Evan Marc Katz Dating Coach pushing pseudo-science again

There's nothing "dating coach" Evan Marc Katz loves so much as to tell women they are different from men,  which inevitably means, in the usual custom of patriarchy, that they should have lower expectations than men in life because that's the way we've all evolved.

As is always the case with extreme pop evo-psychos, nurture - meaning not just socialization but the history and economics that shapes our current world -  is completely left out of the equation. The evolutionary psychologists who dabble in racism have the same approach: African Americans get lower SAT scores, therefore African Americans are intellectually inferior because evolution. That is the basis for all evolutionary psychology/socio-biology thought from Charles Murray's The Bell Curve to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate - all differences are automatically assumed to be the result of "nature."

The worst of these is David Buss, with whom Katz's latest evo-psycho hero David P. Schmitt works. 

David Buss represents the ultimate in the knee-jerk response of evo-psychos to any cultural phenomenon and he was rightly exposed by David Buller (I'm sure evo psychos could come up with an evolutionary explanation for why there are so many Davids involved in evo psycho discussions, they are just that ridiculous.)

I posted Buller's evisceration of Buss on this blog before but it is worth repeating. In his Adapting Minds - Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature Buller writes:

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

The desire to attribute ALL human phenomenon to nature is so reflexive for evo psychos that even virtual slavery is ignored in order to claim women's sexual choices align with evo psycho theories. 

But of course that's an old sociobiology strategy. American slaves were declared to be naturally suited to slavery. How convenient. And how convenient for patriarchy enthusiasts like David Buss, David Schmitt and Evan Marc Katz that untestable just-so eve psycho theories "prove" that women are "naturally" more agreeable, more complaint, more social and domestic, as shown in the idiotic chart Katz posted on his blog.

Although Evan Marc Katz claims to be working for women, you can see who really loves him in the responses to his latest "women are inferior" post - men who support traditional gender roles.

Well I'm done writing about Evan Marc Katz. Like followers of Donald Trump, Katz's followers are idiots working against their own fundamental interests and there's no reasoning with them. If it wasn't Katz there would be some other asshole telling women to stop trying to do "men's" things like choosing mates on the basis of youth and beauty and competing for good jobs and being non-compliant. 

Evan Marc Katz is just another clown cashing in on the waning days of extreme patriarchy.

Evan Marc Katz is a right-wing snowflake who can't tolerate criticism

The king of MRA-style advice con-men Evan Marc Katz wants to have it both ways - first he wants to have a profitable little business telling sad conservative women how to snag "alpha males" by supporting their traditionalist bent in suggesting they behave as passive vessels for manly traditionalist men.

If he stopped there it would be fine. His audience is conservative, he offers conservative advice, it's a closed circle.

But he won't stop there. 

He also feels he has to publicly share his noxious political views which are invariably in the mode of the gender essentialist pseudo science-mongers like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins and the other cranky old white atheist men yelling at feminists to get off their lawns. 

His latest atrocity was citing hateful anti-feminist Trump-loving queen of internalized misogyny Camille Paglia to attack feminism by misrepresenting it as telling women to be victims. I've loathed Camille Paglia and her anti-feminism for a long time, first mentioning her on this blog in 2006. And she's even more loathsome now with her support for Trump. I didn't think it was possible for that crank to be even more loathsome.

If Katz didn't try to shovel his wretched anti-feminism at the general public I wouldn't bother with him. But it's his political propaganda disguised by an "aw-shucks-I'm-just-a-nice-guy-doin'-his-best-to-help-the-ladies" pose that makes me feel it is necessary to oppose him. 

He's much like Pinker and Dawkins and the other misogynists who like to claim that theirs isn't really a political view when they suggest that the real problem with women having less-successful STEM careers than men is that lady brains just aren't as good at math/science (or not as rational per Sam Harris) as men's brains. They're just pure apolitical science guys, just presenting the impartial truth - it's their critics who have political views, not them.

Predictably, Katz cannot tolerate disagreement and so blocked me on Twitter. Which is what a feminist-hating weasel would do.

Evan Marc Katz turns to a famous misogynist for advice

I really feel bad for the pathetic losers who look to "dating coach" huckster Evan Marc Katz as some kind of authority on women's lives. He's so obviously useless on his best days and evil on his worst.

Katz holds a classic both-sides view of men and women. In other words, yes, men have been bad to women, but women are just as bad to men. 

This is easily debunked if you do nothing more than look at which gender is more likely to kill members of the other gender. As The Atlantic reported in July:

The CDC analyzed the murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, finding a total of 10,018 deaths. Of those, 55 percent were intimate partner violence-related, meaning they occurred at the hands of a former or current partner or the partner’s family or friends. In 93 percent of those cases, the culprit was a current or former romantic partner. The report also bucks the strangers-in-dark-alleys narrative common to televised crime dramas: Strangers perpetrated just 16 percent of all female homicides, fewer than acquaintances and just slightly more than parents.

Obviously men are not killed 55% of the time by their former or current partners, partner's family or friends. Men are killed by male strangers far more often. 

Now I didn't have to look this up to have a rough idea it was true. I pay attention to the news, read magazine articles, etc. But if need be, it's easy enough to confirm via a Google search for online data. But I suspect that the kind of woman who looks to Katz as an authority on anything isn't well-informed and is unlikely to look things up for herself.

Meanwhile Katz promotes traditional gender-role men as mates to his audience - the kind of men who are more likely to commit violence against women.

Now he occasionally nods towards the problems of men being horrible to women - he mentions the MeToo movement. It looks good to the suckers.

Then he follows it up by citing Camille Paglia, the world's most famous lesbian misogynist, saying nice things about Hugh Hefner.

Misogynists like to reinforce each other so here's Katz approving of Paglia's idiocy:

• Men and women are more the same than ever before and it’s hurt the dating dynamic.
• Men should be more courtly and chivalrous to women.
• There is no male defense of sexual assault or harrassment.
• Women could benefit by embracing the feminine, eschewing victimhood, and not lumping all men in with the worst of men.

In a list advising women to take the traditional submissive role in relation to men, Katz/Paglia make sure to include something that anybody can agree with - no defense of sexual assault or harassment.

This demonstrates just exactly how full of piping hot shit Evan Marc Katz is when it comes to "believing women" which he claims for himself in the blog post about MeToo.

In the view of Katz and Paglia, women are not justified in feeling like actual victims in a world of frequent sexual assault in the workplace and frequent violent assault in the home. Acknowledging the horrors of living in such a world is considered "victimhood" by professional misogynists Katz and Paglia.

One of Katz's sad followers quotes Paglia approvingly in the comments below his post:

“I was horrified, horrified by the pink pussy hats,” she said; the pink pussy hats were “a major embarrassment to contemporary feminism.”

Of course Paglia would say that. She hates women and she loves Donald Trump. 

And that is the essence of what Evan Marc Katz does to his audience - citing misogynists with approval to make them feel like worthless losers so they'll agree to relationships with awful men. Because the important thing is Evan Marc Katz's track record and there are far more single assholes than single good guys in the world. Pushing women to go for creeps helps Evan Marc Katz's business and that's what any snake-oil salesman cares about.

