I’m officially #old so haven’t been in the market for dating advice since before the emergence of modern short-form video and swiping-based apps. But as a somewhat socially awkward and uncool person, back in the day I did find the somewhat reductive, somewhat essentializing dating advice that was available in men’s magazines and The Game to be kind of useful. I find it intuitively reasonable that contemporary young people turn to contemporary equivalents of this kind of thing.
Around the office, though, Jerusalem mentioned to me how much she hates the broad generalizations and “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” reification of stereotypes that are core to this genre. And when Noah Smith took a stab at offering some dating advice, it convinced us that serious political professionals could wade into this terrain. We decided to investigate!
I found myself disturbed not so much by the advice being funneled to today’s young men but by who was doing the funneling. Some of Andrew Tate’s basic points about self-improvement and accepting responsibility are perfectly reasonable. A guy named Dan Bilzerian was dishing some basic advice that would be familiar to anyone who read Neil Strauss 20 years ago, but then I looked into him and he’s a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorist.
A big concern of mine is that if liberals get so conscientious about constantly reminding the world that each person is a unique individual snowflake and there’s no one way that all women are alike or one correct way to be an appealing man, we’ll end up surrendering the terrain of useful advice-giving entirely to right-wing ideologues and nutjobs. People want to learn about the birds and the bees, there are real sex differences in personality and dating preferences, and most people benefit from a little dose of the confidence that comes from having a plan.
In a prescient 2019 piece for The Atlantic, David Frum warned that “if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.” That’s kind of how I feel about dating advice that traffics a bit in stereotypes and clichés.
Jerusalem counters that reducing people to stereotypes is legitimately bad advice, that curiosity about the specific person in front of you is the foundation of healthy relationships.
Where we perhaps have a greater meeting of the minds is that a lot of dating content is weirdly vague on what is the actual purpose or goal of any of this. Is the foundation of a happy life really coming up with an ever-longer list of red flags to use as a basis for rejecting people? Idealistically, Jerusalem argues that maybe you should be seeking advice from friends and family who actually care about you rather than from social media influencers just trying to keep you scrolling. I think maybe you should be getting advice from your favorite abundance-oriented political columnists.
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The Argument. Libbing out.
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