In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

No, liberal women do not have to date you for the good of society

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks alongside Ivanka Trump, daughter of US President Donald Trump, during a roundtable discussion on women entrepreneurs and business leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC, February 13, 2017. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Get a man who looks at you like Ivanka looks at Justin Trudeau. (Photo Credit Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

I’m not currently single, which is good, because if I were on the market, apparently I’d be expected to date Trump supporters for the good of humanity, and no.

For whatever reason, cross-party dating — I guess in the name of national unity and harmony? — has become a subject of discussion, as if someone who opposes your values and demonstrates such at the ballot box is really just your soulmate in disguise. At the Federalist, Jerrod Laber complains about OkCupid’s newest addition — a Planned Parenthood badge that users can add to their profile to let Jarrod Laber know they don’t want to date him.

It’s hard to not see this as a reaction to the rise of President Trump, as Planned Parenthood has long been a political football tossed back and forth between left and right, although dating sites have never made such an overt venture into politics. But, in our current bizarre world of politics, this represents a widening chasm between those who are most politically active, causing people to see an opposing viewpoint as an all-out assault on their personhood. The irony is that the type of assortative mating OkCupid is encouraging is one factor that allowed for the rise of a candidate like Trump.

Laber goes on to quote Charles Murray and argue that such “virtue-signaling” (by which he’s referring, I think, to the badge letting potential love matches know that a woman isn’t open to a man who wants to control her reproductive organs) only further divides us and makes us more vulnerable to shitstains like Donald Trump. So all y’all liberal ladies, drop your panties and your standards — this one’s on you.

At the Washington Post, Becky Little gets it. She’s sympathetic to the needs of the politically active single woman, acknowledging that the divide goes both ways — Trump-supporting women aren’t looking for Hillary-supporting partners, either.

Why did [Trump supporter Michelle] change her mind about politics and dating? Well, for one, she didn’t want to date a man who’d oppose the Trump-centric T-shirt company she was starting. But her shift in priorities was also bound up with her opinion that certain media outlets unfairly misrepresent Trump. Michelle said she couldn’t be with someone who, in her opinion, is uninformed enough to fall for such “propaganda.”

Michelle gets offended when people “assassinate his character,” as she put it, by calling Trump racist, sexist or homophobic — or by saying that he never would’ve made it without a loan from his dad. “I just can’t be with somebody who’s closed-minded like that,” she said. “They’re believing all those labels that are just political propaganda. I can’t be with somebody that just listens to tabloids or nightly news, because there’s a lot of hate being promoted.”

Back when I was single, there weren’t a whole lot of bright-line tests in my dating standards. No racists, no sexists, no classists, no anti-choicers, no one who was going to try to convert me to their religion. (I didn’t have an explicit no-Nazi policy, but at the time, way back when, such things were pretty much assumed. Ah, the good old days.) I was generally pretty open-minded. I dated an Auburn fan, y’all. Through the course of my entire life, I can’t think of a single general-election vote that would have been enough to put me completely off a dude, with prejudice.

Until Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is that bright line. He embodies every position I deplore in another human being. He’s selfish. He’s xenophobic. He’s jingoistic. He’s bigoted. He’s narcissistic. He’s misogynistic. He’s classist. He’s a liar. He’s that way now, and he was that way through the entire election. Voters knew exactly what they were getting when they pulled the lever for Donald Trump.

Does that mean that all Trump voters are those things? Not necessarily. But where dating is concerned, they don’t have to be. They just have to be okay with those things. They have to be okay with a president who wants to control my reproductive organs, kick my transgender friends out of the military, deport my DREAMer colleagues, and make healthcare prohibitively expensive for my loved ones. And who thinks there were some very fine Nazis marching in Charlottesville.

If they weren’t okay with those things, they wouldn’t have voted for the candidate who is basically a mixture of carbon atoms and all of those things. If they aren’t okay with those things, they’re on the hook to explain in detail, probably with a PowerPoint, why they were still willing to vote for a candidate who is nothing but all of those things standing on each other’s shoulders and wearing a trench coat, and I don’t have time for that. A guy who’s okay with that stuff isn’t a guy I’m interested in dating, so it’s actually very convenient that they’ve started clearly marking themselves with a red MAGA hat so I know whom to avoid.

Elizabeth, from Becky Little’s piece, knows what I’m talking about.

By the time CPAC rolled around in February, Elizabeth was steadily dating her boyfriend, but she still had to steer clear of “those types of guys wearing the MAGA hats that are like, creepin’,” she said. “Guys that are young and very involved with politics, in both parties, can tend to err on the side of being a little creepy.” Later, Elizabeth noticed that some of the guys who were a little too friendly at CPAC ended up getting jobs in Trump’s administration. “The creepy people are now in higher-up places in D.C., which is kind of disturbing,” she said.

And the creepiest one of all is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.


One thought on

  1. Re: “virtue signaling”: Discussion of vice signaling is curiously nonexistent, in a time of 88 t-shirts, rogues’ galleries of ghastly tattoos, and devil horn hand signs. Pointing this out to the neocons would be sweet, if only to embarrass them.

    I tried marrying a Republican/Libertarian, years ago. They don’t change anything but their clothes. Oversized egos and minimal minds: great subjects for satire but not relationships.

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