there's this video going around from youtuber Adam Something about how "the left pushed men into the arms of Andrew Tate by not having good dating advice for men" and it kicks off with a personal story where he says "when i was a young man and I'd ask 'how do I score a hot gf? 😏' the left responded 'uhm, the word score is actually very problematic!' and I said 'jeez sorry I asked' and then I went to the right, and (etc.)" and it's like...
look man. if you're going around saying "how do I score a hot gf", out loud, with your mouth, where people can hear you, then honestly "hey maybe reconsider how you talk and think about women" is actually really good dating advice that will help you cause saying that shit is gonna repulse women. maybe it's not what you wanted to hear but it's what you needed to hear.
I kinda agree that Adam's guide was a bit tone-deaf and silly, but it's still a concrete list of things to do to be less shitty when you are starting to date. Which in turn facilitates getting to know people you find attractive, and realizing that they are also people.
You're not going to get far if you start with language policing. Kids know almost nothing and fear rejection a lot, so we should try to figure out the actual meaning behind the poorly chosen words of the question instead of immediately chastizing them for asking it in the wrong way.
The question of "how do I score a hot gf" is likely to expand into "dating seems scary and vulnerable, I'd like to become romantically involved with a specific person but I have no social script to navigate by, and I don't want to blow my chances through some silly mistake" if you pry a little and ask a few follow-up questions. And we as adults are in fact capable of dealing with poorly worded and stupid-sounding questions without immediately turning to glib hostility. We just have to ask follow-up questions and be patient and kind.
We do not have to be patient and kind to misogynists who turn to the right when their misogyny is challenged
The follow-up questions are intended to determine if you are talking to someone who can still be steered to a better path, I'm just saying it's good praxis to hold your horses for a moment before getting confrontational when you come upon someone asking dumb shitty questions. They might actually be asking good questions in shitty and dumb ways due to a myriad of reasons.
You don't have to be endlessly patient of course. If they double down on the misogyny or whatever, feel free to tear em a new one!
"How do I score a hot gf" is kind of inherently incapable of being a good question because it, and the sentiment behind it, are rooted in men's feelings of ownership over women's bodies and the belief that having a girlfriend is something men are entitled to
I agree that these are some of the broad misogynistic currents underlying the question! Nonsensical expectations and demands towards women are things we are in no short supply of, and not being a toxic dick is a never-ending process of recognizing and discarding these ideas as they swim to the surface. What I'm getting at is that if one is talking to a young man who is asking this question, "how to score a hot gf" can be sort of a stock formulation of a much more complex ask. Sometimes the underlying question is unfortunately still going to be "how do I manipulate women into giving me things I want, preferably without anything in return" and that is reprehensible and deserving of ridicule and scorn. But other times, the underlying question is going to be "how do I approach this person I have a crush on, I can't seem to find a way to begin communicating (probably due to some unexamined assumptions and feelings rooted in the general misogyny of my environment), is there some sort of an etiquette that I could follow so this would be less scary? Also I don't want to act like that guy from the first hypothetical, he's a shithead."
In either case, to our 15-20yo boy/man asking the question, the "how to score a hot gf" formulation is a concise and plausibly deniable way to broach the subject. It doesn't bare vulnerability or unveil specific bad intentions, and it's plausibly explainable as ironic, so that their peers are less likely to make fun of them for asking it.
No, it’s not complicated. Young cis men are asking “why have I not automatically received the mommy bangmaid I am owed for having a dick and surviving until adulthood?” and the answer is “leave women the fuck alone since you’re incapable of basic empathy or recognizing humanity in women and girls.”
In lieu of constructing Killjoy's Incel Island, I still think it makes sense to figure out if a young person is using inflammatory rhetoric out of genuine buy-in into harmful ideas or out of cultural osmosis, and crafting my approach accordingly. To each their own, of course.
Folks will choose “being right” versus “being effective” almost every time, it seems.
I feel like I am genuinely losing brain cells watching people argue that we should ostracise teenagers for asking for life advice in less than perfect language, while simultaneously making up a whole parallel universe in which said less than perfect language means specific things no reasonable person would read into it. like, is "how do I score a hot gf" objectifying? yes, obviously. does it mean "I think I am entitled to the partner of my choice and for her to be my mommy and sex slave"? no, you literally just made that up and I'm starting think you're the one we should maroon on Killjoy Island
Rule 1: to be a person is to be capable of making mistakes.
Rule 1.a if it is possible to do something wrong, then it must therefore be explicitly possible to do something right.
Rule 2: we are all born ignorant, everything is learned.
Rule 3: the best way to encourage effort is to forgive failure.
...all of this, of course, is assigning blame to the left that might not belong there to begin with.
Here's the thing. The right absolutely loves to use "the left disagreed with us" as justification for anything. Express any opinion, and you'll get "This is why Trump won" or "this is why you lose elections" or "this is why you should be rounded up into camps and exterminated."
It's okay to tell budding misogynists not to be misogynistic. Really.
Yeah, but the point being made was specifically that if the person asking 'how do I get a hot gf' is a younger guy, HOW you tell him 'that's a misogynistic way to ask that' is going to impact how he hears it. The point being made was that if someone is young, they may well be educable.
That's just it. I think that's the point we were supposed to hear-- or more accurately talk about-- while internalizing the bit about "it's the left's fault."
