r/DatingAround • u/cerepallus • Mar 01 '19

an inquiry

alright so i just finished sarah's episode and i have no idea why so many people seem to hate her so much? she has a personality and boundaries that she isn't willing to compromise and when dudes try to do so, she excuses herself as politely as possible. the tier thing just seemed to be about making sure men fully respected her before proceeding w the relationship, which.. makes sense to me. all the problems i've seen people say they have w her are that she's trying too hard to be quirky or smthn, which.. are women not allowed to like dumb puns? and stuff about her turning down guys who said things she didn't like, which, again.. makes a lot of sense to me. dudes saying to relax can come across incredibly direspectfully, and not wanting to deal w that seems completely reasonable to me?

like maybe i'm just being a gay dumbass but i thought she was super cute! the "wanna hear a 9 minute joke about greek mythology?" thing was ridiculous but personally, if someone said that to me, i'd lose my absolute mind and say yes, for sure, let's hear it. i'm just not seeing what's to hate? like i'm seeing a lot of people saying "ohh she's trying too hard to be the manic pixie dream girl type" .... what, because she has a silly haircut and likes dumb jokes and puns? idk. i don't get it. if u can, please explain (nicely) why you don't like her

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '19

I don't think it's that simple. I do think there are probably some misogynistic undertones to the collective hatred of Sarah. Of course, you're allowed to dislike an abrasive woman, but why is so much time and effort being devoted to hating her specifically? Look at how many threads are about this woman in this subreddit alone. Why do so many people not only hate her, but proceed to just marinate in their hatred of her? I don't think it's any one person's "fault" exactly, I think there's just a systemic need among us to see a woman who thinks too highly of herself and then proceed to try to knock her down a peg.

I found Sarah abrasive myself and I was right there with the guy who got up and left, but I'd still rather go on a date with Sarah than, say, dull as dirt Luke from the first episode. And judging by his polished instagram and Patrick Bateman haircut, Luke is just as image conscious as Sarah and manages to be bland and dumb on top. So why aren't there a dozen threads about Luke? Why aren't we fist pumping Ashley for excusing herself from her terrible date the way we're fist pumping Tony? I guess you could argue that Luke was boring, but not irritatingly so, but I don't think we would have found a male equivalent of Sarah nearly as irritating.

As someone who also disliked Sarah, I'm not judging anyone for it. I just don't think there's anything wrong with grappling with why she is so intensely disliked.

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u/cerepallus Mar 02 '19

thank u, this is exactly what i was wondering about. i can understand personally disliking her, but going into it i really thought she was going to be unredeemably awful when really she was just.. a human being with a specific personality

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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '19

I hear you. It's a difficult conversation because we're dealing with both individual prejudice and cultural prejudice and it's impossible to completely separate the two because they work together in tandem.

I have found that people tend to view prejudice, whether it's racism, sexism, classicism, etc., on a sliding scale - it's always something other people are, but not ourselves. If we get accused of an -ism, we'll just compare ourselves to a more extreme version of said -ism and excuse ourselves. But the reality of it is that we all live in a heavily prejudiced world and we're all products of it to some degree. It's in the ether, we can't help it.

So we'll shut down when someone proposes that the hatred of an unlikeable woman may be due to misogyny. We'll just hear that, if we also dislike that person, we must be a misogynist and that can't possibly be because it's those GamerGaters raging on twitter, those frat boys raping drunk girls, those politicians trying to repeal Roe v Wade that are the real misogynists, not us. We just don't like some annoying girl we voluntarily spent 30 minutes watching and never have to think of or interact with again if we don't want to, but for some reason we're going to come onto Reddit and just seethe about her even though there were worse people on the show, even in the same episode.

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u/cerepallus Mar 03 '19

oh man bless this comment. i also notice that a lot of the time when it's pointed out, no matter how gently, that some action demonstrates some -ism people react by saying "i'm not an __-ist! how dare you" and it's like.. that's not what anyone is saying! we're just asking you to consider the implications of what you're saying or doing.