your emotional state. As such, we withdraw from each other, pursuing sexual relations as though the emotional element might be sanitized. Recovery from heartbreak changes a person, and while they might come out better for it in certain material ways, there will always linger that unease at being asked to trust someone.

By the time one reaches thirty, most everyone that's single is emotionally damaged. Some have been heartbroken and avoid making emotional attachments the way one learns to avoid touching a hot stove. Others become emotionally callous.

Manosphere writers have lately made a point of highlighting articles in which female writers announce that they're "ready for a nice guy." This is especially sad. Red pill writers point out that the women's sexual market value has expired and that a woman whose body is well-known to a surfeit of men is less than attractive.

But there's also the condition known as being an "alpha widow." Though the woman has settled down--and settled--for the proverbial beta provider, she still dreams of the lotharios of the past. Whether the yearning is sexual or emotional, that circuit has been burned out; it will never fire for the man with whom she condescended to spend her life.

Men do a little better with experience. If the man at the end of his peak decides to settle down, he has a more objective measurement of what will make him happy than a woman's, her preference is for being emotionally overwhelmed. While a man decides that he wants a woman who is, say, attractive, cheerful and loyal, a woman wants to be swept away by her partner. She may find a man that meets her checklist--good job, good with kids--but she'll always be tempted by the possibility of rapture.

Either way, the relationship can shade into becoming transactional, the way thrown ball is drawn towards the ground. Both the over-experienced man and woman become self-centered--the relationship is a method for obtaining what they emotionally desire. The old definitions of marriage and family, of being a part of a whole, of union, are harder to achieve.

That's not to say that the majority of marriages pre-Sexual Revolution were two becoming one, but the culture pointed us in that direction. The message was, if you are unsatisfied, turn toward your relationships. The answer isn't out among the mass of strangers but within yourself and how you relate to those closest to you.

Our current understanding tells us that we are all self-contained objects, extracting our needs from the environment around us, billiard balls bouncing against one another. Two people enter a relationship because it is mutually beneficial; they part when the good feelings dry up.

Each sex is suspicious of the other, and the assumption that the relationship will end, while simultaneously continuing it as though it might end in a lifelong marriage, alienates the self from his most primal urges to belong to another, to have another to protect and call his own.

I touched on that balancing act the other day. The definition of what a sexual relationship is has been thrown away so everyone chases exactly what they want at the moment, just as the alpha widows above say, "I am now officially pursuing a long-term relationship." That one's desires may change from day to day isn't considered.

The old dynamic was that the husband and wife were at the core of the family. Families were at the core of the community. The communities were at the core of the state. Society had a million tiny anchors, as small as the house you grew up in. Now, that house is just the rack from which the balls roll out to bounce against one another.