Ha! Had some similar experiences in Seattle myself. On one first date, she told me all about her dissertation on Walter Benjamin and NFTs. Naturally, I had strong opinions on the value of each. I gave my usual genealogy of the social degradation wrought by the Frankfurt school, and she leaned right into the playful disagreement. Needless to say, it was a late night.
Conceptual competence and comfort with confrontation shows not only that you can keep up, but also that you can lead — and that's attractive. So later when I'd give her a ride home in my lifted truck or she'd see the wall of tools in my hallway or my crosses and icons on the wall, these became proof points of autonomy and confidence rather than salient markers of incompatibility or difference.
My advice for young men who aren't leftists who want to date in cities that are full of them. When you find yourself seated across from one, lean in, smile, and engage with modesty but conviction. Take an interest, don't be threatened, and be clear about what you believe. Most of all, demonstrate that you can chart the differences between the two of you so that she doesn't have to worry about doing all that herself, or worse, getting lost in the process.
I should go back and read that piece on hick libs. I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm a fourth generation Seattlite. These people ruined the city IMO. Not intentionally, of course, but they did.
Seattle has always been mostly democratic, but it used to be fairly normal with a healthy conservative working class contingent up until the 90s when the Southern Californians, then hicklibs, started flooding in.
Now it's a political joke with a transplant Marxist mayor basically run according to the sensibilities of silly millennial single women.
There is a saying amongst the churchies - when a young woman who was previously on fire for God starts getting patchy in her attendance and commitment - “okay, so what’s his name and where did you meet him?” This reads like the seclib version of the same thing.
Seattle is full of the most politically clueless people in the US. Very few are capable of thinking for themselves or offering an independent opinion.
Why? The large majority are transplants and know next to nothing about the local history or (what's left of) the local culture. Basically they just go on what they learned in college or what the pathetic local media says.
So if you can demonstrate some basic political savvy and competence you'll come off as impressive.
Seattle liberals were a big part of the genesis of my piece on Hick Libs, they’re all the same small town weirdo who moved to the city to be with their people and brought their paranoid style of perpetual culture war with them.
The amount of profile space these people would devote to describing who they weren’t going to date when the total population of that type of conservative in Seattle was under a dozen was hilarious, even our churches were liberal.
Like I said in the piece, they were mostly perfectly nice people once you got through the shell, they’d just been conditioned to think that anyone who didn’t share every single one of their beliefs was literally Jerry Falwell, which was actually a fun notion to disabuse them of.
This piece made me thing of that movie with the name I can't remember where Channing Tatum plays a soldier bringing a K9 to his handler's funeral and he stops off in Portland and every girl is interested til they found out he's in the military, and eventually he ends up almost having a threesome after learning to start fake caring about their issues and pretending he's in the Peace Corp or something.
Heh, I didn't even have to go that far, I just had to selectively highlight our points of agreement and keep quiet about my more right coded beliefs until after they met me, then they'd rationalize that I wasn't like those other people that they'd claimed to be totally opposed to dating. Some of them even came around on my sort of Reason magazine libertarianism after spending some time with me, I used to be much more of a softy on criminal justice and could get genuinely worked up over civil asset forfeiture or other police abuses, which gave me a bit of leeway to talk about how wasteful and abusive large bureaucracies can be and kind of set them on the path.
The funnier ones to me were the "I don't date cis het straight white men" girls who'd like me back, I never out and out confronted any of them, but I did tease a few of them (in bed, naturally), and I'd usually get some light embarrassment and something like "well, you seemed different so I took a chance" type replies. I think that was purely weird peer pressure from other girls that made them put that in their profiles, none of them really seemed to have their hearts in it.
You scoff at Craigslist, but for a decent looking guy who could write without a bunch of typos and wasn't blatantly looking for a one night stand booty call it was like shooting fish in a barrel, I just had to filter out a the occasional would be escort hinting at wanting to be paid and DL guys prowling for a hookup. I learned that a lot of women read those for fun, and putting in a well written personal with real pics was surprisingly effective. Fun times.
That's such a weird thing to write that it feels like it must just honestly be a bunch of girls fake signalling something to each other to reduce competition. Bc I gotta tell you, I've almost never met a girl who DIDNT want to date a cis het white guy. It sort of feels like a guy writing "unwilling to date a fit thin woman with curves and clear skin and long hair".
I'm tempted to get back on and send you some screenshots, it's still not unusual to see profiles that are more politics than dating, just a series of slogans and emojis plus a giant list of people who should swipe left or keep moving. Seattle is weird, man.
I ran an OKC experiment in the opposite direction. I wanted to see how opposite of Seattle preferences a female profile could be before matches tanked. I created the most fire and brimstone, homophobic, a bit racist, no sex before marriage, loves country music, hates video games etc profile I could imagine without dipping into obvious satire.
It turned out that as long as the photo was of an attractive woman literally nothing else mattered. Lol.
