Author: Noel Terry
Date: not shown; text indicates 2021
Publisher: Noel Terry
ISBN: 978-1-66784-1-243
Length: 266 e-pages
Quote: "[M]ainstream politics can impact dating politics."
How would they not? How many of us are liberal enough to be happy with a spouse who, even if a couple can agree to vote in different States, can be counted on to cancel our presidential vote? Fortunately, the author of this partisan screed doesn't seem to be American or to understand the public events he records in this book, so there's no reason to believe he is accurately describing the social scene for today's twenty-something. He reads only one side. With regard to "mainstream politics" that's the anti-Trump side, the side on which people are astute enough to know that nobody positively supports the unworkable ideas to which their foreign funders have chained them, so they just keep screaming "racism." With regard to "dating politics" it's the computer dating sites at which, if young people seriously seek dates, something is badly wrong.
What are dating sites all about? As a Kingsport Times-News article once reported, under the headline news that a real couple had actually used personal advertisements to find each other, relying on blind-box ads or fractionally more sophisticated computer versions can help people in very small social niches find one another. If you are a Seventh-Day Adventist ministerial student in search of a young woman who's not part of the S.D.A. prep school crowd but is friendly to S.D.A. religious beliefs, a personal ad mentioning why you're still available may be right for you. Otherwise, dating sites are bedtime reading for people who don't want real-world dates (the conversations with strangers, the expense, the need to bathe).
I did some research once. I wanted to write a novel about a couple who bond by acting out each other's fantasies. From popular fiction I'd taken the idea that the woman wants the man to listen to her stories and put positive spins on them like an ideal therapist. There's no end to the young-adult novels where one can imagine the protagonists getting into serious difficulties, having sexual relationships when what they're really looking for is psychotherapy. Well, in this novel the woman recognized what she was looking for and the man was willing and able to do it. So what did he want that she was willing and able to do in return? What did men want besides the commercial exploitation narrative of the billionnaire playboy who buys whatever's being advertised for the top rates of the season, since anything looks good on him in any case, and theoretically fights crime but always wins? Could James Bond have a believable job (in exchange, he'd get to have hair) and Bobo rather than yuppie taste? Was that something men wanted?
So I called a few of the phone chat lines that were popular in the 2000s, where it was generally agreed that men just wanted to talk about their fantasies, and invited men to share their fantasies with me. My first clue that men who want to talk about their fantasies are somewhat out of touch came from the hostility men showed when I introduced myself with the truth: "Hi, I'm a writer researching men's fantasies. Tell me one." Nooo! They wanted to believe that a woman to whom they were confiding their fantasies was looking for dates with men who call phone chat lines (say what?) with the same panting, audibly drooling avidity they were. They wanted to imagine that a woman who was that desperate would be unincarcerated, have a job, weigh less than 500 pounds...
And, popular though James Bond movies are, these guys did not noticeably want adventures. No fighting crime, no outsmarting enemies, no fortuitously having invented just the right tool to foil the enemies' evil schemes, no competitions, no need even to impress the fantasy gal. They all described almost identical fantasies. They all wanted to find an attractive female body somewhere--most didn't even care whether it was indoors or outdoors--and immediately start making babies. Ohhh. Slurp.
These were not coal miners or assembly line laborers. This was Washington. These guys not only read but were likely to be mentioned in nonfiction books. At least one of the callers claimed a name that hadn't been in the headlines but had been mentioned, if you read far enough into the story, in the news media. More or less by choice these guys were in places where James Bond adventures could happen, to the extent that they could happen at all. And they still had the same fantasies as thirteen-year-olds who are just starting to notice that the changes in their bodies may have uses beyond impressing schoolmates with how fast they're growing up.
Feminists deplore the poor-spirited and unimaginative heroine who, like Cinderella, can do nothing to help herself but needs only to get herself to the party (no mention even of having learned to dance) to be seen and whisked away to live happily ever after. Rightly so. But Cinderella was a model of cleverness and ingenuity compared with these poor-spirited and unimaginative men.
And that's the demographic from which Terry thinks we can predict the future of American civilization.