And when these horrible men treat those women like inferiors the women will accept it for the cause of "vive la difference" and they will not ask for help because they've been advised by Evan Marc Katz and Camille Paglia to "eschew victimhood."

I really hope one of the victims of Katz's horrific advice sues that little weasel some day.

More critiques of evolutionary psychology

Coincidentally right after I wrote about Evan Marc Katz promoting evolutionary psychology and quoted PZ Myers to address the standard "critics of evo-psycho hate science" party line, Myers himself provides another useful critique of evolutionary psychology.

Myers begins:

I’ve criticized evolutionary psychology more than a few times, and usually my arguments rest on their appallingly bad understanding of the “evolutionary” part of their monicker — proponents all seem to be rank adaptationists with a cartoon understanding of evolution. But what about the “psychology” part? I’ve mentioned at least one dissection of EP by a psychologist in the past, but here’s another one, a paper by the same author, Brad Peters, that explains that evolutionary psychology is poor neurobiology and bad psychology.

Read the rest of it here: History will judge evolutionary psychology as the phrenology of our era.

Evan Marc Katz ~ bullshitting the gullible with pseudo-science

I've already demonstrated that Evan Marc Katz is so lacking in ethics that he advised single women to set their sights on married men.

He also advises women to be passive in order to catch "alpha males" whom Katz believes are the only real men. These are men who cling to traditional gender roles so hard that if a woman offers one a ticket to see his favorite band he will FREAK THE FUCK OUT because his masculinity is so fragile. Men who believe in rigid gender roles have been demonstrated to be more likely to abuse women.

So naturally Katz would have no qualms, most recently, against passing himself off as an expert defender of science even though it's painfully clear that he gets all his "science" right from pop-psychology articles in the newspaper.

Today’s post is a little more serious, because it talks about something that is unique and dangerous in our partisan post-fact world: the idea that beliefs about how the world should work are more valid than facts about how the world actually does work.
Witness this article in the LA Times, which poses a very challenging question: “Are gender feminists and transgender activists undermining science?”

I've already criticized evolutionary psychology, aka evo-psycho plenty on this blog over the years but it never hurts to mention that proponents of evolutionary psychology are so reflexive in their belief that all cultural phenomena is due to adaptation that even when women are sold into slavery, they interpret it as evidence of female sexual desire for "alpha males" as David Buller demonstrated in his comprehensive critique of evolutionary psychology (from over eleven years ago already) Adapting Minds (my emphases):

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

Of course the kind of people who are stupid enough to care what a huckster like Katz says aren't likely to be aware of any serious critiques of evolutionary psychology. Katz lives in a bubble of dullards, which no doubt makes him feel like a genius, and he's perfectly content to live that way.

Evolutionary psychologists are not bothered in the least that their "science" is not empirical and in fact, like the poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect that they are, they claim it's their opponents who don't understand or are even hostile to science.

I'll let an actual scientist, P. Z. Myers address that issue:

Why, oh why, do EP’s defenders rely on throwing up armies of straw men to slaughter? It’s silly. Here’s how (Jerry Coyne) starts:

There are some science-friendly folk (including atheists) who simply dismiss the entire field of evolutionary psychology in humans, saying that its theoretical foundations are weak or nonexistent. I’ve always replied that that claim is bunk, for its “theoretical foundations” are simply the claim that our brains and behaviors, like our bodies, show features reflecting evolution in our ancestors.

Have you ever seen a critic of evolutionary psychology deny that we evolved, or that features and differences of the human body and brain are products of evolution? Not me. When I say that it’s theoretical foundations are ridiculous, I don’t mean the idea that there are evolved differences between the sexes, but that EP comes with a set of ludicrous assumptions, such as that we are adapted to the African savannah and the agricultural and urban adaptations of the last 10,000 years don’t count. It leads to absurdities like the paleo diet, in which it’s assumed that we should eat like cavemen, because evolution. 

I also criticize the just-so story-telling. Coyne should know this well: studying evolution is hard and demands rigor. Yet evolutionary psychologists will do a quickie study on color perception in college undergraduates and announce that women evolved to be better at recognizing ripe berries. 

And obviously, as you might guess, there are the methodological problems. There is so much trivial market-driven crap in evolutionary psychology that it swamps out any hypothetically ‘good’ research in the field. If I were doing research on the evolutionary basis of human behavior (I’m not, fortunately), I would run away so fast from the label “evolutionary psychology” that I’d make Kanazawa’s head spin, and he’d have to formulate some story about the distant ancestors of white people having to sprint away from noisy speculating sabre-toothed tigers. 

But then Coyne pulls his magic “proof” out of his hat: the existence of sexual dimorphism. Yeah, who has a problem with that? Men and women look different in grand and subtle ways. Some of those differences were almost certainly selected for. Again, I don’t know anyone who denies that, so it’s kind of weird to use it as his triumphant example. Except that he seems to think all those lefty wackos — you know, feminists, apparently — are in the business of denying the obvious. 

But the left-wing opposition to evolutionary psychology as a valid discipline in principle, especially when it involves differences in sexual behavior, seems to me based more on ideology than on biology. Ideologues cannot allow any possibility that males and females behave differently because of their evolution. Such people think that this would buttress the view that one sex would be “better” than the other.

I know a lot of modern radical feminists. I’m pretty solidly in the left-wing camp myself. And NO ONE denies the physical differences between men and women, or claims that evolution could not have played an important role in shaping the diversity of modern humans. Nor do any claim that there aren’t significant behavioral differences — we encounter those every day. What we oppose is the credulous insistence that every single difference is a product of selection, that the influence of culture is noise gently overlaying the purity of the biological signal, and worst of all, the idea that the status quo is justified as a product of biology (which Coyne at least tries to distance himself from at the end).

Katz himself demonstrates the untestable nature of evolutionary psychology. Evo-psychos claim that men and women have fundamental, completely oppositional natures. But when an example of someone behaving in a way that goes against their alleged gender nature is presented, evo-psychos will say something like Katz says here:

Sort of misses the point, Emily. We’re talking about generalities – always.

But "generalities" is the very essence of evolutionary psychology and that's why it's just as much a science as astrology. Evo psychos make claims about how men and women are but admit there are exceptions - but if you have a high enough percentage of exceptions to a rule, the rule is bullshit. 

Fifty years ago women were kept out of the Boston marathon, on the theory that women just couldn't handle it. As Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon said:

"It was feared that anything longer (than 800 meters) was going to injure women, that they wouldn't be able to have children or they somehow turned into men," she told NPR.

" 'You'll never have children,' they said. 'You're going to get big legs. You're going to grow hair on your chest.' It was hilarious, the myths.

I'm sure the sexists of the time argued, after Switzer ran the marathon, that she was an exception to the general rule of female fragility. Now that millions of women have run in marathons I don't think even someone like Evan Marc Katz could deny that women do not endanger their fertility by running marathons. Because Switzer was NOT exceptional. But until women were allowed to run, it could not be proven.

