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Top level seems sparse this week, I posted this just before Trump's verdict was dropping and I thought it might be at least a little entertaining, so I would like to proffer it again as an unsung culture war issue, BOATS!
Boating/Fishing and Right Wing Associations.
Inspired by a post in Wellness Wednesday, it took on a bit of a culture war tone as I wrote my response.
To the best of my recollection this is kind of a thing that started really turning ugly during covid. The notion guys with fish in their profile picks were all right wing anti-vaxxers because an odd amount of the posts on the hermaincainaward subreddit had a dude with a fish held high in their profile...
I've seen that "trend" other places where people have kind of sussed out a correlation of fish pictures and right wing proclivities, I just did a quick search on the tinder subreddit and others, I've found the question going back at least 6 years.. There are dozens more posts like this every year asking "Why all the fish pics" or "Stop with the fish pics".
There were also those boat parades for Trump etc...recreational power boating and ocean fishing are generally very white, sometimes wealthy. Fly fishing is even whiter and wealthier, think float plane trips to remote Alaskan camps and guided week long floats down untouched rivers. Bass fishing is white redneck hick Trump central and that is what a lot of people think of because of the televised tournaments and occasional news articles, add in a little cruelty to animals and you've got a stew going.
Some on the more extreme left, and probably a lot of young women of dating age must figure if you're fishing from shore or bass fishing you're a white trash trumper. They figure if you're fishing from a boat or racing to a sandbar to party that you're middle class to small business owner, killing animals for fun and burning gas while polluting the world, and if you're fly fishing in Kamchatka or deep sea fishing from a GT70 then you're a fat cat that needs to be eaten when the revolution comes (but maybe that won't be for a while so let's see where this goes).
https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/quo8p7/grandpa_catches_a_big_fish_and_a_big_virus/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/rb2tzq/update_guy_thought_he_was_a_legend_for_not_taking/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/nyoc9z/why_do_they_all_have_boats/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/168ivpu/when_men_hold_up_fish_in_their_dating_profile/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/u5eaiy/whats_wrong_with_fish_pictures_i_see_so_many/
I'm going to quote my own comment on anti-Conservative dating discrimination
Let's apply this simple system to Fish Pictures. Let's start by positing that Tweets have been tweeted around left wing feminine twitter and articles written on left wing feminine-coded websites about how fish pictures are unattractive. This is definitely true, Fish Picture discourse exists, as you provide examples of. As soon as that is the case, the phenomenon is self sustaining. If you're using a Fish Picture, you are perceived as either out of touch with the social discourse, or so incredibly obsessed with right wing politics, I mean fish, that you it's the only picture you have. Neither is attractive in a mate. Even if an individual woman doesn't mind fishing in and of itself, she may still discriminate against Fish Pictures because she things it signals a guy who is either socially inept or fish obsessed, because she knows other girls discriminate against Fish Pictures.
It's a good way to select for guys who read the same twitter feeds and thinkpieces you do, where they would have learned that Fish Pictures are bad and maybe racist or something.
You might be right that that's how it works now. But I want to imagine that the Fish Picture debate started for simpler, more innocent reasons- just a fundamental disconnect between how Men and Women present themselves and see the world.
The men aren't choosing the fish pictures because it's the only picture they have. OK, maybe some are- men usually don't take nearly as many pictures as women, and they don't pose for pics with a friend holding the camera taking multiple shots to take the perfect selfie like women do. But still, they do have other pics. They choose the fish pic because they think it's a good picture!
They think "I should show a picture that shows off my hobbies. I'm outdoors, doing something healthy and vaguely athletic. Here's me in my crowning moment of triumph, having just caught a fish! I have a genuine, happy smile. And it's in a boat, so I can subtly show off that I have at least a little bit of money to afford some recreational equipment."
And women see that and it just BOMBS. They don't see any of the stuff that the men are trying to communicate. They think "What is this gross cold slimey thing? Does he enjoy torturing animals for fun? This picture is at a terrible angle, it's focused on his nostrils. And he's sunburned- obviously not a guy who takes care of his skin. That boat looks gross, too. Why doesn't he have any normal hobbies, like shopping or baking fancy cakes?"
So there's a button you can press that makes every woman who doesn't get it not respond? Good; from the looks of most relationships I see, it's hard to filter them out and they seem absolutely awful to live with (on both sides of the equation; I observe that "people who get it" and "people who don't" might as well be different sexual orientations). I guess that's why "good thing you're pretty" is how straight men work; the species would probably have died out otherwise.
I guess the meta then is simply to have a profile picture that's making fun of fish pictures so you can select for women who are secure enough not to [have to] take themselves too seriously (for various reasons), but I think that's also untenable for most men either because they're not with it enough to come up with something silly, or because women of that type have some pretty unique quirks (and they're all flat for some reason, which doesn't tend to trigger the 'attractive' flag in most men, which rather humorously creates the same problem from the opposite end).
Like @Sloot said, it's very easy to get women to not respond. The hard part is getting anyone to respond at all. Try your "meta" and see how it works!
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Maybe not every woman, but in general for most men there’s a button to have most women not respond: The “send message” button, even after a match when/where applicable.
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