Badger writes about a woman at a dinner party who recently tried to enlist him in her friend’s quest to keep her dating hopper filled with new men:
“Do you have any normal friends for my friend to date?”
Vaguely confused by the hasty presumption that I was a dating sourcer, but detecting an opportunity for a silent manosphere laugh, I replied “you’d have to tell me more.”
“Well, she’s been dating guys from OKCupid and says she just can’t find any normal guys there.”
Now I was irked. It would have been one thing if she said her friend worked long hours with all women and just wasn’t meeting men, or had had trouble getting back on the
carouselhorse after a breakup. But she’s swimming in men and is striking out wildly. And I happen to know that a significant portion of the young men in my city are on OKCupid, so I know there’s a few good fish in that pond.
As Badger points out, the woman is presuming quite a lot in expecting a stranger to fix her friend’s dysfunctional dating strategy:
The fact that she saw me as a possible conduit for her issue of the day smacked of a combination of megalomania and an appeal to the male instinct for problem-solving – “maybe you can help me fix this!” Expecting me to leap into the coat closet and re-emerge in my Captain Save-A-Ho suit, ready to line up cannon fodder for her chica amiga who couldn’t generate her own romantic sales leads.
What strikes me even more is the widespread denial of the larger issue. Once a woman sets out with a strategy other than one and done marriage, she all too often becomes a ravenous beast with a need to constantly fill her hopper with more men. Most of these men will be either outright rejected or (worse) added to her stable of beta orbiters.
Strip mining machines are typically stuck for life in the very pits they create. While younger prospectors are starting up in rich ground, as a strip miner for men ages she ends up forever reprocessing less and less promising tailings.
Eventually nearly all of the most promising ore has been lost forever in an unintended environmental impact or has been snapped up by more astute miners. Even if she does come across a promising nugget, the years and hard mining operations have taken their toll; her battered sluice box can no longer even slow down most nuggets, let alone retain them.
This is why if you come across a site focused on single women (or single mothers), there is a never ending obsession with feeding the hopper. More men. More men. Must find more men. Anyone and everyone is enlisted in the obsessive task of devouring through mountains of men in an attempt to relive the glory days of their early mining experience.
To be fair, the constant need for new romantic prospects isn’t limited just to choice addicted women in today’s Sexual Marketplace (SMP). Those men who find themselves repeatedly in the first 2-3 stages of the strip mining operation have little choice but to look for new hoppers to throw themselves into. Some men have figured out the business of dealing with strip miners, and deliberately set out to play the role of hookup, fling, and (as part of a soft harem strategy) boyfriend. A much larger group of men unwittingly end up playing the role of forever scraped aside top soil, beta orbiter, and the sucker who chivalrously pays for dates with the miner while she has sex with rockbanddrummer for free.
But either way there is a critical qualitative difference. Those men who are setting out for a life of sexual variety are very honest about the moral and practical reality of their choice and the continuing need for new ore in the hopper. They aren’t pretending to be seeking the one, and therefore don’t need to lie to themselves and others about the nature of their operations. As a result, they are able to come up with effective strategies to keep operational costs down and efficiently retain as much of what they are seeking for as long as possible.
It is worth noting that the entire process is often mistaken for something more quaint due to the denial at the core of the operation. Strip miners work hard to associate themselves with the romantic image of their grandmothers and even sisters who spent a few years in their late teens and early twenties carefully panning for a husband. Finding a proper husband is no small task, and many women still quietly take this seriously. They understand that devouring mountains is counterproductive, and instead work to locate rich areas to prospect and carefully sift to avoid discarding the prize or falling for the flash of fools gold. They don’t attract the attention of the much more visible strip miners because they aren’t devouring mountains, and when they think they have found a good prospect they aren’t about to tip their hand to other miners.
Wise prospectors also understand the vital importance of holding on to their gold once they find it.
Bagger 288 panoramic image licensed as Creative Commons by Martin Röll
Gold in pan image licensed as Creative Commons by Dennis Garrett
Rockbanddrummer term coined by Deti.