Along the same lines...a very conservative friend of mine does very well on Grindr in Seattle. He's hot and pretty well off. His profile photo is him, shirtless, with a MAGA hat on.
I think there may be a pattern when it comes to men.
Honestly, a good profile pic is 90% of what you need, it was just fun trying to run up my match score to get my profile served to as many women as possible at the time.
what's also great about liberal women is that a lot of them are genuinely warm, caring and nice people. if anything, they care too much. well, kind of obvious but, still...
Man, this brings back the memories. I actually was a liberal (not a progressive) barring a few things like HBD you can easily cover up. On the other hand I wasn't a good cook and, yeah, the gun safe might been a net plus in terms of attractiveness, whatever they said.
In general I tended to leave anyone who said they didn't date cishet straight white men alone; I figured even though there was a good chance they were lying they'd be insufferable. It was funny how I went on dates with twenty 'bisexual' women and no 'queer' ones.
(I was going to say, looking at your pic, the bi flag has the best colors. Nice analogous color scheme centered around purple.)
Oh, I did all kinds of fun things with the questions on OKC. You could move stuff in and out of private (most women didn't pay for the bit that let you look at private answers), you used to be able to purge your answers and start over to see if something worked better. Heck, at one point you could even manipulate the search engine to figure out your own attractiveness score.
Back in my days at the border of [CITY REDACTED]'s kink scene there was even a fun trick with the friend and enemy percentages.
Nitpicking but the questions weren't originally just for politics; they were to find people with similar preferences on anything. Most of the original high-ranked ones weren't particularly political. They only started with the political flags around 2020 or so.
At least now I know how I could have actually picked up the nerdettes. Well, the cute ones. I had plenty of ugly ones. Still friends with some.
I occasionally toy with the idea of trying to revive peak era OKC as a premium dating site, the Match Group people have absolutely gutted it and there’s nothing on the market that works as well as it did in it’s 2007-2012 ish prime. Add an AI layer to spot hidden preferences and steal a couple of good ideas from other apps, make the free tier usable and the payed version actually worth it without trying to squeeze every nickel out of your customers with endless swiping and I think people would pay real money for it.
FWIW the rationalists on Astral Codex Ten bring this up from time to time and seem to conclude it doesn't make sense and would be outcompeted. Then again none of those guys are good at business so maybe!
Ha! Had some similar experiences in Seattle myself. On one first date, she told me all about her dissertation on Walter Benjamin and NFTs. Naturally, I had strong opinions on the value of each. I gave my usual genealogy of the social degradation wrought by the Frankfurt school, and she leaned right into the playful disagreement. Needless to say, it was a late night.
Conceptual competence and comfort with confrontation shows not only that you can keep up, but also that you can lead — and that's attractive. So later when I'd give her a ride home in my lifted truck or she'd see the wall of tools in my hallway or my crosses and icons on the wall, these became proof points of autonomy and confidence rather than salient markers of incompatibility or difference.
My advice for young men who aren't leftists who want to date in cities that are full of them. When you find yourself seated across from one, lean in, smile, and engage with modesty but conviction. Take an interest, don't be threatened, and be clear about what you believe. Most of all, demonstrate that you can chart the differences between the two of you so that she doesn't have to worry about doing all that herself, or worse, getting lost in the process.
I should go back and read that piece on hick libs. I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm a fourth generation Seattlite. These people ruined the city IMO. Not intentionally, of course, but they did.
Seattle has always been mostly democratic, but it used to be fairly normal with a healthy conservative working class contingent up until the 90s when the Southern Californians, then hicklibs, started flooding in.
Now it's a political joke with a transplant Marxist mayor basically run according to the sensibilities of silly millennial single women.
There is a saying amongst the churchies - when a young woman who was previously on fire for God starts getting patchy in her attendance and commitment - “okay, so what’s his name and where did you meet him?” This reads like the seclib version of the same thing.
Seattle is full of the most politically clueless people in the US. Very few are capable of thinking for themselves or offering an independent opinion.
Why? The large majority are transplants and know next to nothing about the local history or (what's left of) the local culture. Basically they just go on what they learned in college or what the pathetic local media says.
So if you can demonstrate some basic political savvy and competence you'll come off as impressive.
Seattle liberals were a big part of the genesis of my piece on Hick Libs, they’re all the same small town weirdo who moved to the city to be with their people and brought their paranoid style of perpetual culture war with them.
The amount of profile space these people would devote to describing who they weren’t going to date when the total population of that type of conservative in Seattle was under a dozen was hilarious, even our churches were liberal.
Like I said in the piece, they were mostly perfectly nice people once you got through the shell, they’d just been conditioned to think that anyone who didn’t share every single one of their beliefs was literally Jerry Falwell, which was actually a fun notion to disabuse them of.
Lol, Craig's List! You dirty dog.
This piece made me thing of that movie with the name I can't remember where Channing Tatum plays a soldier bringing a K9 to his handler's funeral and he stops off in Portland and every girl is interested til they found out he's in the military, and eventually he ends up almost having a threesome after learning to start fake caring about their issues and pretending he's in the Peace Corp or something.
