Ever since I started writing these posts, my Social media feed has been serving me up some real gems of stuff that must fall into the “talks about sex and relationships” content. Here is one that really jumped out at me as bizarre when I first saw it, and got even weirder/started to make a lot more sense once I started reading the comments.
First of all, I know almost nothing about the poster of this content, much less where the original creator of the meme shared. From an incredibly surface level analysis, it appears that BoozyBetch presents as a woman with a snarky sense of humor who likes drinking and is trying to build up a (rather impressive) network of followers with content that sparks engagement and debate. This is relevant to posting a survey meme like this one, because, while her posts tend to appear directed at women, this post has more than 100 times the engagement of her typical posts, largely because it is full of comments from men insisting that they know how the “ladies” really rank these 5 categories, with almost all of the men claiming that women put money, and looks at the top of this list, with some disagreement about where penis size and personality rank, although almost all of the men commenting insist that women actually put loyalty at the bottom. This is the second time the idea of “loyalty” has come up in my blog posts, so I am going to have to write my big thoughts on it in a post sooner than later, but for now I am going to ignore why men think women don’t value loyalty, and instead focus on the absolute absurdity of “personality” as one category, and why so many of these commenting men think women value money more than that.
What does it mean to have personality? I think generally, within the context of this kind of meme-survey, “personality” is supposed to be read as “fun to be around,” maybe “good sense of humor,” and possibly also “is kind.” This is already too many things to be one category but since they aren’t listed out anywhere else in the list, “Personality” also has to be a stand in for “self-awareness,” “emotional maturity,” “ability to make friends and sustain those relationships for any length of time” but also even little stuff like “shared interests” or at least “stuff to talk about and connect over that isn’t about how I make money, how good I am in the sack, or how I maintain looking this good” (since those three kind of do get covered by other things in the list). In that regard, it is kind of absurd, sad, and telling that anyone looks at this list and doesn’t put personality at the top of the list. Think about it. Someone with a bad personality isn’t going listen to you or your desires. They are not going to share their wealth with you in any way that isn’t directly transactional and unbalanced in their own favor. They certainly are not going to be loyal to you in a way that is meaningful to you, and not just representational of their own moral code, which will almost certainly be used against you at some point in the future if you haven’t submitted yourself fully to them/that code. And this is where I think misogynistic ideas about heterosexual relationships, and what men are supposed to want from them, and what women are supposed to want from them gets exposed in the way different people think about personality.
If you are defining personality as just maybe the first 3 things I mentioned: fun to be around, sense of humor, kindness; that kind of exactly fits the misogynistic stereotype of “the nice guy,” that is destined for “the friend zone” (ooh, that is definitely a topic for a future post). Of course men who’s identity is tied up in patriarchal, misogynistic ideas about sexual virility and dominance are going to undervalue “personality,” not even realizing that they have probably tied their own personality to things like making money, looking good to women, and dominating sexual relationships with a massive penis. Thus, in their own eyes, women valuing money or eggplants are really just valuing what real men present to the world as having a personality. It is also why it is inconceivable to these men that some women might see right through that facade they are presenting and say they value personality over these other attributes when talking them, not realizing that it might also be a personal warning that they (the women) think these men’s personality based on those other attributes…just sucks.
So, “hey, Dudes!” If you think that women are lying when they say personality is the most import thing off this list, there is a very strong probability that the reason why you are leaving comments like this in the first place on a post of a person you definitely don’t know…your personality probably is the reason why no one you are interested in wants to date you. You are the one essential yelling at random women on the internet and calling them liars. If you don’t understand how that kind of misogyny makes you a 0, you need to do a lot of reading and rethinking of your life.