D'Arce von Flue

I just don't remember "wait for women to ask you out" ever especially being a part of what 2010s pop feminism/Etiquette of Hitting On Women Bloggers were saying.

(It wouldn't surprise me if some were, but it wasn't the party line to the extent that there ever was one, which, to be clear, there wasn't.)

A much more accurate criticism would be to say that the question of "if men stop hitting on women, how will there still be heterosexual dating?" is not one they particularly concerned themselves with or had an answer for.

I don't remember ever even once in my era of being engulfed in 2010's pop feminism hearing "wait for women to ask you out", I think principally because women don't particularly want it to become more normalized to ask men out so the idea was just never going to gain much momentum in any feminist movement. The fact that there was no suggestion whatsoever that we should shift the asker-out role in a direction less ridiculously skewed towards men was actually pretty close to the crux of my issues with that movement's mindset and rhetoric, as I wrote about extensively around 2017.

I generally share Morlock Holmes's frustrations with the messages of 2010's pop feminism, but I have been slightly perplexed at the way he often frames it as, "2010's-style pop feminists, especially fellow straight men, constantly imply that if we just treat women like human beings they'll ask us out, and yet I came to notice that when I treat women like human beings they still don't ask me out." I may not have interacted with the same guys that Morlock has, but I got a lot of the "just treat women like human beings" thing as well, and never did I sense the slightest implication that this would make women ask me out as opposed to, maybe, make women receptive to going out with me or drop hints that I should ask them out or say yes if I were to ask them out. And in fact, when I talked to both man and woman 2010's-style pop feminists about this, they never bothered pretending that women were ever going to start asking men-in-general or me-in-particular more often and only put the mildest hint of apology in their voices when acknowledging this.

(I still remember my grad school colleague, a very very 2010's-pop-feminism-espousing guy whose attractiveness was 90th percentile and who had a very easy time getting dates, telling me, "There's no need to be so worried about asking a woman out. You just try, and it's like rolling dice, if you're lucky they share your interest, and if you're unlucky they don't and it's no big deal." Never at any point in this conversation did he suggest that he or I lived in a world where women would ask us out, and indeed I don't think I knew of a time when a woman ever asked him out, as attractive as he was.)

There isn't some secret to getting women, they aren't video game characters where you win by doing a specific thing;

The only secret is to treat women like people;

Gender roles are fake;

Men are constantly hitting on women in pressuring, gross ways;

I have a diagnosed disability that impacts my ability to read social cues, so I am more likely than the average man to hit on women in gross ways, and ordinary men are already so gross it's a problem everybody was talking to.

Conclusion: Women are just people, and people often ask each other out. Everybody I talk to agrees gender roles are fake and outdated so there's no reason to think they'd adhere to those roles. I can reduce the risk of being a gross creep by waiting for women to do things people do.

This was wrong.

What I was actually supposed to take from those above premises was:

"People are going to expect you to follow traditional gender roles, which are harmless and fun. These involve very specific actions and behaviors that you always ought to be taking. Just the very fact of how those gender roles work mean that you'll occasionally put people off but that's fine and you shouldn't worry excessively about it."

To this day I don't understand how I was supposed to get there, other than "Not be autistic."

And it's annoying because it's perfectly possible to talk openly about this stuff but I basically never encountered anybody who did, you were supposed to talk about how men are gross and gender roles are a prison then just sort of quietly realize everybody still expected you to conform and silently pick up on what you were supposed to do but definitely don't bring any of it up in public.

You were supposed to not be autistic.

Did you think that the ADA applied to social norm formation, or something?

Yes, fuck, dude, you were supposed to not be autistic. These are maladptive strategies that you adopted because you are autistic, and they significantly impacted your life quality. Find a way to increase your life quality, then.

I wasn't told that I was supposed to be getting out my secret decoder ring and I was told explicitly that it was really important for men to listen to and internalize the stuff I was being told.

>You were also told that Santa Clause was real

The U.S. Air Force now runs Venezuela’s main international airport. A U.S. amphibious warship is docked at its principal port. MQ-9 Reaper drones and combat helicopters fly reconnaissance over Caracas. Nearly 2,000 U.S. troops are deployed on land, air and sea in and around the country, operating out of two colonies: U.S.-held Puerto Rico and Dutch-held Curaçao.

There's only 3 days left to back "Parenting - an SMBC comic collection" on Kickstarter! "Scruffles" is one of the comics that will be included in the book.