But evolutionary psychologists avoid presenting test scenarios. The claim that women are by nature "hypergamous" and men are not could be disproved if enough men and women were shown to behave differently than their gender roles. But evolutionary psychologists are not attempting to find such people - assuming you could tease out "natural" behavior from its complex interaction with culturally-learned behavior - because they are already certain they are right. And so it will never be known how many exceptions there are to this alleged rule of gender-based behavior, and evo-psychos don't even bother to predict the percentage of exceptions there will be. They just do a lot of mumbling and hand-waving about generalities. So evolutionary psychology is unfalsifiable.

That is why evolutionary psychology is a pseudo-science.

Evan Marc Katz's exciting new dating technique: mate poaching!

The other side of Katz's
mate-poaching technique

Evan Marc Katz the dating advice huckster keeps trying to pass himself off as an egalitarian, even a semi-feminist:

But I don’t write this blog (or offer advice) to look good. I write here as a reflection of reality. Yes, I believe I’m one of the good ones – and yes, even the good ones have been raised in a society that objectifies women – and have been known to make mistakes once in awhile.

This gives you an idea of how disheartening Katz's view of women's hopes and expectations is - even he, a "good one", persistently tells women to be passive in their relationships with men.

Katz also pushes the idea that men come in only two flavors: alpha (desirable) or beta (less desirable).

Here is Katz a month or so ago:

Beta/feminine men are often some of the best husbands out there, but they conduct themselves in a passive way, leaving women wondering how they feel. In short, these nice guys are so insecure about pursuing you and making a move that they often wait for YOU to express interest in them. “You can call me, you know,” might be their mantra. Which is fine. However, this puts you in your “masculine energy,” and forces you to be the one to reach out to him to gauge his interest and availability.
As a dating coach for women, I don’t like that model. Nor do most of my clients. They may be proactive superstars in real life, but they tend to prefer being courted by (alpha) men.

But then suddenly, unceremoniously he has abandoned that old dichotomy.

In his most recent blog post he writes:

Sounds a lot like the kind of experiences (and thinking) that we see so often in the questions and comments here. Women choose selfish alpha males who are inconsiderate of their needs, and insecure beta males who feel impotent and emasculated, and come to the conclusion that this is the way all relationships work. It’s not.

So now alpha and beta males are both bad choices that us stupid women make, and the alpha male has been swapped out for the married man. Katz cites the July 2016 Modern Love column by Karen Rinaldi:

From her own failed relationships (and her parents uninspiring 60-year-marriage) Rinaldi came to the obvious conclusion that the only answer was to be alone...
...Then she fell in love with a married man…who left his wife and married Rinaldi. 

Says the author, 

“I don’t need him, but I want him in my life. He doesn’t protect me from others, only from my worst instincts. And as far as procreating, well, we did it the old-fashioned way and that will never get old.
He is comfortable in his masculinity and doesn’t need to remind me of who is boss, because in our relationship there isn’t one. Our lives are shared at every level and I realize now what a man is for.
He is a true partner. He is a lover and a friend. He is the father of my children and the only one in the world who cares about the minutiae of their lives like I do.”

And that, my friends, is why you keep dating. Even if you’ve made dozens of bad relationship choices in the past, you always have a new chance to rewrite your future.

Katz has not yet offered a Greek letter with which to label the poachable married man.

Katz's audience tends to be conservative - you'd have to be in order to accept Katz's constant promotion of traditional gender roles. So I was amazed he would deliberately alienate his audience by promoting an adulterous man as dating material.  I once posited that Katz promoted traditionalist men because they are more likely to be single than egalitarian men are, and thus increase the match-up success rate for his clients. Well apparently Katz has decided to expand the pool of men for his clients by suggesting they consider (not pursue, that would be unfeminine and active) egalitarian men who are not single.

One of Katz's commenters, "KK" responds to his blog post:

“Then she fell in love with a married man…who left his wife and married Rinaldi”.
Sorry, Evan, this isn’t a happy ending.

Not only not a happy ending but a ridiculous solution for a dating coach to suggest. A woman who doesn't mind dating a cheater will have plenty of men to choose from - she needs a dating coach about as much as a woman who prefers depersonalized sex with random strangers in a back alley needs one.

Well, I have said before that Katz is not very bright. 

Another one of the commenters offered information about the woman whose husband Rinaldi poached. Her name is Catherine Texier and she wrote an entire book about it eighteen years ago. 

One of the editorial summaries on Amazon:

Shortly after the author returned from a trip to France, the country of her birth, she discovered that her husband of 18 years and the father of their two daughters wanted to leave her. Texier, a novelist (Love Me Tender) who co-edited with her husband, Joel Rose, Between C and D, a lower Manhattan literary journal, publishes here the diary she kept in 1996, the final year of their marriage. Artfully written and candid in its anguish, her memoir describes the harrowing months when she tried to change Rose's mind by maintaining their sex life, cooking for him and restraining her rage at his betrayal. Although she discovered that he had been having a 15-month-long affair with the woman he wanted to leave her for, Texier continued to hope that the memories of the good years they had shared would be powerful enough to keep them together. It was only after Rose took his lover on a trip to Los Angeles that the author finally told him to leave their home. Men and women alike will respond to Texier's re-creation of her feelings of depression, anger, jealousy and erotic longing that accompanied the dissolution of her marriage.

Rinaldi is thirteen years younger than Texier. So this is the utterly banal scenario of a man dumping his wife for a younger model, a move that poster boy for alpha males, Donald Trump, has made twice.

As KK comments later on:

...the wife eventually kicked him out. He was perfectly happy with his cake- eating status quo. Therefore, Rinaldi ended up with him by default. He didn’t CHOOSE her. He didn’t confess his affair and run off with her. He got kicked out. And Rinaldi grabbed up her prize (sarcasm) after he got dumped.

So to recap.

The problem: women becoming discouraged over the failure to find a good man.

The Katz solution: get yourself a man, a damn fugly man, twelve years your senior, married with kids. A man who will two-time his wife for over a year, then once the adultery is in the open, continue to screw his a wife in addition to you for another year or so. You will finally have him all to yourself, three years after the beginning of the relationship, once the wife decides to cut him loose.

And here I thought that Evan Marc Katz's view of women's hopes and expectations was already at rock bottom.

I don't speak for all women of course, and I suppose it's possible that Katz may convince some women that a life with an old ugly unfaithful entitled man is the best possible one for them, but I for one would rather be celibate the rest of my life than end up with a creep like Joel Rose.

It's a complete mystery to me why people like KK continue to go to the poisoned well that is the advice of Evan Marc Katz.

More on my contempt for Evan Marc Katz.

Dick is abundant and low value

And speaking of Evan Marc Katz and the "how to get a man" franchises, how did it take me so long to learn of this perfect mantra?

Dick is abundant and low value. I had gotten my new motto amidst the worst break-up of my life. Shaken to my core by the degrading insults my ex had hurled at me but also mourning the permanent departure of some poetically good dick, I was spending a day mindlessly refreshing Twitter and reading up on how to spot sociopaths. I came across two tweets from Madeleine Holden, a lawyer and writer who regularly entertains the Twitter masses with her unapologetic analyses of toxic masculinity and her praise of amazing female-identified people: 

In my memory, those last six words emerged from the screen with their outer edges glowing like the inscription in the Dark Tongue of Mordor on the One Ring. I was transformed, nay, transfigured, by the message. 

