On attraction and double standards

I must have missed--I was in either Vietnam or Laos--Arthur Chu's response to MIT Scott's bitter-nerd essay, even as I blogged about some of the other responses. Chu's just came to my attention, and is worth excerpting here:

None of the pain Scott talks about came from things that happened to him. They came from things that happened inside his head. He speaks in generalities about “sexual assault prevention workshops,” or of feeling targeted by feminist literature — himself saying that he was perversely drawn to the most radical and aggressive rhetoric he could find, eschewing more moderate writers for the firebreathing of Dworkin and MacKinnon.

and

That’s how I feel when I look at Scott’s impassioned argument that the dating scene is set up to grind “shy awkward nerds” into the dirt while letting jockish “Neanderthals” have all the women they want. I could point out plenty of evidence, statistical and anecdotal, that this is not in fact the case, as commenters in that thread in fact do — but what would be the point? You can’t argue with emotions that deeply ingrained.

What’s striking to me is that this comes up because Scott very passionately wants to debate that nerds don’t have “male privilege” and that nerdy guys are the victims, not perpetrators, of sexism. He is arguing this to a commenter posting under the name “Amy,” who argues that shy, nerdy guys are in fact plenty dangerous on the grounds that she has been raped by a shy, nerdy boyfriend, and that in her life experience around shy, nerdy guys she’s seen plenty of shy, nerdy guys commit harassment and assault and use their shy nerdiness as a shield against culpability for it.

and

This is what Laurie Penny means — or one of the things she means — when she says that the harm the “patriarchy” causes women is “structural.” Not that all women have it worse than all men. Not that anyone gets away without getting at least a little screwed up by the arbitrary, unreasonable demands our culture makes of us. But that it’s women who disproportionately bear the burden of actual harm, of being directly victimized by other people.

Women get spurned, too, but do they go around throwing acid out of entitlement and spite? More often then not, women are told to suck it up and try to like the men who like them first. I know Reductress is satire, but it's eerie how close to home those satirical tips sound.

People are attracted to what they're attracted to. I wouldn't want to be in a relationship where attraction was an ordeal. Though it's true that, while men go on as if all women organize their lives according to their attraction), women are the ones (in heterosexual relationships) more aften asked to get over it, and even told that women aren't visual enough for attraction to matter. As Tracy Moore writes (first link in this paragraph),

The thing is—it is OK to reject people for dumb reasons, or, at least, it’s better to do that than to lie to yourself and that other person about what you want. To begin with: who has the right to tell anyone what their personal criteria for dating can or should be? Moreover, I think that A) men openly reject women for being fat all the time by never dating them in the first place, and B) women are, yes, just as picky, but it’s fine.

and

Here’s the thing: On some level we are all shallow when it comes to dating, and that’s nothing to apologize for because it’s how it works. We all like what we like. Attraction is sometimes something that forms out of a lifetime of exposure to one thing or another, the familiar or the novel. Sometimes what you like is inexplicable even to you, but it has a pull on you regardless. It’s all so arbitrary, so specific to the situations and relationships that shape us, the images we all see and embrace or reject.

***
I had conversations about this with two different friends last week. One was debating whether to go on a fourth date with a guy. She wasn't feeling it, but she wasn't completely not feeling it. Among his offenses was that he saw nothing wrong with watching Woody Allen movies. I directed her to the Ethicist's column on the matter, which she herself had checked out after their conversation and agreed with. [Note: perhaps prompted by that conversation, I got "Blue Jasmine" out of the library; I thought it was mediocre in its own right but fascinating as a remake of "A Streetcar Named Desire," which I hadn't realized it was supposed to be until I watched it.] Anyway, I advised my friend, not very helpfully, that she go out with the guy if she felt like it but, at this point, she wasn't going to like him any more that she did presently.

Later, I had dinner with a friend who just got engaged. She pretty much echoed the excerpted sentiments above: it's worth holding out for what you're attracted to, and you know when it's worth overcoming little things that might turn you off at first.