Emotional labor watch: "Closers" flirt on behalf of men who use Tinder

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/28/women-on-demand.html

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Everything wrong with society distilled into one little vomitous start-up. Appalling, yet impressively so.

Even so, gotta give Cory kudos for the discount Cyrano de Bergerac in front of the Tinder logo.

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Soon…

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Gives a whole new meaning to robot uprising.

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As GulliverFoyle said, impressively appalling.

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So, you have professional online Cyranos whose boss is basically training them with regurgitated idiocies of the PUA culture. Men who have no fucking clue how to present themselves to women in a way that isn’t creepy or disgusting hire a firm to present for them, and the firm proceeds to present for them in creepy and disgusting ways.

I think this pretty much sums it up:

ETA: As someone who met their partner online twenty years ago, I have never and still cannot wrap my head around all the broken and stupid things lonely people do in order to find someone they like. It’s very simple. Live your life. Setting out with the goal of finding someone ensures that you will not find anyone, or if you do, it will be a superficial relationship doomed to end badly.

In the course of living your life, if you are not a hermit or living in a nunnery, you will encounter people of the appropriate gender and orientation. Treat them as human beings, the same as you treat people who are not of the appropriate gender and orientation. In the course of talking with them in an ordinary way, you may, over time, come to like each other. Shift the conversation to a private venue and keep talking. Never stop talking. Eventually, after much talking, you will come to a mutual realization that you are in love with each other. It’s that simple.

eta2: corrected a preposition as pointed out by @GulliverFoyle.

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This feels like a form of harassment. I am guessing that signing up for Tinder itself isn’t giving consent to such actions. I am not a lawyer, but, it would be interesting to find out the legal status of this.

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“Dear [MATCH NAME], You seem like someone with a lot of confidence. What’s your secret? A) all in one shampoo and conditioner, B) high fiber diet, C) Photoshop”

Good lord, it’s like a telemarketer opener mashed up with a garden-variety neg. If someone sent this to me, I’d have to make an immediate saving throw vs. projectile vomiting. A dead-serious use of “Are those space pants?” would get you further with me.

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Huh? Men do all of those things. While speaking of birds as paragons….

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Typically? No. Talk to some women of your acquaintance. Disgusting and creepy men vastly outnumber the men who have a clue of how to interact with someone of the opposite gender in a respectful, decent, and human way.

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Hardly. They just stay stuck in the single pool and so form a disproportionate fraction of it.

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Or they’re capybara who can transform back and forth! It’s the Oklahoma paddlefish female who take clinical-dose clozeparil with terefrilprans [n.b. not a medication] and appear to be horrible men for up to 3 hours before their gills get dry and they return to the ranch. Those WR88-rated phones aren’t for humans.

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If it was simple, we’d all be doing it.

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Talk with, not just to.

Love is work, not a place.

Treat those you court as you want to be treated, not just how you treat everyone else. It’s that simple.

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Nope. Simple =/= Easy. If it were easy, we’d all be doing it. Sometimes the hardest things to do are the simplest.

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Building a lasting life-partnership is neither simple nor easy, as anyone who has knows. But I get what you’re saying. Treating other people how you want to be treated is simple, but it’s easy to forget. People get wrapped up in themselves. Empathy is the key to all good humaning.

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Had to check the byline on that article to see if it was Stephen Glass, or if it was published April 1st.

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Yeah. The concept of being genuine - of being yourself - is about as simple as it gets. Actually doing it, even in non-romantic encounters, can be quite difficult.

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Absolutely. That’s sort of the takeaway here. Romance has aspects beyond friendship, but it’s built on friendship. Social interactions take effort and patience. Not everyone is equally talented at that, and sadly there are a-holes such as PUAs glad to make a buck by leading the naive in the wrong direction.

Sorry for going a bit contrarian on your previous comment. Morning coffee is still kicking in.

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