Conversations were governed by the same rules as matches. Lead with a pussy joke about my cat? Dick is abundant and low value. Choose a meeting place that doesn’t account for my commute there? Dick is abundant and low value. Ask for nudes too soon? Dick is abundant and low value. Cancel twice? Dick is abundant and low value. Send an unsolicited photo of your lower body in your laundry-day underwear with your hand suggestively but not sexily placed over your semi and not even bothering to crop out your poor cat? Dick is abundant and low value.

I'm going to start sending the motto to the random assholes I meet on dating sites. Speaking of which - thanks so much for the offer, random pudgy man.

Evan Marc Katz: women must be passive for alpha males

Once again, Evan Marc Katz has fresh content in which he tells women to be passive if they want a man:

For the uninitiated, mirroring is designed for one purpose – to prevent women from chasing down men who are not interested in them. It is not a game. It is not a throwback to the 1950’s. It requires no thought and very little effort. Mirroring presumes one basic thing about that guy you like: if he’s interested in you, he’ll let you know.
So…
If he texts you, text him back right away.
If he calls you, call him back right away.
If he says he wants to see you this weekend and you’re free, say yes.
If he says he wants to be your boyfriend and you feel the same, say yes.
Mirroring is reactive, not proactive.

It gives men the space they need to choose you, prevents you from looking needy and desperate, and reveals what men are thinking – all without doing ANYTHING.

Mirroring is based on confidence, not insecurity. You should never have to chase a guy down and remind him that you’re alive and available and want to see him. All you have to do is be warm, enthusiastic and available when he reaches out to you.

The primary exception to mirroring comes in the form of beta/feminine men. Beta/feminine men are often some of the best husbands out there, but they conduct themselves in a passive way, leaving women wondering how they feel. In short, these nice guys are so insecure about pursuing you and making a move that they often wait for YOU to express interest in them. “You can call me, you know,” might be their mantra. Which is fine. However, this puts you in your “masculine energy,” and forces you to be the one to reach out to him to gauge his interest and availability.

As a dating coach for women, I don’t like that model. Nor do most of my clients. They may be proactive superstars in real life, but they tend to prefer being courted by men.
Which brings us back to the beginning. When a man is interested in you, you don’t have to do anything except say yes. You never have to reach out to him because he will do it for you. It’s in his best interest – whether he wants to get laid or whether he wants to be your boyfriend. You have to trust that.

"but they tend to prefer being courted by men"

So "beta/feminine men" says Katz, using the terminology of evolutionary psychology and Men's Rights Activists, are not actual men.

And the best part is that Evan Marc Katz claims to be a feminist.

It's important to note that the kind of men that Katz is promoting to his poor sad clients are so backwards, their masculinity is so incredibly fragile, that they will freak right the fuck out if you exhibit any initiative whatsoever. You must absolutely wait for him to choose you, or no deal.

To Katz a true man is one who believes in traditional gender roles - in other words men who are more likely to be abusive. 

You know who didn't take the kind of advice that Evan Marc Katz is dishing out? Linda McCartney.

...Five months later, in May 1968, she turned up at a press conference being given by Paul and John at a New York hotel. ‘I managed to slip him my phone number,’ she recalled later. ‘He rang me up and told me they were leaving that evening, but he’d like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.’

Is Paul McCartney a beta male? Well it didn't utterly emasculate him when Linda didn't wait for him to ask for her phone number. So by the Katz definition, yes.

You know who else was not passive? Yoko Ono:

Eventually, Yoko’s dogged pursuit of John became so blatant that it developed into something of a private joke between the married couple. Yoko’s grande atrocity occurred one night when she turned up at the Transcendental Meditation lecture John and Cynthia were attending in London. When it was over she followed them out of the lecture hall and into the backseat of John’s psychedelically hand-painted Rolls-Royce limousine and sat herself down between them. Cynthia and John exchanged embarrassed smiles over her head until the chauffeur dropped her off at Park Row, where she was living with her husband.

So apparently in Evan Marc Katz's book, John Lennon, leader of Beatles was a beta male, and not "a man." 

Granted Yoko's approach was much more extreme than Linda's but neither of those women - who were, by the way, older than the man they were pursuing - Linda only by a half-year, Yoko by eight years - were passive. They were proactive and extremely proactive in the case of Yoko Ono.

So John Lennon and Paul McCartney both failed the alpha male type test. They ended up with pro-active women. Women like Elizabeth Warren, who proposed to her husband.

You know who does match the "alpha male" type that Katz is constantly selling to his sad backwards traditionalist clients? Donald Trump:

Introduced at a party in 1998, one year after he had split from his second wife, Marla Maples, "I saw Melania and I said, 'Who is that?' " Trump recalls. "She was a very successful model. She was terrific. I tried to get her number, and she wouldn't give it to me."

He came to the party with a date!" Melania explains, laughing. "I had heard he was a ladies' man, and so I said, 'I'm not one of the ladies.' He said later that he sent her to the ladies' room so he could get my number. I was like, 'Oh what a sneaky way!' "
Still, Melania says she liked his "sparkle" and took his number. After returning from a modeling gig in the Caribbean, she called him, and on their first date, "we talked for almost the whole night," she says. 

Clearly when a man is attractive, women will pursue him and the man won't necessarily be turned off by being pursued. And if Lennon and McCartney are examples of "beta males" why would any woman want any other kind?

And it's not a stretch at all to make the connection between men with fragile masculinity issues and voting for Donald Trump. As this Atlantic article notes:

Standard commentary about Clinton’s candidacy—which focuses on her email server, the Benghazi attack, her oratorical deficiencies, her struggles with “authenticity”—doesn’t explain the intensity of this opposition. But the academic literature about how men respond to women who assume traditionally male roles does. And it is highly disturbing. 

Over the past few years, political scientists have suggested that, counterintuitively, Barack Obama’s election may have led to greater acceptance by whites of racist rhetoric. Something similar is now happening with gender. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is sparking the kind of sexist backlash that decades of research would predict. If she becomes president, that backlash could convulse American politics for years to come. 

To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social failures like “losing a job.” When asked how someone might lose her womanhood, by contrast, they mostly came up with physical examples like “a sex-change operation” or “having a hysterectomy.” 

More on the traditionalist views of Evan Marc Katz.

None dare call it sociopathy

Evan Marc Katz's latest blog post has got me thinking about something I've been musing over for quite some time now - the high level of sociopathy among men.

Of course it's not called sociopathy, but Katz references the issue in his recent blog post:

Sounds a lot like what I’ve been preaching here for a decade. You can see it in the comments section. Men who think American women are selfish and would rather fly to Thailand for a bride. Women who are disgusted by men’s willingness to separate sex and love and have convinced themselves that no men are kind and commitment-oriented. This type of scarcity is not only untrue, but unhealthy as well.

First I'll point out that this paragraph reveals how much Katz's dating site, allegedly devoted to serving women, has a comments section populated by hideously misogynist men.

Now to the main issue - it's true that there are some men who are interested in love and commitment. But the fact is that a very high percentage of men do separate sex and love. Nobody knows how high a percentage because our male-dominated culture has never considered it an issue worth exploring.

