The Most Important Part Of That Salon Article You Didn't Read

The manosphere is excited by a Salon article in which Tricia Romano (pictured above) complains that male tech workers are killing her sex life. Heartiste is spinning it as Money Won't Save Beta Males. That's a very sound interpretation, but it's not the most important message to be had from it, not by a long shot. Let's do a quick close-ish reading of certain parts, from the top:

"Even though I was bored, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I wanted to get a second drink. He offered wine back at his house and I said no. He was good-looking enough, but I wasn’t going to be able to get it up for a boring tech dude." Really? Get it up? There's something telling in her use of that phrase. It's the telltale of someone who takes a traditionally male approach to sex. In other words: "Does this person offer enough variety for me to bother sleeping with them?" After all, it's usually variety that drives male behavior, or the search for it. It's why most men would rather sleep with three or four so-called sevens than one so-called hard nine. She wants variety. She's like a guy. Her date is handsome and employed --- two things that are hard to find, says the ugly, unemployed person writing this blog --- but she can't get it up for him. If you're planning on marrying this woman, you should make sure you have some variety baked in. Hope it's enough.

"'The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued,' she wrote. 'I am a smart woman. I have a master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains. They interpreted information as intelligence. I constantly felt like I wasn’t seen or valued by them, even though I experienced a lot of them as having a very limited view of the world.'" Oh, you sweet summer child, as my pal BZR would say. Nobody who is on the front lines of tech development views a master's from Berkeley in philosophy as anything besides toilet paper. In fact, nobody with an IQ over 130 views a master's from Berkeley in philosophy as anything other than toilet paper. This isn't a male-versus-female thing: it's a conflict between productive, working, highly-compensated intelligence and liberal-arts jerking off. Your brain is very abstract. Your brain is very abstract. That's just a fancy way of saying that you can't understand math. Let me tell you who has an abstract brain in reality: the average large-scale database designer. But his work can be measured in the unyielding currency of cloud CPU cycles, whereas Miss Berkeley was given a degree because she paid for it and she said the right things in class. In the economy of the future, people like that will wind up on their knees.

"The type of person who is attracted to these jobs and thus to the Seattle area seems to be a socially awkward, emotionally stunted, sheltered, strangely entitled, and/or a misogynistic individual" That's one way to say: someone who works eighty hours a week at very specific and difficult problems so he can afford to have the future he wants. When you're busy working that hard, you don't have the luxury of being socialized by extensive free-time peer-group interactions. This is why coal miners were considered rough-hewn individuals, and still are, and it applies to tech-startup people as well. The good news: just like coal miners, they are unlikely to starve as long as the resources are available.

"Arlene said that she was once contacted by a Microsoft programmer on OKCupid who required that she read Neuromancer before “he would consider taking me out on a date. He was not joking.” This is the same woman who made the comment above. Think about this: She expects that her potential date will steep himself in socialization, emotional "intelligence", exposure to the real world as she sees it, and the bizarro world of modern "gender studies". That's years of effort. This guy wants her to read a 208-page book before he'll waste three hours on her --- and let's say he earns $200k a year, which means $4k a week, which means $100 an hour, which means $300 lost by going on the date plus the cost of the date. Say $500, which would feed a family in Middle America for two weeks, easy. Maybe both requests are extreme, but I bet you the guy with his favorite book is more aware of the extremity of the request than Arlene is. (P.S. I'll buy dinner for any woman who reads Neuromancer and wants to discuss it with me. I'm not in the dating market any more, but I really like that book.)

"This wasn’t what I’d signed up for. I’d moved back to Seattle, in particular to Capitol Hill, because when I’d lived here during the ’90s it was a beacon of diversity for weirdos... young gay boys, old hippies of varying sexuality, straight artists and musicians, softball lesbians, punk-rock dykes who played house music, metal musicians, ravers, or people into the fetish scene. They were not straight, white guys from flyover country or California imported by a software company. They spent their time doing things other than making Jeff Bezos more money." Jesus, lady, you sound like an eighty-year-old decrying the fact that they don't have a maypole in the public square any more. Who told you that you were entitled to have Seattle be exactly what you want it to be, in perpetuity? Furthermore, what did you bring to that oh-so-diverse scene? You're just a white woman whose idea of art and culture is writing dating articles. You're effectively identical to the white men from flyover country, save for a chromosome. Is that what scares you?

