A slow clap for Amanda Marcotte’s lede in Salon.
It’s an amusing truth that comes up with regularity: Men who love Donald Trump struggle on the dating market. This is neither surprising nor regrettable. Supporting Trump is much like refusing to bathe, blowing your nose in your hands or farting loudly on purpose. It’s a repugnant habit that makes you repulsive to normal people. The whole point of dating and marriage is to find happiness, not to spend the rest of one’s days suffering in silence while the racist you live with cackles over Greg Gutfeld’s latest hateful diatribe disguised as “comedy.”
I wouldn’t date a Republican and I certainly would not marry one. If I were a woman, that would go double. What other people do is their business, not mine. If you love a Republican and want to be intimate with them or begin a lifelong commitment, who am I to judge? But I have to agree with Marcotte that it gets tiresome reading this recurring articles, including now from the Washington Post editorial board, bemoaning the fact that Trump-loving men can’t find heterosexual bliss.
To be fair, the editorial board is a little more subtle. The problem, they say, is that women can’t find mates and this is exacerbated by the fact that they won’t date people with whom they are not politically aligned. Simply put, too many young men are conservative and therefore undateable.
If you think this is unfair, consider that Democrats are less willing to date Republicans than the reverse, although both groups are reluctant. And since women skew to the left, they’re more likely to be the ones turning up their nose than the men.
For the editorial board, the problem is that marriage has “collapsed” and studies show that married people are happier than singles. If women won’t date Republicans let alone marry them, how will this societal calamity be repaired?
Marcotte treats this with the contempt it deserves:
In trying to sell women on this “marry men who repulse you” plan, the editorial board unconvincingly argues that simply being married makes people happier than being single. But while it may be true that married people — even those in politically mixed marriages — report higher levels of happiness than single people, it doesn’t follow that the wedding ring is the reason. Most Americans marry for love, after all. Being married to someone you wanted to marry is very different than what is being suggested here: lowering your standards just to get married.
It seems like it should need saying that marrying someone who makes you miserable is not likely to make you happier than sitting at home alone with your cats. It doesn’t seem to occur to the editorial board than men who can’t attract women should do something different. And I don’t mean a better haircut, nicer clothes or leasing a car you can’t afford. How about not being a Trump-loving asshole? Why not try that?
Trump, who is an admitted and convicted abuser of women isn’t a great role model. Women are wise to look askance at any male who holds Trump in even the least amount of esteem. He’s also solely responsible for stacking the courts with opponents of women’s reproductive freedom, and you can’t ask a woman to engage in a reproductive act with you if you’re not willing to let her decide on the potential consequences. Try telling a woman, “I’d like to have sex with you and if you get pregnant you are absolutely having my baby.” This doesn’t work well when explicitly stated, so why is it a surprise that it struggles as a pickup stance when left merely implicit?
I don’t know why so many men who can’t find mates wind up hating women. It doesn’t seem like the reverse happens with the same frequency. But, in any case, it’s a bit of chicken and egg question. Many men who hate women have no trouble attracting them, but many others are inept daters precisely because they don’t like women in the first place and don’t give a shit what they think or what they might want in a partner.
All I can say with certainty is that it’s true that women are having trouble finding good men, and the best way to remedy this is for bad men to try being good men for a change.