And in truth, the issue is even more extreme than Katz presented. A high percentage of men don't just separate sex and love. Based on my experience in online dating, a really high percentage of men want to separate sex from any and all type of human connection. 

They usually don't state it so explicitly, using euphemisms like "no strings attached" and "no drama" and "not looking for anything serious." But what they actually mean - and I've sloooowly come to understand this from years of meeting men through online dating sites - is that they want to be in a room with you (or outdoors, they really aren't particular), they want to stick their penis into one or more of your orifices, evacuate and then go away. 

When they use the term "friends with benefits" it's complete bullshit - they don't want the friend part, they only want the benefits. They don't want to know anything about you - the only thing that matters to them is that you present enough visual sexual signifiers to arouse them. Period. Unique, individual you means less than nothing to them - your humanity is actually an inconvenient, annoying roadblock to their achieving something of value.

In other words for many men, the best kind of sex is completely dehumanized sex.

What do we call people who prefer to have minimal emotional connections with other people? Sociopaths.

But the reason that we don't call it sociopathy in this case is because sex without emotional connection is identified as a masculine thing. Men have so utterly dominated the world since the beginning of human culture anything male is the standard for humanity.

This dehumanized way that many men look at women is the basis for "flying to Thailand for a bride" and the phenomenon Katz pointed out without criticism, men working to get rich so they can have access to women they wouldn't normally have access to. 

Many men don't want a woman they have something in common with: life experiences, similar level of attractiveness, compatible aspirations, shared hobbies. Those are women they have access to. They want someone younger and beautiful and nothing else matters.

This phenomenon of men treating women like soulless things goes a long way to explaining why men abandon sick wives at such a high rate:

• A married woman diagnosed with a serious disease is six times more likely to be divorced or separated than a man with a similar diagnosis.
• Among study participants, the divorce rate was 21 percent for seriously ill women and 3 percent for seriously ill men.
• A control group divorced at a rate of 12 percent, suggesting that if disease makes husbands more likely to split, it makes wives more likely to stay.

These men married their wives to have access to pussy. And illness makes the pussy less available and/or less desirable. So why would they stick around? To deal with possible sad feelings and diminished sexual access? That's not what they signed up for, no matter what vows about sickness and health they spouted in front of an audience.

What women need to do is stop allowing their own lived experiences to be gas-lighted away by self-interested champions of the patriarchy like Evan Marc Katz and instead ask: why are so many men sociopaths?

Evan Marc Katz: heterosexual women are great big hoes

Evan Marc Katz, patron saint of traditional gender roles:

Men spend countless hours working to get rich – not just for their own self-worth, but because having money gives them an advantage when it comes to courting women. Do these men feel bad that they’re being “used” for their money? Occasionally. But, for the most part, a rich guy understands that his money is part of the package – and if it allows him to get a woman he wouldn’t otherwise get, he can usually make peace with it.

These are the people Evan Marc Katz means when
he uses the terms "men" and "women."

So let's see - men work to get rich so they can have "an advantage" courting women. And when the money gives them an advantage courting women they "wouldn't otherwise get" they can make peace with it.

So a man can make peace (usually!) with a scenario that he spent countless hours trying to achieve.

Evan Marc Katz is a special kind of stupid.

And his claim about straight men of course begs the question, although Katz's none-too-bright followers are unlikely to think of it: if getting rich is about scoring quality pussy, why do any straight women or gay men work to get rich?

The only women who would listen to Evan Marc Katz are those who agree with him that women are whores who marry for money. No doubt because that's who they are, and they assume all women are like them. And Katz will certainly not tell them otherwise.

It makes me wonder who Katz is voting for in the upcoming presidential election. Hillary Clinton certainly didn't marry Bill for his money; she has worked all her life; and been nominated for president. How does such a woman fit into the Evan Marc Katz gender role paradigm? She doesn't. And neither does Elizabeth Warren.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is very much an Evan Marc Katz kind of man. Sure Trump didn't actually work to get rich, he was born rich, but he obviously used his money to buy women he wouldn't otherwise be able to get, twice dumping the aging Mrs. Trump for a younger model.

Donald Trump is the kind of man that Evan Marc Katz is selling to his poor marks, but the joke is on them. Unless they are under 35, they are not considered worth purchasing by the kind of men who buy women.

I'd bet that most of Katz's audience are women over 35, and so he is encouraging them to believe in a system which has already rejected them. No matter how much Evan Marc Katz advises women to be passive, these gold-digger wannabes will never score the rich man of their dreams. 

What a grotesque snake-oil salesman is Evan Marc Katz. But at least he offers his customers some consolation for being such dummies: Why So Many Smart People Aren't Happy.

More on the horrifically regressive, logically dissonant commentary of Evan Marc Katz.

When worlds collide: Evan Marc Katz and Amber A'Lee Frost

Well it was inevitable - Evan Marc Katz, gender-traditionalist dating-industry huckster who likes to use men's rights activist lingo to categorize men (alpha and beta) admires leading Ladies Auxiliary brocialist feminist-hater Amber A'Lee Frost.

Katz and Frost are made for each other.

The piece that Katz links to by Frost demonstrates the deep hatred of feminists shared by Katz and the brocialists. Just as leading brocialist Hillary-hater Doug Henwood criticizes feminists much more harshly than he does the Koch brothers, Frost likes and admires Tucker Max and Neil Strauss far more than she does any feminists. Frost much prefers to harshly attack feminists, supported and encouraged by the brocialists at Jacobin and The Baffler. Frost previously defended misogynist men of the left - admiring men who are assholes and shitting on feminists is what Amber A'Lee Frost does. As a comparison - she's much less sympathetic to women talking about sexual assault in a public forum, calling it "industrialized confession" than she is towards industrial-grade assholes like Max and Strauss. No doubt Katz believes this indicates Frost would approve of him too, and he's probably right.

Speaking of the Koch brothers, Katz is a big admirer of their most prominent employee, Arthur C. Brooks.

All kinds of inter-connections among the feminist haters. But the main connection between Katz and Frost is that they both want women to defer to men. Katz explicitly tells women to be passive - in order that they may have relationships with traditionalist men (who are single in much greater quantities than more enlightened men, and so more likely to increase his match-up hit rate and further his career); while Frost, along with her contemptible brocialists-at-arms Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwoood want feminists to shut the fuck up about glass ceilings or careers or even the universality of rape(!) because the men have more important things to talk about.

Yes, dating hucksters and brocialists have much in common in their attitudes towards women.

Elizabeth Warren rejects Evan Marc Katz's advice - lives happily ever after

Dating advice huckster Evan Marc Katz likes to tell women to be passive. He also believes, like a Men's Rights Activist, that men are divided into alphas and betas.

Luckily for her, Elizabeth Warren never listened to Evan Marc Katz-style advice - and women have been told to be passive long before Evan Marc Katz decided to rebrand that piece of patriarchy-bolstering advice as his very own.

Elizabeth Warren:

I proposed to Bruce in a classroom. It was the first time I’d seen him teach, and I was already in love with him, but watching him teach let me see one more thing about him — and that was it. When class was over and the students had cleared out, he came up to me and asked, somewhat hesitantly, “Uh, what did you think?” 

