Damn you, Jessica Valenti. I was about to leave the woolly, weird world of Susan Walsh behind after yesterday’s post, but your email tip pointing out that Susan straight up lied (oh no! so surprised!) on Twitter has sucked me back in. The lie is simple—-Susan was squawking about sluts, so I asked her to tell me how many partners a woman could have before she was a slut, and she demurred, claiming to care not for this tawdry discussion of numbers. But on her blog, she straight up says you’re a lonely, used up slutbag if that number is too high, and maybe you should consider a little dishonesty to cover up the stink.
Your number is too high. OK, fine, you don’t want any guy who cares about how many people you’ve slept with. Problem is….that’s most guys. You don’t have to tell anyone your personal data. Just be aware that when you’re making the rounds within a certain community or group of friends, word gets out fast. I don’t think there has ever, ever been a guy who got laid and didn’t tell anyone about it afterwards. If your number is high and that fact is well known, you have every right to find a new pack of males and revirginate reinvent yourself.
I suppose the more generous interpretation is just that Susan’s a man-hater, and thinks all men are uptight yet sleazy at the same time. Again, I’m not sure why women are supposed to want so desperately the validation of a relationship from men, if men are so terrible, but I guess it’s because we’re accept on faith that they may suck but they are our superiors and we need them to validate us.
But I link this not just to call Susan a liar, because I did that on Twitter. I’m linking this because it’s great evidence of a pet theory I’m working on about how skeptical tools often used to debunk horoscopes and psychics can also be used to debunk reactionary dating advice. In particular, the confirmation bias. It’s why psychics or astrologers can just throw a bunch of shit out there, and you’ll attach yourself to the one that seems true about you and forget all the rest. “Do I sense a John that died of something in the heart/stomach region? No…. A name that starts with M….something in the head…. You say Mary died of brain cancer? Yes, I’m feeling a Mary.” Or a horoscope that says, “Today there will be some trials, but you will get through them.” If that’s true, then you remember the horoscope being accurate. If, in fact, you didn’t get through them, then well, you have other things on your mind, if you still have a mind. You see how it works.
This link provides a particularly blunt version of this tactic. Let’s start with the title: “20 Reasons You Don’t Have a Boyfriend”. Well, I have a boyfriend, so if I was an ordinary reader instead of a feminazi hellbeast bent on revenge, I’d probably skip this article and forget the whole thing. Things written therein that are true of me won’t be used to disprove the thesis, since I never bothered to do a rigorous experiment to find out if, as Susan suggests, sluts with some too high number that we won’t ever actually name don’t get boyfriends. (Evasion of specifics is another tactic of charlatans.) Unfortunately, I’m not an ordinary reader. Or fortunately, depending on your point of view.
But let’s dig in to the reasons that you without boyfriends don’t have them. And no, don’t be all smart with your thinking jokes are funny shit and saying things like, “Because I have a girlfriend who would disapprove” or perhaps, “Because I just threw his shit out the front door and changed the locks.” Because, if you’ll recall from earlier, jokes are only performed by people who think having fun is clever, and they really should know better. Also, women who crack jokes never have boyfriends, because jokes put your oxytocin levels at the level where no man can be snagged. It’s science, people. I peer-reviewed it, i.e. showed it to some misogynist blog commenters and they liked it.
1. You’re needy.
Right off the bat, we get that this is straight up bullshit. If being needy runs the guys off, then wouldn’t the first step be to put down the blog post examining why OMFGURSTILLSINGLEWHATSWRONGWITHU, go out on the town with your girls, pick some guy up, fuck him, and then push him out the front door as soon as he starts getting that I-kinda-like-you smile? Or at least start by not reading blog posts whose very existence says, “You, the reader, are kind of desperate and needy.” I suspect, however, Susan Walsh doesn’t want you to stop reading her bullshit.
2. You like players. You say you want a nice guy, but you fall for the same lines again and again. You can’t resist the bad boys, the ones who have dumped on other women.
