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MIRI Researcher Don’t be a Quokka Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).
Katja Grace posts “date me” document. Asks everyone to share.
I originally posted a similar link in the small-scale-questions thread in response to Tyler Cowen linking to the doc on MarginalRevolution. What I didn’t know at the time is that Katja apparently wants this to be spread everywhere?!?!?
Object-level thoughts: I quite liked it. The document makes a compelling case that will appeal strongly to a certain demographic of men. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from “mid-30s Bay Area rationalist woman ready to settle down and have kids,” expanded out into a full dating profile. It certainly caught my attention.
Meta-level thoughts: OH NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You can send out something like this to your blog readers. They’ll know how to interpret it, and they’re the kind of people you’d be interested in anyways. You can’t toss it out into the black void that is Twitter and expect to come out unscathed. She even dropped her personal email address at the end. Guess who’s going to need a new Gmail account next week?
Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.
I feel bad for her getting dragged in the quote tweets, but like, what did she expect? Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing. Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.
I normally browse the motte by looking at the recent comments and going through context from there. But for the last 15 hours, it seems there was nothing but this topic. Can someone lay out why a dating ad is so interesting to people?
Catty bickering gossip is always going to be one of the most popular topics for us fallible meatbags to engage in.
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-- Young men who are having trouble dating love seeing their theories proven by a promiscuous woman entering middle age having trouble dating.
-- Trad people have to point out that she's miserable because she's quite aggressively not trad. It's not hard to argue from the evidence provided.
-- Any time you post personal facts on the internet, you get mocked. She's probably a perfectly average woman, but on the internet people whose last five sexual partners average a full point below her will say she's hideously ugly. I once made the mistake, during a Covid discussion in /r/stupidpol (of all places), of mentioning that by BMI I was overweight and that I wondered if the BMI increased risk even though I lifted/climbed/ran a marathon that year. The whole thread turned into a dogpile of stupidpol-ers (of all people) telling me my lifts were dogshit and I was probably really fat and lying to myself. Say anything about yourself personally on the internet and you'll get shit on.
-- There is a contingent of people that just hates when other people try to do something in a "cheesy" way, especially if cheesy succeeds for that person.
-- The ad was almost certainly designed with hooks (spirituality? Really?) To get people to argue about it, therefore making it more likely to be spread, therefore getting more eyeballs on it. Once the doc is a spectacle, someone will reply to her, inevitably. If she's "pure" bi, possibly a woman, in which case a lot of the dynamics are quite different. Celebrities, even internet celebrities, who can't get laid don't exist.
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If an ageing single woman expresses complaints and frustrations about the human mating marketplace of a post-patriarchal Western society, especially if she’s middle-class and educated, the only people willing to assign any meaningful responsibility to her for her own misfortune will be anonymous though criminals on marginal online platforms. This is such a place, so all the thought criminals here seem to be eager to dismiss her (for good reason), because this cannot be done in mainstream discourse, plus (as in most such cases) it’s simply low-hanging fruit.
She did not do this, though. I have the sense that some of the people here who are being negative towards her did not even look at her document.
Well, I'm sorry but yes, if you're a single childless 36-yr-old woman posting such a document openly, it means that, in effect, yes, she's complaining about her experiences in the mating/dating market.
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We accidentally stepped on a scissor statement.
If her pitch/approach were twenty percent more cringey and she were four years older, everyone would agree this a sad and sympathetic case of someone with unrealistic expectations who missed the boat. Move in the other direction, and no one would think to remark on it — an everyday case of a career-focused woman settling down.
But it straddles the line just so, leaving room to get outraged that other people are binning her in a category you think it's ridiculous to bin her in. Accusations of misogyny go to accusations of white-knighting go to accusations of I-bet-you're-no-prize-yourself-partner etc etc.
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In the immortal words of Uma Thurman: When you little scamps get together, you’re worse than a sewing circle.
Oooo that's a deep cut ;-)
I'll be honest, if this were a granede, it would explode while I was still holding it, as I love good gossip and drama myself. But people are taking it way too far. Not to mention, this isn't supposed to be a place for it to begin with.
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