So it's comforting to note that Terry's English is British. Though he says he spent some time travelling and talking to people in American bars, he probably wasn't here when most of the events he discusses took place. All he knows about those events is what he read in partisan papers/
The results can be as disastrous as Merkel's lax immigration policy. Flinging wide the gates served everyone well in Germany, Terry cites sources having written, apparently before the mass rape event in Berlin. If Terry had been paying attention to any feminist concerns other than the entertaining-catfight potential of "sisterhood wars," he'd know that that event was pivotal in flipping women's positions from "Let us help these poor refugees" to "How much are we, individually and as a nation, being paid to serve as a prison for other countries' criminal outcasts?"
Basically Terry's argument seems to be:
1. Socialist programs that depended on population growth must be kept going and must not be refitted to a finite world where human population is already more than double what it needs to be.
2. Therefore, even as we see overcrowding suppressing the reproductive instincts in the young, we must keep packing more people into overcrowded cities
3. There aren't enough jobs for the existing number of job seekers already.
4. Nevertheless, socialism might be able to buy ten years if young women would just go home and have more babies, which would keep them from doing health, education, administrative, and communicative jobs so much better than young men do.
5. But they won't, willingly, go home and have more babies unless they've found men who can afford to keep them and their babies in the style to which they are, or would like to become, accustomed.
6. Among young single Americans who are still willing to risk having babies, this leaves a majority of the females in unladylike competition for a minority of the males, and a lot of young men (currently) unsatisfied, blaming us mean old feminists for calling attention to things like the way mass immigration did not serve the people of Berlin well.
7. Although Americans noted these things long before Donald Trump could afford to run for President as The Candidate Who Did Not Ask Voters For Money, it has to be Trump's fault, anyway, because no party that claims to appeal to the masses wants to leave those masses time to think about the fact that ca presidential candidate won without asking them for money every few hours.
8. So this book has to keep blaming Trump, in all ways, always, and at whatever risk of making the Democrats look like the sorest and sorriest lot of losers-even-when-life-handed-them-a-win the world has ever seen.
9. So, Trump's a Nazi, all of his supporters are White male haters whatever they may actually look like, and people who observe rationally that the Trump Administration accomplished good and bad things don't caaare enough about the people the Trump Administration hated and hurt. And the reason for their lack of caaaaring needs to be worse than "They looked around and couldn't see any such people."
10. When your argument is very weak, like this one, polarizing people is a good strategy because it motivates them to throw their tomatoes at one another rather than you.
11. Therefore, women who criticize each other's opinions or strategies are not engaging in debate but locked in a deadly "sisterhood war," young men who aren't meeting Miss Right on dating sites don't need to go to church or temple or join a social club and talk to real women but need to blame older people (both feminists and non-feminist Trump), everything is all because the United States have that pesky Constitution that says the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, and readers of a book that supports a weak argument with misreported facts and comes to no meaningful conclusion should at least picture Terry dodging bullets as he fled back to Britain.
12. Whatever. Just don't anyone ever vote to re-elect Trump.
Apart from a tendency to use "struik," which Google says is a Dutch noun meaning a bush or shrub, as a verb meaning to speak or say, Terry's writing skills are good. However, because his research skills leave so much to be desired and his persuasion skills seem to have been developed in a partisan echo chamber, I don't expect this book will cost Trump a vote if he insists on running in 2024.
Great books do not come out of echo chambers; they are written by reading all sides and, if writers want to oppose someone, opposing ideas in a more rational way than just screaming "ooohhh, ooohhh, the people who don't agree with us are all such horrible people." This web site did not endorse Candidate Trump, found abundant reasons to criticize the Trump Administration, and would have been receptive to parting shots from the less-brave while Trump is out of power, but in this case the parting shots miss their targets.
There is, however, a throwaway line in this book that I like. It's on page 203, in the context of a woman's suggestion that perhaps women who get drunk or stoned in public places shouldn't be able to press charges against men who take advantage of their condition: "[M]en take care of their wasted buddies who have drunk too much; why wouldn't the same caring principle apply to a woman?"
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