Heh, I didn't even have to go that far, I just had to selectively highlight our points of agreement and keep quiet about my more right coded beliefs until after they met me, then they'd rationalize that I wasn't like those other people that they'd claimed to be totally opposed to dating. Some of them even came around on my sort of Reason magazine libertarianism after spending some time with me, I used to be much more of a softy on criminal justice and could get genuinely worked up over civil asset forfeiture or other police abuses, which gave me a bit of leeway to talk about how wasteful and abusive large bureaucracies can be and kind of set them on the path.
The funnier ones to me were the "I don't date cis het straight white men" girls who'd like me back, I never out and out confronted any of them, but I did tease a few of them (in bed, naturally), and I'd usually get some light embarrassment and something like "well, you seemed different so I took a chance" type replies. I think that was purely weird peer pressure from other girls that made them put that in their profiles, none of them really seemed to have their hearts in it.
You scoff at Craigslist, but for a decent looking guy who could write without a bunch of typos and wasn't blatantly looking for a one night stand booty call it was like shooting fish in a barrel, I just had to filter out a the occasional would be escort hinting at wanting to be paid and DL guys prowling for a hookup. I learned that a lot of women read those for fun, and putting in a well written personal with real pics was surprisingly effective. Fun times.
That's such a weird thing to write that it feels like it must just honestly be a bunch of girls fake signalling something to each other to reduce competition. Bc I gotta tell you, I've almost never met a girl who DIDNT want to date a cis het white guy. It sort of feels like a guy writing "unwilling to date a fit thin woman with curves and clear skin and long hair".
I'm tempted to get back on and send you some screenshots, it's still not unusual to see profiles that are more politics than dating, just a series of slogans and emojis plus a giant list of people who should swipe left or keep moving. Seattle is weird, man.
More politics than dating is even common here in Utah of all places.
Though there are more who choose to lean into being right wing than I’d assume there are in Seattle.
I ran an OKC experiment in the opposite direction. I wanted to see how opposite of Seattle preferences a female profile could be before matches tanked. I created the most fire and brimstone, homophobic, a bit racist, no sex before marriage, loves country music, hates video games etc profile I could imagine without dipping into obvious satire.
It turned out that as long as the photo was of an attractive woman literally nothing else mattered. Lol.
Along the same lines...a very conservative friend of mine does very well on Grindr in Seattle. He's hot and pretty well off. His profile photo is him, shirtless, with a MAGA hat on.
I think there may be a pattern when it comes to men.
Honestly, a good profile pic is 90% of what you need, it was just fun trying to run up my match score to get my profile served to as many women as possible at the time.
It appears you look kinda like Matt Walsh so, if that’s true, yeah I’d say you are good looking.
The AI darkens my hair and beard a bit, but not entirely off base. Thanks!
Sure. And best wishes.
what's also great about liberal women is that a lot of them are genuinely warm, caring and nice people. if anything, they care too much. well, kind of obvious but, still...
Man, this brings back the memories. I actually was a liberal (not a progressive) barring a few things like HBD you can easily cover up. On the other hand I wasn't a good cook and, yeah, the gun safe might been a net plus in terms of attractiveness, whatever they said.
In general I tended to leave anyone who said they didn't date cishet straight white men alone; I figured even though there was a good chance they were lying they'd be insufferable. It was funny how I went on dates with twenty 'bisexual' women and no 'queer' ones.
(I was going to say, looking at your pic, the bi flag has the best colors. Nice analogous color scheme centered around purple.)
Oh, I did all kinds of fun things with the questions on OKC. You could move stuff in and out of private (most women didn't pay for the bit that let you look at private answers), you used to be able to purge your answers and start over to see if something worked better. Heck, at one point you could even manipulate the search engine to figure out your own attractiveness score.
Back in my days at the border of [CITY REDACTED]'s kink scene there was even a fun trick with the friend and enemy percentages.
Nitpicking but the questions weren't originally just for politics; they were to find people with similar preferences on anything. Most of the original high-ranked ones weren't particularly political. They only started with the political flags around 2020 or so.
At least now I know how I could have actually picked up the nerdettes. Well, the cute ones. I had plenty of ugly ones. Still friends with some.
I occasionally toy with the idea of trying to revive peak era OKC as a premium dating site, the Match Group people have absolutely gutted it and there’s nothing on the market that works as well as it did in it’s 2007-2012 ish prime. Add an AI layer to spot hidden preferences and steal a couple of good ideas from other apps, make the free tier usable and the payed version actually worth it without trying to squeeze every nickel out of your customers with endless swiping and I think people would pay real money for it.
FWIW the rationalists on Astral Codex Ten bring this up from time to time and seem to conclude it doesn't make sense and would be outcompeted. Then again none of those guys are good at business so maybe!
Alls fair in love and war. And dating. Culture war I mean.
I’m almost shocked I haven’t read anything about this being a new form of kink yet.