I gave a specific example of this in a different thread/branch where a white supremacist arrested for assaulting a counter-protestor in Charlottesville tried to make it sound like he wasn't on the side of the white supremacists until those darn lefties attacked him for being a white male-- when the video of the attack, as well as his online history, paint an entirely different picture.
This particular method of propaganda does three things:
It recontexualizes deliberate actions into reactions-- in his case it turned "I deliberately choked a woman just to make a point" into "I was reacting to being screamed at and pepper-sprayed".
It plants the idea that challenging the behavior can make it worse.
It perpetuates the victim narrative that the right wears like body armor.
I'm not saying there's not a wrong way to confront pubescent misogyny-- or really, any -ism or phobia-- I'm just saying that anytime someone says "I was like this because people were mean to me", I think of Steven Balcaitis, or that politician who whined about how unfair it was that his friends no longer wanted to be associated with him just because he was exercising his constitutional right to speak about how we should dehumanize a vulnerable population, or Mike Pence at the Farmville debate responding to an accurate description of his political history with "Do you see how mean he's being to me?"
The goalpost for "how respectful and gentle should the left be" will always be moved to a point behind the current speaker, until we are quiet and invisible-- and then we will become the threat to their existence that is hiding under their noses, and the fact that we try to stay invisible will be vilified.
Incel culture is in particular built around the concept that the "male loneliness epidemic" is entirely the fault of the women who refuse to become their sexbots fresh off the puberty assembly line, and the very act of refusing to fuck them is an act of disrepect, sometimes even "disrespect deserving a violent response."
We shouldn't be concerned about the goalpost moving until the left (including myself) can hit the basic goalpost of responding to a young person's poorly worded question with neutral curiosity rather than derision and hostility, and this entire thread has just reinforced to me that we're nowhere near reaching that goal post. This is not some unreasonable or unusual expectation, it's a goal post that is surpassed by right wing organizations constantly, and is one that any organization or group wishing to bring in new people must meet.
"how do I score a hot gf?" is an entirely culturally acceptable and normal question for a teen/young man to ask. Not because of anything inherent to him, but because everything in mainstream US culture tells him that is the way the question should be phrased. It is *absolutely* the fault of those on the left who respond "that's problematic, don't say that" that the young man feels rejected by the left, because rejecting him is literally what those people on the left have done.
It is not the fault of the people on the left that the young man was then snatched up by the right, but *we know that's what they do*. The blame is not on the left for the actions of those rejected, but it is there for not making the effort to create a culture that accepts mistakes and innocent ignorance rather than blaming the inexperienced for their lack of knowledge.
“We have to allow teenage white people to call Black people monkeys while we educate them, and not shame them. They’re acting out of innocent ignorance!”
“We have to allow teenage straight people to call LGBTQ+ people abominations and faggots while we educate them, and not shame them. We can’t blame the inexperienced for their lack of knowledge!”
There is no difference between that and calling women objects to score. It is all dehumanization of marginalized groups.
And if you hear a difference, it is because your own misogyny is so deeply internalized and ardently defended that dehumanization is acceptable to you when the target is women and girls.
The only way ingrained cultural bigotry becomes unacceptable is for people to STOP FUCKING EXCUSING AND ACCEPTING IT AND STOP REACTING TO IT LIKE IT’S ACCEPTABLE AND NORMAL.
“It’s an entirely culturally acceptable and normal question”
You are literally doing your personal best to ensure that it stays that way.
And a big part of emotional maturity is being able to take responses that are frank in tone or that you don't want to hear without getting upset. If a guy can't take being told the answer to his "how do I score a hot GF?" question is "that's a gross way to talk about women" then he's not emotionally mature enough to join a community or project that needs him to behave like a damn adult!
It drives me fucking nuts that people are like “you can’t talk to people like that, they might be young!” as if being young means that what they do doesn’t cause as much harm.
You are not less dead if a 5-year-old shoots you.
Which is why we deal with capacity to cause harm from two directions as a society.
If you are someone who might do harm yet should not be held accountable because you do not have the capacity to stop yourself (e.g. because you are a child without the experience/judgment/impulse control to manage power without harming people), we limit your autonomy (e.g. we don’t allow you to buy or (hopefully!) handle guns).
On the flipside, if you are someone with autonomy, we hold you accountable.
If you cannot be held accountable for the harm you have the power to cause, you should not have the autonomy to cause that harm. If you want autonomy, you accept accountability.
If young men can’t deal with accountability for how they talk about women, they should not be allowed public platforms to talk autonomously about and to women.
If your choices are your own, so are the consequences of making them. This is not hard.
You need to do harm reduction. And harm reduction sometimes means dealing with someone who is shitty and finding a way to make them less shitty. And surprise, saying 'you're shitty, stop being shitty' is not an EFFECTIVE METHOD
Do you care about RESULTS or do you care about BEING ON YOUR MORAL HIGH HORSE?
This question is for about 90% of those in this thread.
Which matters more, making things actually better, or feeling morally superior? Note that feeling morally superior is not actually being morally superior.
Amazing that you want to take “we’ve been coddling men and letting them have a little dehumanization of us as a treat for thousands of years and it has resulted in them killing more of us than ever, literally keeping women’s corpses on life support to serve as incubators, and putting us on track to have an uninhabitable planet in the next generation’s lifetime, we have got to stop putting their comfort above everyone’s survival” as “moral superiority.”
You’re being incredibly disingenuous, and a coward.