Confirmation bias in action, with a dose of tautology. Rejection is just part of dating, but every guy who rejects you gets rounded up to a “player” and every guy you rejected gets turned into the one who would have totally been the best boyfriend ever. It’s easy to be deluded by this, because if you just say yes to every guy who asks, even if you’re not attracted to him, you will have a boyfriend by definition. But probably not one that you like, which is something Susan doesn’t seem to think matters very much.
3. You’re a princess. You want a man who will proclaim to the world that he is whipped as butter. He will worship the very ground you walk on. Trouble is, the only men who will happily inhabit a one-down position in a relationship have no balls. Do you really want a guy who will eagerly go to a bunch of chick flicks with you? Wouldn’t you rather accompany him to Transformers from time to time?
This is in there to destabilize premises you have that might make you resistant to her arguments, the main one being the idea that relationships should be built on rapport and mutual admiration. The princess shit is a cover for the real argument, which is, “You will never actually find a man who you could have a real relationship with, since men and women are completely different in any way. So drop that love model and accept my relationships-are-transactional model.”
4. You flirt too much…....
5. You’re not in the game. If you’re shy, reserved, or aloof, you are not approachable.
Confirmation bias in action. Pick one and forget she said the other thing. (Oh sure, I’m sure she’d say that there’s a happy medium, but of course, has no solid suggestions on what it is.) These two start to approach what I discovered was the general theme of the post, which is, “To find out what you’re doing wrong, look down your pants. If you find a vagina there, then you’re bound to be fucking up all the time no matter what you do.” Much of it was basically setting women up to feel uncomfortable having self-respect or standards, for fear that they’re bitchy, high maintenance, self-absorbed, fill in your misogynist stereotype. But what was really awesome was the continuing theme of straight up contradictions.
Like:
16. You’re flaky. A plan is a commitment. Don’t blow someone off when something better comes along…...
19. You’re rigid. You have plans for Saturday night, but his buddies are going to a game that night, would Friday be OK? You say, “No, you made plans with me first. And Saturday is date night.”
So the advice is to make it clear that you’re just an object to be manipulated, right? He can flake, change plans, and waste your time, but his plans are sacrosanct and your commitments to him should be honored. So, you need to be like a toy for men, that they can just take off the shelf and play with when they like, but that has no life of her own worth mentioning, right?
No, after insulting your very dignity, she’s going to make it clear that you can’t win.
20. You’re a pushover. You put up with all kinds of crap. You allow yourself to be booty called and stood up.
So, treat his time as sacrosanct, your time as endlessly flexible, your commitments to him as unbreakable, his commitments to you as irrelevant….but don’t be a pushover. Got it. Perhaps you should throw darts at this and figure out which one is why you don’t have a boyfriend? Because a lot of these can’t be true at the same time.
Still, this may have been my favorite of the “can’t win for losing, straight ladies” contradictions:
14. You’re too hard to get. Yes, everyone likes a challenge. No one likes eager or desperate. But employing “The Rules” or some other silly tactic is just going to leave you solo…...
15. Your number is too high.
Don’t be easy, except you should be easy. Whichever one applies to you, pick it and that’s the reason you don’t have a boyfriend. Unless you do.
There’s, I suppose, another way to read this list, but it’s no more generous. She could just be suggesting that having a personality is your problem, and that you should moderate your traits out of existence. If anything about you starts to form into a “trait”, someone out there probably won’t like it, and so you should get rid of it for fear it might get you rejected. Of course, “bland” is also a trait.
Starting advice from the position that rejection-avoidance should be your goal above all others, including finding someone compatible or being happy with yourself, is the perfect baseline to hand out reactionary gender ideology and pretend that it’s “advice”. Conservatism in general trucks in fear as a tactic, so why not when it comes to dating “advice”? But of course, as Jaclyn noted in her essay that kick started this whole thing, learning to take rejection with aplomb is probably one of the most valuable skills you can have in the real world of dating and sex.
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Wow, guys really don’t come off well here either, do we?
It’s like she’s unable to conceive of people having mature, adult relationships.