It’s tough being an average guy, trying to find romantic connections online. While the incels have all sorts of dastardly theories about why this is so (most of them centering on evil women hoarding the hottest, most dominant men, which they call “chads”), the simple reality is that men dominate dating apps.
Tinder’s user base is 78% men, and 76% for Bumble. The numbers are similar for other popular apps. The odds don’t favor men.
But if you’re a conservative man? It’s a lot worse.
Today, Jan. 6 insurrectionist Andrew Taake pled guilty to assaulting officers with chemical spray and a metal whip. He was one of several insurrectionists nabbed by one woman’s Bumble sting.
Residing in D.C., she used Bumble to talk to around a dozen men following the Jan. 6 attack, using “comically minimal ego-stroking” to get them to spill more and more details until she had enough to hand over to the FBI.
“They just wanted to regurgitate a lot of these ideas to somebody, and it seemed like I was a willing participant,” she said. “It definitely didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to get them to start talking about it. Basically me being like ‘Wow, so cool — then what? What else?’ was pretty much all it took.”
“One of my friends was like, ‘You basically got all these confessions just being, like, “Haha! Then what?”’” she said.
Taake is the second insurrectionist nabbed by intrepid women on dating apps, and more are likely coming.
It might seem fantastical that these men would open up about their law-breaking to random strangers on a dating app, but the fact is, few women want to talk to them at all, and that phenomenon has only intensified since the Dobbs decision eliminated federal abortion protections. Indeed, a 2022 report by Match (which owns Tinder, OKCupid, and several other dating sites) found that two-thirds of women won’t date someone with opposing views on abortion, and—take note, anti-abortion men—34% said they would be less likely to either date at all, or have sex. And unsurprisingly, 58% said it was “now more important than ever to know a partner’s political views.”
Conservative reaction to the shunning beggars belief. Reacting against a study of 1,500 female Ivy League students that found that just 6% would date a Donald Trump supporter, a piece in the conservative National Review claimed in the headline that political discrimination in dating was “a civil rights struggle.” The cutline argued that “viewpoint neutrality should be legally mandated.” Very “small government” conservative of them.
Of course, conservatives try to place themselves on some high-minded pedestal. That story quoted a 2019 Pew study that found that—surprise—men were far more likely to date Hillary Clinton supporters than women were likely to date Trump supporters. This was considered “political discriminat[ion]” in the same manner as those “who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews.”
There was columnist Ross Douthat’s infamous piece in The New York Times arguing for “the redistribution of sex,” in which he said, “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” Don’t worry, ladies—Douthat’s solution is sex robots, even if he managed to wrap that argument in layers of insulting sexism and misogyny, that sex was something for women to surrender to demanding men.
Heck, conservatives have even argued that women’s refusal to date them is the reason Donald Trump was elected in the first place!
Yet for all the crying about intolerant lefties who won’t date them, the fact is that men have historically had a great deal of sway over what women say and how they vote. For whatever reason, single women (unmarried, divorced, or widowed) are far more likely to vote Democratic than their married counterparts. Looking at the 2022 midterm election exit polls, married women voted 56-42 for Republicans, while unmarried women voted 68-31 for Democrats—that’s a whopping 51-percentage-point difference! (There was a much smaller 13-point swing among men.)
It is in the conservative movement’s interest to encourage liberal women to marry conservative men, as the data is quite clear, and voting patterns adjust accordingly after marriage. Yet whether it’s because of the #MeToo movement, the rise of an educated professional female class—or, who knows, Taylor Swift—women are increasingly disinterested in matching up with men who don’t reflect their values.
Even some non-conservatives are getting the vapors at the notion that women don’t need to date A-hole men who want to restrict their rights. It’s been a month since The Washington Post editorial board laid this stinker of an op-ed on its pages, arguing that women are “threatening marriage.” The Washington Post notes that “[s]ince Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.” As a result, the editorial argues that “someone will need to compromise,” and guess who they think should be doing the compromising? Again, it’s not conservative men refusing to mate with liberal women. Heck, the thought likely turns them on.
Ultimately, women (and men) are right to filter their relationships by ideology. It’s not as if conservatives didn’t pioneer the process—creating their own alternative conservative media, political institutions, book clubs, conferences, and so on. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Peter Thiel even funded a conservative dating app called The Right Stuff (never mind that it flopped, because what women want to be on that thing?). It’s just noteworthy that when women decide to play the same game and filter out the worst of the worst, suddenly people get the vapors.
I don’t blame women for not wanting to deal with this nonsense:
Or this nonsense:
Or this:
Or this!
Values matter.
Too many conservative men have decided to throw in with Trump, and women have reacted accordingly. That’s as it should be. Horrible people don’t deserve connections with decent, caring, and evolved humans.
