I have noticed people on social media are now trolling other trolls. The goal is for them to be trolled back and then complain that someone was really mean to them. Perhaps they will take a screenshot of some troll’s rude comment to them, omitting the fact that they initially sought out a reaction, maybe by posting something incendiary or controversial. Negative attention is after all still attention, and represents fleeting evidence that anyone actually gives a shit about the person. The positive kind isn’t happening, so the negative will have to suffice.
They’re seeking out victimhood so that they can in turn whine about it.
It is quite pathetic.
I’ve seen more than a few aspiring bad dayers use screenshots from Tinder to illustrate how they themselves are a beacon of shining light who, due to the presence of evil in the universe, often get fucked with.
If you’re not familiar with Tinder the way it works is that if you want to engage with someone you swipe right on their profile, which includes a short blurb comprising a failed attempt at cleverness and a few photos of themselves, and if they also swipe right on your profile a match is created, meaning you are able to exchange personalized messages with the person.
In practice the way this works out is men, typically after failing to generate any female attention at a bar or nightclub or feeling guilty about being too lazy to go to one, log on to the app and begin feverishly swiping right on any photo that looks remotely like a woman between the ages of 17 and 49, figuring they will winnow out any potential errors later on by simply ignoring or “unmatching” them.
Often times the initial photo of the woman looks passable, but once the match occurs, the man peruses the woman’s additional photos and decides that he would rather just view some online porn.
The women post the most flattering photos of themselves and generate a huge volume of matches from horny men, who in turn send them lewd icebreakers which often include sex proposals and stock photos of their genitals.
The women vastly enjoy the attention while pretending to be perturbed at what even non-Tinder users like myself understand is the entire culture of Tinder. Often times the woman will write something in her blurb such as “not here for hookups” which would be roughly akin to visiting a batting cage and declaring that you were not interested in hitting any balls.
The females will also attempt to levy some power over the men and weed out those who are engaging in a high-volume R selection strategy by making them dance around for their own amusement by writing things such as “make me laugh or I will ignore you” or “I will only respond to interesting messages” or something along those lines.
The men, who in the throes of this desperate moment do not in any way care what an anonymous avatar demands of them, do not bother to read such disclaimers and the women are allowed to get all huffy and pretend they’re deeply offended and sometimes they will take a screenshot of some idiot’s pornographic messages to them in order to illustrate what pigs men are on this fuck app.
Take the case of Addison Rose Vincent, a trans person who wrote an op-ed on the Huffington Post about how Tinder may have “a transphobia problem.” Rose is self described “25-year-old Canadian transfeminine genderqueer activist”, so needless to say she is a terrible hang. In fact she prefers the pronoun “they”, so that when you refer to her you sound like a character out of Huck Finn, as in “they is a real delight, madam, now what say I take that sack of clementines into the kitchen by lawdy.”
Tinder doesn’t have separate categories for gender. Just Male and Female. This posed a problem for Vincent, who says she is “not a man or woman, just an AMAB feminine being”
(AMAB means “assigned male at birth”, which is a way of saying that you were born a male. I don’t think this process is arbitrary. They tend to look at your parts and check a box. It’s not like Natalie Portman was assigned male at birth.)
A Tinder exchange from Thalia
Even though Vincent had apparently already excluded they’s self from the basic perimeters of using Tinder (by not being male or female), and even though they doesn’t think they is a woman, they still listed themselves as a woman on Tinder (if this is confusing, “they” and “them” is one person, meaning Vincent, and not a group of multiple assholes), and found themselves having their account suspended.
The issue, in a nutshell, is that men on Tinder are looking for women to have sex with, and when they find out the woman likely has a penis they get confused, and then angry, and report the person as violating Tinder’s terms and conditions (essentially meaning the person is misrepresenting themselves.)
Vincent is completely aware of the crux of the issue, but maintains they still have a right to use Tinder and shouldn’t keep having their account suspended because men who didn’t read their profile swipe right and then report them.
Vincent’s profile picture clearly displays them wearing a handbag that says in bold bright letters “PROUD TO BE TRANS *!” (It is unclear what the asterisk is for but maybe Vincent got beat by Chaz Bono in a steel cage match and is not proud to be associated with him. It is not explained so I am forced to speculate) and the aforementioned blurb stating that they are a “25-year-old Canadian transfeminine genderqueer activist living in Orange County.”
It is a testament to how little men care about the personality section on dating apps or websites, and to the furious pace at which they attempt to match women, that many of them still swipe right on Vincent’s profile, because they look like a reasonably attractive woman in the photo.
It is also a testament to the asshole nature of men that, instead of unmatching this quasi-female that they aren’t interested in, they take the time to report the person to Tinder purely out of spite or homophobia.
Even though Vincent, to their credit, is completely aware of the situation, instead of finding a more appropriate niche based dating site, they still just continue to use Tinder, receive negative attention, and write blogs about it which are published in the Huffington Post, complete with a trigger warning:
“Trigger Warning: anti-trans, transmisogynistic and vulgar language and phrases. If you decide to share this piece, please include a trigger warning in your post. Thank you.”
Go fuck yourself. My readers are adults who can handle an R rated movie without taking the following day off of work to recover.
Another trans person, Tahlia Rene, was similarly banned from Tinder after a number of men complained about her trying to dupe them. Tahlia told Vice that she gets frustrated because men keep asking her if she has a vagina, even though she wrote in her bio to “specifically not ask me about my genitals.”
It would be inappropriate for the guy at Pep Boys to ask about your genitals and whether or not you prefer regular or synthetic, but this is a dating app whose expressed purpose is help people with clearly defined genitals meet other people with the opposite genital.
Nobody would be so naive as to think, despite their plea, that immature horny males on a dating app are not going to ask you about your genitals. In fact, your request to not be asked about your genitals, means that an exponentially greater amount of men are going to ask you about your genitals, as you well know, hence, you are trolling trolls.
(Thalia goes even further, stating that one of the times she was kicked off of Tinder that she had travelled from her enclave in Austin, Texas to a rural part of eastern Texas, at which point she received the largest number of complaints, meaning that not only was she trolling trolls, but trolling hillbilly trolls to up her odds of backlash.)
This entire situation highlights the pathetic nature of humanity. On the one hand you have stupid horny men behaving stupidly. On the other hand you have a group of people seeking the attention of these stupid horny men and then pretending they are shocked and dismayed when these men behave stupidly. I’m not sure which act is more pathetic, but one is certainly more contrived.
Is the solution for Tinder to create a separate category for trans people, so that you can bicker over their terminology and write faux angry pieces for the Huffington Post about how they’re screwing up your myriad of gender pronouns or about how it is discriminatory for them to have a separate category for trans people? Is the solution to reprimand men who complain about matching with trans people on Tinder when that was not their initial intention? Or for Tinder to just not ban anyone based on complaints?
Or is the solution for you to admit that you’re just a miserable person looking to be offended and has found a surefire way to do so by going on an app for desperate horny people when you could easily find a site that caters more to your demographic, and has a more complex matching system than blindly swiping a photo at 3 am while wearing your beer goggles, and that you are seeking out problems?
This behavior isn’t specific to the trans people discussed here, this is just a case study, there are all sorts of annoying people on the internet.
And by the way, if you ask me not to ask about your genitals, that is the first thing I am going to do, in great detail, until I am blocked from contacting you, because you deserve it for trolling a troll.