“What can I say? Will you marry me?” 

He stared back at me. It was not the first (or last) time that I gob smacked him. If I was a hard-charging, go-to-the-mat-for-whatever-you-believe kind of professor, he was more of a scholarly, camping-out-in-the-archives-poring-over-an-old-legal-manuscript kind. I’m usually the one with the wild schemes, and he’s usually the voice of reason, calmly explaining why it isn’t a great idea to paint the ceiling dark purple or rip all those unknown vines out of the overgrown flower bed by hand (lesson learned: poison ivy).

But he blinked a couple of times, then jumped in with both feet. “OK.” 

To make sure the deal was sealed, I smiled and said, “Good. Let’s do it.” 

It made no sense at all. Bruce was teaching in Connecticut, and I was teaching in Houston. And besides, there was the small matter of the fact that I had a complicated life: two children, both of my parents and my Aunt Bee popping in and out all day, a red station wagon and a mean little dog that bit people. Bruce had lived with none of the above — children, seniors, station wagons or dogs — but he never hesitated.
We got married 36 years ago today. It made no sense at all, but maybe that’s how love works. All I know is that I’m sure glad I asked — and sure glad he said yes.

Happy anniversary, Sweetie! I love you.

I totally get Warren's feelings. There's something incredibly sexy about a man being articulate and sharing his knowledge in an open, accessible, non-snobbish way. That and a man who can do impressions and accents/dialects - both incredibly arousing.

Evan Marc Katz's message to women is still: be passive

Evan Marc Katz advises women to be passive when it comes to dating men, but he also likes to promote the work of other regressive monsters, these "dating coaches" who say exactly the same thing. The dating coaches Katz likes to recommend believe that male dominance is the ideal standard of human behavior and rather than opposing it, we should encourage it.

The latest asshole being promoted by Katz is one Dr. Ali Binazir. He also believes that women should  wait for a man to make the first move - and all the other moves - because if she makes any sudden moves that indicate interest in a man he'll be scared away. Thus spake Binazir:

And at a very primitive level, remember that men enjoy the chase. That’s why the word chase is so often preceded by thrill of the. Why should he be thrilled about your taking away his thrill?

Binazir confesses that this has happened to him a lot. And we are to take him as the exemplar of manly opinion and behavior, of course. But in spite of the fact that he's a wimp who is afraid of any woman expressing strong interest in him, he prefers to describe himself as a predator, a lion. When the animal Binazir actually resembles the most is a chicken.

The animal Evan Marc Katz resembles the most is a weasel, for his constant sexism and then refusal to own his sexism. Katz gaslights poor suckers who buy into his mindfuckery. One of his marks, in the comments of his article promoting Binazir mentions women "dating down" and Katz chides her:

Are men dating down when they date women with less money and education? If not, then please drop that tired act and start dating the way men do – because they feel accepted, appreciated and admired.

So "start dating the way men do" wow Katz is such an egalitarian! except that elsewhere he promotes the idea of gender essentialism and strict gender roles - men must chase women because men must have the thrill of the chase because men are lions and women are gazelles, as his buddy Binazir describes it. You can't get more different than that - men and women aren't even the same species - men are predators and women are prey.

So you get that, ladies? You should date the way men do. Except when you should date the exact opposite of the way men do. Are we clear? Good, now give Evan Marc Katz and Dr. Ali Binazir all your money!

My inner 25-year-old

I still can't get over the idea that I'm not twenty-five years old - in my mind I still am. This is increasingly getting to be a problem, the disconnect between internal and external age.

For example - I keep seeing claims that young women prefer Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton and my knee-jerk response is: "oh yeah, well I like Hillary Clinton" and then I suddenly remember... oh... right.

Speaking of being old, I have to laugh once again at the idea being pushed by Evan Marc Katz and other conservatives that women and men are equally bad towards each other - the old false equivalency. Krugman talks about it in reference to politics, but it's just as false in gender politics.

To get an idea of just how full of shit the false equivalency hucksters like Katz are, consider that there is an entire web site, We Hunted the Mammoth, devoted to reporting on the organized misogyny of the Men's Rights Movement.

Or you can go right to the source - I defy you to find me a women's organization devoted to spewing hatred towards men over 25 with the same single-minded venom of the Return of Kings article Unmarried Older Women Need to Go Away.

And of course the ongoing slaughter of women by the men in their lives.

There's only one reason why someone like Evan Marc Katz would keep pushing the idea that women and men are equally bad to each other - because he has an agenda and he doesn't care if he has to lie to promote it.

More reeking right-wing lies from dating advice huckster Evan Marc Katz

Biological weasels are cute
and blameless ~ unlike metaphorical ones

Evan Marc Katz claims to be a liberal, but when it comes to gender he is as conservative as they come, which is why he so often quotes right-wingers with approval. This time around he references Arthur C. Brooks, number one employee of the insidious Koch brothers. I blogged about him here: Nazis -> Koch brothers -> Arthur C. Brooks

Like all conservatives, Brooks blames victims if they point out that they are victims. The basis of the conservative mindset is that people who are victims only have themselves to blame. That way the people who are actually responsible for the victims' misfortune are let off the hook. People like the Koch brothers, who I predict will go down in history as the foremost contributors to the global warming crisis. The Koch brothers and their lap dogs like Brooks have a deep self-interest in promoting the philosophy of the blamelessness of the powerful.

Another belief of right-wingers is that we now live in a time when men and women are completely equal and the term "patriarchy" is just some crazy bra-burner mythology. This is a subset of the blame the victim tactic - how can women complain about the way things are when men have it just as bad? 

This leads to the usual false equivalency as Katz demonstrates in his latest blog post. 

They are the men who complain that the world is rigged to favor women and spend all their time railing against injustice (“I had to pay for dates! She didn’t even call me back! American women are emasculating hags with no sexual market value over the age of 30!). They are the women who complain that everything is part of a greater patriarchy designed to oppress women. If you question it, you’re a part of it. 

As always, Katz employs the straw feminist: "They are the women who complain that everything is part of a greater patriarchy designed to oppress women" Naturally he doesn't name names because there are literally no woman anywhere complaining that everything is blah blah blah. Now there are organized Men's Rights Activists who are that extreme, but since Katz can't find any feminists who are as extreme as MRAs are, he must invent them in order to maintain his fantasy "both sides are just as bad" position.

He also uses this post as another opportunity to lie about his past advice:

So although 50% of my advice is to tell women to stop putting up with bullshit from men, the other 50% is to tell women how to act more effectively with men. It often means being nicer, more patient, more accepting, more understanding, more easygoing – putting yourself in his shoes the way you’d like him to put himself in your shoes. Basically, it’s good people advice that somehow gets twisted into a patriarchal attack on women, because evidently men aren’t entitled to expect better treatment from women as long as other men still treat women poorly.

He doesn't merely tell women to be nicer, more patient, etc. He tells women to be passive.

The sweet irony here is how Katz is claiming to be the victim - his advice "somehow gets twisted into a patriarchal attack on women."

Poor Evan Marc Katz! All he did was tell women to be completely and abjectly passive in their dealings with men, and some bitches out there are "twisting" that into a patriarchal attack!

