Here’s a challenge for the Commentariat:
Here is a imgur image of a message string on OK Cupid. I would like to say it is very weird, at least from one side of the exchange, but sadly we can all recognize these behaviors from real life.
So here’s the challenge:
1) Read the message thread.
2) List all the weird behaviors.
3) Assess how much they align with standard tropes in the dating script, courtly love narrative or similar cutlrual standards around heterosexual interaction.
4) Post your answers.
Let the good times roll!
By the way I am quite aware of how red flaggy this particular Facebook thread is. Look beyond these specifics and relate these red flags to general cultural tends or tropes.
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by 
One behavior is when the male says: “If you wanted to talk to me, you could have.” It breaks both feminist and traditional norms.
For feminism, it qualifies as mansplaining (because he assumes to “know” about things on her end).
For traditionalism, it violates chivalry because he’s saying she could bear the burden of “opening the door.”
To me, it reads like the male not being interested (by going off-script), while the female is following the script, but becoming frustrated.
It was so very creepy. For a while I thought it was fake, but nope; her behavior is real enough. The guy was remarkable tolerant.
The funniest part was her accusing him of being sexist because “When a guy stalks a girl, it’s creepy. When a girl stalks a guy, it’s cute.”
I’ve been shaking my head for over an hour. To be fair to normal women, this girl seems to be about as bright as a turnip. It’s one thing act out the typical damsel script and get frustrated while waiting on a guy to choose her, but it’s another thing altogether for her to actually articulate what she is doing and actually blame the guy instead of recognizing how ludicrous her own behavior is.
The thing that makes the female’s behavior quite normal, though, is her seeming inability to think strategically. She doesn’t grasp the idea that she isn’t the only girl in the world when angling for an ostensibly attractive male, going so far as to accuse him of being a liar and being mean for having the audacity not to act in the more desperate manner to which she is accustomed to from men. I have seen similar behavior by younger females back in college. I wish I could say that there was one time back in college when I went out with a group of girls and one of them kept rejecting every guy who had approached her only to walk up to the hottest guy in the room and bitch him out for ignoring her… but it happened over and over again with many girls. Just happened to me a couple weeks ago at a bar – I was talking to a former Army Ranger who was deployed near me in Iraq and had been wounded by a ricochet and a girl who was eavesdropping on us later told me, “I really thought you were on a man-date… because here I was, just sitting there waiting for you to talk to me, and you were just having drinks with some guy!”
That last anecdote was sublime, dungone. FEMALE Privielge – Dethroning the vagina.
There in a nutshell you see an attack on male homosociality. Two men are spending time not centered on chasing a woman? At best it’s weird and should be policed, at worst it’s Misogyny! OMG!!!!.
dungone on 2013-11-04 at 9:09 am said:
“To be fair to normal women, this girl seems to be about as bright as a turnip”
Yeah, she is… but given the distribution of human cognitive ability she may be closer to normal than one would wish to believe. Intelligence is a multifaceted thing and there are lots of genius/dumb-ass hybrids out there, not to mention the highly educated fools and some wise illiterates.
Throw in ideologies (which excel in implanting daft ideas into normal minds) and the many, many, many people who have borderline or barely sub-clinical mental illnesses (which may just be everyone) and it makes you wonder if the girl above isn’t a perfectly representative specimen of the human species. I think I might go close my blinds now.
Her: “When a girl looks at your profile, you should send her a message.”
Really now? Is this one of those “playing hard to get” tactics where the woman gives a sign of interest that is so tiny it could literally mean anything but the guy is supposed to just know that it’s its a sign of interest and meant to get him to make the first significant move?
If this had been the other way around it would already be on some feminist site as evidence of teh patriarchy where guys feel entitled to the attention of women and get bent out of shape when they don’t get it.
You spelled “the” wrong.
Danny,
“Really now? Is this one of those “playing hard to get” tactics where the woman gives a sign of interest that is so tiny it could literally mean anything but the guy is supposed to just know that it’s its a sign of interest and meant to get him to make the first significant move?”
This is a type of pasive aggression that I don’t know the actual clinical name of. The informal term is a “mean bottom” or “bossy bottom”. The bottom gets to be absolutely passive and gets to judge the top on how well he does at satisfying the bottom, exactly to the bottoms standards, and the bottom gets to be so passive that he/she doesn’t even have to define those standards. If he really cared, he would just ntuitively know all this, because the connection is just that close.
