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.