Evan Marc Katz needs to own the fact that he is a conservative - but he won't because he'll lose some of his poor gullible marks that way and because he's a weasel. And I apologize to biological weasels who are much less harmful to human social progress than Evan Marc Katz.

Evan Marc Katz - still a regressive asshole

Perhaps Evan Marc Katz was stung by myself and others online suggesting he's a sexist douchebag (or hyperbolically, albeit amusingly "a shitstain on humanity") who encourages women to be passive like we're still living in the 1950s. So he's teamed up with some regressive woman - and if you don't think women can be regressive you've never heard of Phyllis Schlafly, Camille Paglia, Ann Coulter or Katie Roiphe.

Katz probably figures, well if some woman says these things it's OK and he gets a get-out-of-misogyny free card.

Nope, sorry Katz. You don't. This mealy-mouthed up-talking simulacrum of an educated professional woman named Kate Edwards says "women need to be much more pro-active" but then a minute later says "I don't think women should ask men out."

Katz then says that you can only ask out a "beta male" - in other words a loser who lacks confidence - something he's already said before.

He then waffles as usual because he's a weasel and says it's OK if you ask a guy out. But really you should wait for the man or you will most likely fail. But it's OK so don't get mad at him, Evan Marc Katz. But you know, you should listen to him so you won't die alone.

He is the king of having it both ways, much like his hero Sam Harris.

They make me want to puke, these hucksters promoting an antiquated MRA-approved mode of human interaction, helping to hold back humanity in order to make a nice buck from the insecure and the hapless and the easily-led.

More on the incredible douchebaggery of Evan Marc Katz and his various huckster friends.

Evan Marc Katz against equality

Remember when I pointed out that Evan Marc Katz is urging women to be passive in order to snag a man? This is what he said:

Men win you over by giving to you. We ask you out. We call you. We pay for dates. We initiate sex. We ask for commitment. We propose marriage. We give. You receive. Reverse this order by asking him out, initiating sex, asking for commitment, or proposing marriage, and a masculine guy will feel, well, emasculated. Thus, if you want a masculine guy, your greatest move is to embrace your passive feminine side.

So I checked in with Katz lately to see what mischief he's been getting up to and I had to LOL - apparently he has done a complete turn-around: it's no longer men who want passive women, as he has been claiming - it's women who are forcing men to be active so that they can be passive:

In my opinion, men can complain all they want about how unfair it is that they’re supposed to call, plan and pay for the first few dates, but you’ll find few women who prefer passive men...

Whatever happened to women "choosing" to be passive in order to prevent a masculine guy from feeling emasculated? Apparently that's something that men don't really want. At least that's what Katz is saying now.

What more do you need to know to realize these dating advisors have no idea what they are talking about?

The concept of equality never occurs to Katz or any of his co-star hucksters - men and women trading off responsibilities and paying for things as equally as possible. There are actually men and women out there who believe in trying to achieve equality. We may not always be perfectly successful - we've all been raised in the cesspool of patriarchy and are influenced by it to some degree. But we have an ideal we are trying to achieve. We apparently don't exist as far as  dating hucksters are concerned.

If somebody doesn't do a study on the insanely regressive, anti-feminist dating advice industry soon I will have to do it myself. I will have to talk to my friend Maxine Margolis, author of True to Her Nature: Changing Advice to American Women about how to begin.

More of my thoughts on Evan Marc Katz.

Tragically Fragile

I try not to think about Evan Marc Katz but I couldn't help but do so when I saw an article in Buzzfeed called 23 Gendered Products That Prove How Truly Fragile Masculinity Is. (When I posted it on Facebook it reads as "tragically fragile" which is more fun to say in your mind.)

I recently criticized Katz for the incredibly regressive advice he gives to women on bowing to traditional gender roles in order to catch a man. He advises women to be passive, and he lists some things that are unacceptably pro-active for a woman seeking a "masculine man." Two of the items just blow my mind - I thought I knew how bad American men who cling to traditional gender roles are, but if Katz is to be believed their concepts of unacceptable female aggressiveness wouldn't be out of place among the Taliban. The items are:

• You haven’t heard from him all weekend, you text him to make sure he’s doing okay.
• You want to see him next week, you tell him his favorite band is playing downtown and you can get tickets

That's right, even enquiring after his well-being or offering tickets to his favorite band are considered so horrifically domineering that they will, using Katz's own term, make the masculine man feel emasculated.

Yeah, I can just hear the manly man after he receives a text from the woman:

"she has two tickets to the Springsteen show next week and she asked me to go with her? THAT CASTRATING BITCH!"

In spite of the fact that masculinity is supposed to represent toughness, in fact it is one of the most fragile things on this planet, under constant threat - as Katz's examples of pro-activity demonstrate.

As does the Buzzfeed article:

20. “This food is only truly good for men. Women wouldn’t appreciate it.”

 

Ryan ▫️⬛️‏@mamma_earth

More in painfully fragile masculinity: fun fact (they're tomatoes)

27 more examples!

More on toxic "dating coach" huckster Evan Marc Katz

Once you've demonstrated that someone is actively encouraging women to date men who are statistically more likely to abuse them, as Evan Marc Katz does, there's not much else to say about them.

But I can't help but say a few more things about Evan Marc Katz and his exchange with a dissatisfied customer.

In addition to Katz's usual slipperiness in failing to own the regressive advice he gives women, the article demonstrates that even women who are inclined to be skeptical about the benefits of reverting to traditional gender roles have drunk hearty draughts of Katz's misogyny Kool-aid. Customer says:

But I also feel like I’ve learned a lot of stuff that just feels almost insurmountable taken in total, and also… a huge amount of effort that will yield… what, I’m not sure.
To wit (and hear this not as angry, but just incredibly overwhelmed):

She then goes on to list what she considers Katz's objectionable advice.

She then says:

I’m not sure I can actually do all these things.
It looks exhausting, and no fun. What is the upside, besides getting laid, since I earn my own living? 

The fact that she thinks that there actually is an upside - "getting laid" - to Evan Marc Katz's advice that women submit to traditional gender roles in order to catch a manly-man indicates that she's already in the land of cognitive dissonance. Because in fact if all you want to do is get laid, why would you have to become passive? Contrary to Evan Marc Katz's claim, men in fact do like it when women initiate sex, and not only insecure clueless men. Now the traditional-gender-role-loving men that Evan Marc Katz is promoting as real men may not want to marry a woman who actively pursues sex, on the basis of the traditional gender role phenomenon known as the madonna/whore complex. But they will certainly have sex with you and if getting laid is what you want, then it's a win-win. 

And of course there are some men who are sufficiently "masculine" and yet do not buy into rigid gender roles. I know such men. But naturally they are very popular with women and tend to already be in relationships, usually long-term relationships, so if that was the type of man Evan Marc Katz was selling, his success rate would take a big hit - there are just not enough of that kind of man for all the women who want them. But the supply of single traditional-gender-role assholes is huge, and so it's just that much more efficient for Katz to make a buck convincing women that those are the men they really want. Or at least convince them that there are no other alternatives, because "men" are likely to feel emasculated at the tiniest non-passive action on the part of women.