Is this what a BPD sounds like?
The lady definitely is definitely a bit troubled and she keeps and keeps begging for the guy’s attention, but as some of her messages are glaringly absurd and ridiculous, she can’t seriously mean all the things she is saying.
Not to derail but I have a way more appalling example of sexual and emotional entitlement from this comment by sommiel:
from the feminist subreddit. You would think feminists would know better, than to condone sexual assault as a rhetoric trick.
“from the feminist subreddit. You would think feminists would know better, than to condone sexual assault as a rhetoric trick.”
On the other hand I would never expect feminists to know better than to make stupid false equivalences between breasts and penises.
It is nearly impossible to actually injure a person by grabbing her breast, unlike the high likeleihood fo injury form grabbing the testicles ( and grabbing the crotch, whatever your intent, is quite likely to result in grabbing the testicles.)
Jupp,
“Not to derail but I have a way more appalling example of sexual and emotional entitlement from this comment by sommiel:”
This is a good example of what is NOT derailment. This is an example of a really good contribution.
Assuming it wasn’t a false equivalency between breasts and testes, would that really be considered sexual assault? If someone says that they’re open to X action being performed at random by members of group Y, and you’re in group Y…that sounds like consent to me.
It’s still all sexual assault. teh guy was an asshole, and so was she. The difference was that she was a hyprocritical, moral preening asshole.
It’s definitely an attempt to instigate a hard-to-get pursuit. But another part of why it’s so ludicrous is her apparent inability to grasp the fact that an electronic list of page views doesn’t exactly come across the same way as fluttering her eyelashes at him in real life. This isn’t a normal attempt to blame a guy for failing to pick up on sexual signals; it’s more along the lines of an internet woman telling a guy that he should respond sexually to her repeatedly flashing an electronic hyperlink at him.
@ Gingko
“It’s still all sexual assault. teh guy was an asshole, and so was she. The difference was that she was a hyprocritical, moral preening asshole.”
If a woman said to a man “men can’t be raped because erections are consent” after he retold his experience of having been raped.
And then he raped her, making sure she lubricated in the process… and said “you weren’t raped, getting wet is consent”…
You know what, typing that out made me realize… Who the fuck does something like this to prove a goddamn point?
That’s what I call a “one sided account.” First she gets thrown out of a bar for punching a man – whatever he had done to her apparently didn’t rise up to her version of events in anyone else’s eyes. Then her friend laughed her off – once again, the actual exchange of what previously happened didn’t rise up to the level at which another person would show concern. So then she sexually assaulted her friend, apparently inflicting a great deal of pain. Something tells me that reality was very differently from this violent sociopath’s self-congratulatory you-go-girl version of events.
Well, how about this: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/03/the_10_strangest_facts_about_penises/
I have liked this writer in the past (haven’t read her lately, till now), so I was disappointed. I mean, I like reading about penises as much as the next girl, but doesn’t #2 sounds like its being played for laughs? But oh so carefully; treads a fine line.
Does anyone else agree?
That’s a good find, DDH.
I genrally like her stuff. She basically has her head on straight, even if she doesn’t alwasy have everythiong worked out.
#2 – yeah, if it was anyone else I might see it as being played for laughs but I know her stuff weel enough that not only is she not doing that but it’s far enough from her mind that it probably never occurred to her how that might read.
Speaking of the reverse, here’s a clear-yed one from Amanda Marcotte on the elections we just had: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/06/terry_mcauliffe_owes_his_victory_to_women_but_not_to_white_women_who_voted.html
She’s not telling you anything you don’t already know, but it does go against the “dominant discourse”.
I almost thought the exchange was a joke, until I remembered that people like that really do exist. Bleah.
As for the article by Marcotte, I find it interesting that she muses that those Cuccinelli-voting white women were either naive (“it’ll never happen to me”) or ignorant (not paying attention). Could it be that most of them are actually anti-abortion and want to restrict its availability? Or maybe that as right-leaning, upper-middle class women their perceived economic interests take precedence over other women’s reproductive rights? Nah, couldn’t be. That would mean they have moral agency and considerable political power, and women are all oppressed by teh patriarchy.