"My dating life went from dating artists and writers and going on cheap but exciting dates, to men who thought the ability to buy someone an expensive meal made them interesting." Trust me, there are still artists and writers out there. Too many of them, says the writer who is writing here. They --- we --- haven't changed. Why aren't you dating them any more? If your response is anything besides, "I got old and boring", then I know that you're a black belt at lying to yourself. You're old now, you're boring now, you don't interest those men. You're worthless to them.

"When I went to Paris, I went on OKCupid dates with several men as a way to see the city and perhaps have a romantic excursion; one worked at a movie production studio, another was a video editor; one guy worked in finance; another was an interior designer. Each one was thoroughly different than the other." Again, it's that gold-plated sense of entitlement. What about these men that you were essentially using as tour guides? It feels less than chivalrous to say so, but how many of them were disappointed at having a middle-aged blah-blah woman with a mousy look and a prominent mole arrive at their date? Did they enjoy the part you'd chosen them for, sans consent?

"The new tech bros have one thing on their brains—making money. They are different than the programmers I knew from ’90s, many of whom were also artists—musicians, photographers, DJs, involved in underground and alternative subcultures. They were freaks... Now that computing is trendy—and economically fruitful—it’s attracting a different kind of person altogether." Trust me, lady, freaky young coders are still out there. Did we already cover why they aren't asking you out? Let's reiterate: you're old and you're boring and you are essentially invisible to them. "For her part, Annie Pardo sees at least one comical upside to the endless stream of dull tech men: “These dudes are easily recognizable with their PCs, backpacks, pulley ID badges, short buses.”

You can see them coming a mile away. There’s just enough time to run."

At this point, we really are back in high school. OMG THEY DRESS LIKE NERDS THERE'S TIME TO RUN.

So, let me ask you, the reader, a question. Did you get a little nervous, a little itchy, when I described this woman as "old" and "chinless" and "worthless"? Did you find it a bit troubling that I was willing to essentially consign her to the dung heap just because she's over thirty and no longer pretty, if she ever was? Did that strike you as a bit misogynist, a bit hateful, too PUA-ish for this blog, which is not supposed to be yet another manosphere mouthpiece where we talk about how 24-year-olds are past their prime and only Russian women can truly satisfy a man?

It's okay if you felt that way --- I was hoping to provoke that response in most of my readers, male and female. Which leads to the next question: if we've agreed as a society that diatribes on women "hitting the Wall" and being "unfuckable" and so on don't get prime-time exposure in mainstream media --- and I'd suggest that we have, given the way those media outlets responded to the Eliot Rodger thing --- then why does an effectively identical rant on the part of a woman about men get the front page of Salon?

Imagine, if you will, that I wrote an article about how all the women in Columbus, Ohio are fat, worn-out, middle-aged sluts who wear Ohio State sweatshirts and have visible lip hair and don't have the aerobic endurance for a reasonable facsimile of sex. What if I wrote an article about how I went out with some single mom who was twenty pounds overweight and talked about her kids too much and I concluded the paragraph with "I couldn't get it up for someone like that"? Would Salon put that on the front page?

You know the answer to that, dear reader. So the true message about this silly dating article has nothing to do with the actual content, which is mostly anecdotal and ridiculous. It's a power message. It's this: We, the people who write the modern feminist narrative, control the horizontal and the vertical. If you write something about how to "game" women, or anything that judges normal women in any way, you will be relegated to the fringes of society faster than you can say "career suicide". But if you write an article that dismisses an entire generation and type of men as being beneath contempt, pathetic, unfuckable, miserable --- you'll get the front page of Salon.

Note, also, that the men's bloggers are anonymous: Heartiste, RooshV, and so on. This woman, on the other hand, has no fear about putting her name on the top of this article. If you want to know what's permitted and what isn't in a society, just take a look at what has to hide behind the cover of anonymity.

There's one final irony to this: if the poor bastards lampooned in this article went to one of the PUA sites, or took a class, they'd probably see a lot more success with women. If they took the so-called "red pill", they'd break out of the boring box into which they've been placed. The only problem is this: if they took the red pill, they'd wind up having little to no interest in "Arlene" and the other high-mileage adventuresses-by-proxy who have no interest in them now.

So what's the solution? Could it just be as simple as men not expecting women to be Playboy models and women not expecting men to be vampire-industrialist-millionaire-bondage-fetish-dominating-doctor-artist-musician-astronaut-combos? Or is that too much to ask of everyone? Would it just be better for all of these people to be alone forever? If that happens, where are we going to get the next generation of intelligent children?