Notice too that the dissatisfied customer said: What is the upside, besides getting laid, since I earn my own living? 

"Since I earn my own living" - she is not looking for a man to be her meal-ticket. 

Now of course economic inequality is the basis of traditional gender roles. The reason men made all the moves in courtship with women was because they had all the power and all the money. Men bought women - not the other way around. Rarely as obviously as when slavers bought slaves, it was more of a barter system than a cash-and-carry. But the power dynamic was just as real.

The main motivation for getting married for a woman was economic - if she didn't find a man who could support her financially, she would either have to live with relatives or earn her own living at a time when it was perfectly legal to bar women from many kinds of high-paying jobs. And the jobs that were open to women were low-paying, usually because they were considered women's jobs. And of course she would not be allowed to have sex lest she be considered a worthless slut - only men had the option of socially-accepted extra-marital sex until very, very recently. So the only option for a woman who didn't want to be a celibate burden to her family (or a celibate poorly-paid worker) was to get married.

Evan Marc Katz prefers to believe that gender roles are biological - like his favorite writer Sam Harris (Harris is a New Atheist and evolutionary psychology is their religion) and so of course he ignores the economic social reality. He prefers to tell women that male dominance is just the way of the world, men are never going to change, and there is nothing to be done about it except resign yourself to being the passive receptacle of male approval. Or live a lonely, sexless life.

It used to be that dating hucksters didn't have to work so hard to push women into the passive role - the entire socio-economic system was designed to force women into that role. Marriage was very common because women had a compelling financial interest to get married. 

But since Katz's clients earn their own living, they tend to believe they don't have to settle for any man with a good job. But a woman being "picky" lowers Katz's success rate, so he is very much focused on claiming women expect too much from men. 

And then when he is called on it by someone he can't ignore, a client, he gaslights her and pretends that he's a huge egalitarian who never told women they had to be passive.

I was amused to see how Katz referred to his critics:

 I’ve seen criticism of my views from anonymous strangers before, but I’d never before had a client who expressed such great displeasure with her perception of my coaching philosophies.

As anybody who has read this blog knows, there are many Katz critics, including myself, who are not anonymous. And Katz knows it too - he reads this blog. It was easy enough to figure that out when I noticed in my blog analytics that someone from his town in California was regularly visiting this site. 

Naturally he won't discuss critics by name, any more than he will name feminists he makes claims about - because it's much easier to argue with straw-women, or clients who have already drunk his Kool-aid. 

Katz may be toxic for women as individuals and for the progress towards an egalitarian society as a whole, but he sure knows how to take care of the financial progress of Evan Marc Katz.

More on the toxic Weltanshauung of Evan Marc Katz.

Fortunately some men are helping to promote an egalitarian society:

Michael Kimmel: Why gender equality is good for everyone - men included.

Are "dating coaches" like Evan Marc Katz encouraging domestic violence?

Evan Marc Katz is defending against objections to his advice for women by offering a false equivalency.

He claims he has similar expectations from men and women when it comes to the best ways of attracting a mate. He presents an exchange between himself and a dissatisfied customer which includes this:

(CLIENT)
I have to talk to men in a certain way or they won’t find me appealing. 

(EMK)
Yes. Then again, don’t men have to talk to you in a certain way as well? They can’t be arrogant, rude or condescending. They shouldn’t be negative or nakedly insecure. They shouldn’t blather on about themselves without taking an interest in you. It would seem that there are certain characteristics that make all people unappealing, no?

As he states, he expects men to refrain from being arrogant, rude, condescending, negative, blatantly insecure, and talking only about themselves. The kinds of things he must surely expect from women too. But Katz has one extra piece of advice for women that he doesn't have for men: be passive:

Being passive doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything proactive. It means that you’re choosing not to do anything proactive, because being proactive during courtship is ineffective in making a man feel attracted to you. 

Here are a few common examples of being proactive:

• You have a great date, you email him the next day to say you had a lot of fun.
• You haven’t heard from him all weekend, you text him to make sure he’s doing okay.
• You want to see him next week, you tell him his favorite band is playing downtown and you can get tickets.
• You’re confused about where your relationship stands, you ask him where things are headed.

You think you’re being real; he thinks you’re acting clingy. Understand, the man of your dreams doesn’t NEED to be pushed to be your boyfriend.

Katz expects women to be so extremely passive that any and all attempts on the part of the woman to communicate, without first being contacted by the man are considered by Katz (on behalf of men) horrifically clingy and pushy.

The male prerogative to pursue a woman, and the female requirement to be the passive object of that pursuit are known as "traditional gender roles."

As the organization "Futures Without Violence" states:

Traditional Gender Role Beliefs: Men who hold traditional gender role beliefs (men as breadwinners, women should stay at home, etc.)14 and conform to masculinity norms (believe men need to be self-reliant, have power over women, etc.) are more likely to commit violence against women, particularly sexual assault.15,16 Alternatively, men who view women as their equals are less likely to commit an act of sexual assault.12

And as a document from the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence notes:

...as discussed in the VicHealth prevention framework, research has consistently found that individual men who hold traditional views about gender roles, have a rigid belief in male dominance, or hold sexually hostile attitudes about women are more likely to perpetrate violence (see VicHealth 2007: 34).

Katz doesn't refer to the men he is selling to women as believers in "traditional gender roles" he refers to them as "masculine men." But there is no doubt at all that traditional gender roles are what he is promoting for women who want to find "love":

Men win you over by giving to you. We ask you out. We call you. We pay for dates. We initiate sex. We ask for commitment. We propose marriage. We give. You receive. Reverse this order by asking him out, initiating sex, asking for commitment, or proposing marriage, and a masculine guy will feel, well, emasculated. Thus, if you want a masculine guy, your greatest move is to embrace your passive feminine side.

Evan Marc Katz is encouraging women to date and marry men who are statistically more likely to perpetrate violence against them. But as long as he gets his success stories and makes his money, why should he care? After all, by his lights, women should not expect anything more than rigid traditional behavior from men (unless they are by Katz's definition, insecure losers: "But most men do not want to be actively pursued. The only guys who do are really shy, really insecure, or really clueless about women."). Because men, manly, masculine he-men, must be in complete control in all the usual, traditional ways or they feel, well, emasculated. Or as another dating advice huckster whom Katz highly recommended says:

So you can either support feminism in the hope of bettering the state of affairs in the future, or better your life now by finding love.

This is the hideous evil dystopia that Evan Marc Katz and his fellow sexist hucksters are selling to women. And Katz has the nerve to whine about occasional criticism.

And lest you think I'm too hard on Katz, when reviewing what I've written about him previously, I've often gone incredibly easy on him. I just noticed that I said of him:

Poor Evan Marc Katz. All he wants to do is make a very sweet living sitting around talking about himself and inventing little tips and tricks for how a woman can snag a man. 

But actually, as you can clearly see from the passage above on the importance of being passive, Katz has invented nothing - he is just regurgitating virtually every single thing that women have been told (and until recently compelled to abide by) since time immemorial. What a loathsome piece of work is Evan Marc Katz.

More on the work of traditional-role-promoting "dating coach" huckster Evan Marc Katz.