The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Dweeb World Update

Posted on | May 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Dweeb World Update

If there’s anything that should cause parents to take away their teenage daughter’s cellphone, it’s the thought that somewhere, in his mother’s basement, covered in Cheeto dust, a loser with zero social skills is dreaming about getting his hands on your daughter. There are millions of these antisocial weirdos with nothing better to do than play videogames all day, and all these sick freaks want to get with your daughter. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t seem bothered by this:

If we’re looking for an explanation of why today’s teens are having less sex than previous generations, there’s this: Many of them spend months or even years dating without ever meeting face to face. . . .
While there is little or no research on the phenomenon of long-distance-only relationships among young people, it’s not surprising that it’s happening, say experts. . . .

(The experts are all probably creepy perverts, too.)

“The way me and my boyfriend met was very strange,” says Katelyn Bobbitt, 20 years old and living in Providence, R.I. “We originally met through a YouTuber who was streaming Minecraft.” . . .
“I started getting more and more out of my shell, which is something I did not do in real life,” says Ms. Bobbitt. “I became closer to these people online than I did with my friends I had in high school.” Eight months into their online friendship, Ms. Bobbitt and Jacob Ribeiro declared themselves boyfriend and girlfriend, though they still had yet to meet.
A year after they first struck up a conversation in a YouTube chat thread, Ms. Bobbitt, then 19, told her parents she was in love and that she was getting on a plane to meet a boyfriend they didn’t know existed.
“I just straight up told them I’m doing this and you can’t tell me no,” says Ms. Bobbitt, who had saved money to pay for airfare. “But my dad was just like, ‘You better call me… You better tell me where this boy lives.’”
Now Ms. Bobbitt and Mr. Ribeiro live together. . . .

(Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Bobbitt. Your daughter is shacking up with some freak she met on a YouTube channel. You must be so proud.)

The online environments that allow some people to cultivate more intimate relationships can also become a burden, however. Expectations of that eventual physical encounter can become so great, the couple fears their first in-person meeting could be a disappointment.
That’s what kept Seyar Tahib, a 21-year-old college student living in Fremont, Calif., from meeting up with his girlfriend, he says, even though they’d talked online on and off for a year, and had even begun “dating” without even hearing one another’s voices. Finally, they worked up the courage to meet, and everything turned out fine.
“We were just scared we wouldn’t feel the same after we met each other,” Mr. Tahib says.
Fear that people we know only through the internet might not be who they seem—or even claim—is perfectly rational. In the most extreme cases, people will create fake online personas, known as “catfishing,” to defraud the lonely.
In Ms. Nguyen’s case, both of the online-only relationships she had from age 14 until she was 16 ended when she discovered that the attentive, always-online boys she was dating were busy also dating other girls, online… and in real life.
Tiffany Zhong is chief executive of Zebra IQ, which gathers insights on the behavior and tastes of Generation Z, usually defined as people born since 1995. She runs an app and online community, of which Ms. Nguyen, Ms. Bobbitt and Mr. Tahib have been participants. Another respondent told Ms. Zhong that when she was 16, she had a brief online-only relationship with a boy two years her senior. Two years later, after she had ended the relationship, she discovered that he was in jail for assaulting a female relative. . . .

This is when every father in the world becomes Liam Neeson.

 

How many times do I have to repeat myself? Online dating is for losers. And it’s also dangerous, because you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen, hidden behind an online persona. Even if you can authenticate the other person’s identity, however, it should be obvious there’s something wrong with them, because they wouldn’t be on a dating app or trawling the Internet to meet people if they could get a date with anyone who actually knows them in real life. You will never meet anybody nice via online dating, because all the nice people already have real-life relationships with other nice people. What you find via online dating is discarded trash — the substandard losers who weren’t good enough to have relationships with nice people — and also, dangerous creeps who get arrested after locking up a teenager girl in a dog cage.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Culture

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