Original comic : www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-01-08

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i think this is pretty revealing re: Trump's whole deal - you see it come out other times too, like when he said Zohran could call him a fascist if he wanted in front of the press. i think this is why he has a reputation for "honesty" among his supporters, despite being a chronic liar - he understands political communication as a tool to signal different things to different people, with the actual truth value of what you say being irrelevant. i think this is true of a lot of politicians, but what distinguishes Trump is that he doesn't feel compelled to maintain kayfabe and will freely acknowledge it. remember this?

Whenever I see a "consent is sexy" post, I think about my ex. I know my ex would look at "consent is sexy" and conclude that this "affirmative consent" thing has only upsides for men, and only downsides for women.

Whenever I see such a post I think about all the women who casually told me they like to be spanked and gagged and tied up "a little", but who felt they weren't "into BDSM" or "into degrading stuff". They were just into it "a regular amount", and they flat-out told me they expected men to know what a regular amount of hair pulling is. Any more and you're a pervert, any less and you're a wimp.

And I think about that girl I asked out to the movies when I was 14. I asked her if I could put my arm around her. She said no. She later told me that she really wanted me to put her arm around her, but I shouldn't have asked. I should just have done it. I asked her if she wanted to see another movie, and she said no, that's not the point she was making.

Like, again, official White House communications trumpet the fact that the "foreign-born" population of the US has declined under Trump and that none of the jobs created by his economy have gone to foreign-born workers.

Kash Patel is one of a handful of the Trump crew who toured with Clay Clark's Reawaken America tour, which also platforms holocaust deniers.

There's Marko Elez, there's the Young Republicans making jokes about what Nazis they are, there's Nick Fuentes, there's Richard Hanania's racist past. Hanania's own narrative of his life is that the ideas he developed about policing came about while he was simultaneously writing racist screeds about how ugly black women were compared to white women.

The wokes who warned us that there was a major undercurrent of squishy, semi-ironic it's not fair to call me on it racism in the Republican party, and that this would translate into actual brutality, were completely right.

So were the ones who thought that a lot of Republican policy was an attempt to put a smiley face on what is actually racial animus.

That said, my memory of the early 10s was that the GOP was run by Romney/Ryan types who loved immigration and neoliberalism, the Dems were still onboard with Barack "we are one people" Obama, and the first metaphorical shots really were fired by left-wing ideologues disappointed with Obama for not being radical enough. Things really did change. "America was always racist" obscures the ways the changed. I remember vividly the "wait, what the fuck, I thought we were friends" feeling when they started blaming every social ill on white male privilege, and how many of those white men surmised there was no place for them anymore.

Obama's constant attempts to reach across the aisle were met with, "Nah man, we're doing whatever we have to to win" and left us with the most right-wing Supreme Court in a century and a Republican party solely dedicated to unwinding and eliminating whatever good he managed to do.

It's worth remembering that the Republicans continually talked about how radical, hostile and rude Obama was.

And then they immediately voted for Trump.

Obama's beer summit was exactly the sort of symbolism that was supposed to undercut the power of the left and demonstrate that the Democrats were willing to ignore the crazy left to caucus with Republicans.

To the extent that "who started it?" is a discussion that can possibly matter -

You're correct that the Rs started it on the political side; that their elected officials and their pundits have been bad-faith actors using scorched-earth zero-sum tactics since at least the mid-'90; and that they're responsible for the failure of all of Obama's attempts at unifying statesmanship.

The Ds really did mostly start it on the cultural side. The first waves of social justice ideology - which is to say, attacks directed at the norms of the people at large, not at the decisions of policy-makers - came out of nowhere, as far as most normies could tell, and stirred up a lot of new anger and turbulence.

From Wikipedia:

In 1989, [John] Tower was President George H. W. Bush's choice to become Secretary of Defense. In a stunning move, particularly since Tower was himself a former Senate colleague, the Senate rejected his nomination. The largest factors were concern about possible conflicts of interest and Tower's personal life, in particular allegations of alcohol abuse and womanizing. The Senate vote was 47–53, and it marked the first time that the Senate had rejected a Cabinet nominee of a newly elected president. As The New York Times reported in his obituary, "Mr. Tower's repudiation by his former colleagues, who rejected him as Bush's nominee for Secretary of Defense after public allegations of womanizing and heavy drinking, left a bitterness that could not be assuaged. In the normally clubby Senate, Mr. Tower was regarded by some colleagues as a gut fighter who did not suffer fools gladly, and some lawmakers indicated that they were only too pleased to rebuke him."

Emphasis added.