Relationships Talk

As a couple who found love on “Bachelor in Paradise,” Ashley Iaconetti and Jared Haibon understand the need to break the rules of traditional dating.

They sat down with “Extra” to share their tips for finding love during the holidays in today’s digital age!

Digital technology and smartphones have redefined the dating game, with more and more millennials relying on dating apps to find romance on their own terms, and the holiday season is a popular time for swiping!

Meeting people through dating apps has become the new normal, but you have to commit to using the apps regularly for the best results – the more active you are, the more people you match with, and in turn, the more dates you go on.

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Jumping back into the dating game is never easy. And if you were in a more than 10-year relationship with your ex, like Jennifer Garner, then it’s definitely not going to be a walk in the park! But luckily for Jennifer, she can rely on her friends to help her navigate the dating world, and according to Life & Style, her besties just gave her the best dating advice from the perfect outfit to wear to great conversation topics.

“They told her, avoid talking about Ben Affleck, don’t spend all night discussing the kids, and most importantly, no more mom jeans!” an insider told the magazine. Though we doubt Jen would be wearing “mom jeans” around her new boyfriend, John Miller, she should definitely not bring up Ben or his life post-rehab. The best thing that Jen can seemingly do is to keep the conversation very fun, light, and not about her former flames!

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Jen’s friends are seemingly just looking out for the actress and don’t want her to scare John away by bringing Ben up all the time. “They just want Jen to let loose and get back in touch with her sexy side,” the source said. “Fortunately, John likes the whole Jen package!”

Since John and Jennifer have been dating for about seven months now, he’s probably gotten used to being around Jennifer and her sweet, quirky personality. They have such a great relationship that Jen has already reportedly introduced John to her three kids, Violet, 12, Seraphina, 9, and Samuel, 6, which made their dad, Ben, very angry.

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“When Ben and Jen met up with the kids, they kept talking about mommy’s new friend and how much fun he was,” a source recently revealed to the UK’s Heat magazine. “They were saying how [John] knows how to cook and doesn’t like alcohol, which really got to Ben.” If Jen already introduced John to her kids then she must want him around for the long haul!

Male supremacist extremist Daryush Valizadeh (known online as Roosh V.), who came to fame harassing overweight women, is at it again.

In the past week, Roosh has spread a hashtag calling for men to report sex workers or Instagram models who don’t pay income tax. The #ThotAudit hashtag originated with a Twitter user on Nov. 22 and has gone viral in the past few days. Roosh gave it plenty of airtime. He was the fourth biggest Twitter influencer for the hashtag on Tuesday morning, according to social media analysis platform hashtagify.

Thot is a misogynistic slang term which stands for “that ho over there.” In keeping with the harassment campaign, participants are now redefining the term as “that ho owes taxes.”

In a series of tweets, Roosh called on men to report women who make money but don’t pay taxes, writing: “your vagina isn’t a 501(c)(3) charity” and claiming that “these girls are getting a free ride via beta bux and a broken sexual marketplace that is rigged in the favour of females.”

Even Roosh is aware this is not about taxes — the men reporting the women have no inkling of their taxable incomes or tax declarations — but about capitalizing on male resentment by shaming sex workers. As Roosh explained in a podcast on the topic — where he railed against video games featuring LGBT and black characters, put on a “black accent” and used racial slurs — he received a flood of messages from men asking him to support the #ThotAudit:

“Men are angry. Men have no outlet for their anger because they’re being banned and censored everywhere. If you’re a heterosexual man you’re not allowed to share your opinion anywhere you’re not allowed to speak out against hos, thots, people ruining your platforms…”

What’s more, he raged, women are “invading every space and turning it into a softcore pornography hangout.” Not usually so prudish, Roosh regularly tweets pictures of barely-clad women with the caption “would you bang?”

Roosh is notorious for his violent misogyny, condoning rape in his writings by advocating that “no mean no — until it means yes” and disparaging women as “cum buckets.” He has shared accounts of sexual encounters of his own that amount to assault, by his own description. His violent rhetoric led Amazon to take Roosh’s books down, and has also resulted in a ban from PayPal and even from the UK.

The deplatforming led him to close his male supremacist website, Return of Kings (ROK), a cornerstone of the so-called “manosphere” which claimed to give men sexual and dating advice. This advice often dismissed consent as an unfair burden to men and treated women’s rights as non-existent. ROK is designated as a male supremacist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). In November, after SPLC published a story calling out Barnes & Noble for selling Roosh’s pick-up advice book, Game, the book was removed from their website.

Roosh is still present on Twitter. And the #ThotAudit campaign gave him a boost:

“This has blown up my account. I usually get 300,000 views a day on my Twitter. In the past day I’ve had three million.”

Roosh has continuously used the platform to spread his misogynistic campaigns and antisemitic conspiracy theories in the past. On November 27, he was prevented from tweeting from his account for twelve hours because of the misogynistic campaign, a move Twitter made after Hatewatch reached out to the company for comment.

Even Roosh is aware his privileges aren’t normal. He tweeted on Nov. 24, “People ask me how I’m still on Twitter. I believe it’s divine protection.”

UPDATE: Late Wednesday morning, Twitter responded directly to Hatewatch’s request for comment. Twitter spokesperson Lisa Roman said, “We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons. But, as you can see, the account owner has been temporarily suspended for violating Twitter Rules.”

Photo illustration by SPLC

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In your early 20s, you know nothing about sex, dating, and relationships. I hate to sound condescending, but as a 27-year-old woman, I now know this to be true. Women in your 30s or older reading this and smirking that I too know very little: You are correct. I freak out when someone stops telling me I’m amazing every five minutes, have never seen a relationship to its second birthday, and have the commitment issues of a stray cat. But that’s the point: You have to live through all sorts of romantic relationships to get it.

Your 20s, I’m afraid, are where you do a lot of the painful learning. As a girl, you’re evolving from someone who keeps their bra on during sex to a Self-Assured Adult Woman (SAAW). If you’re a nascent SAAW dating straight men, you’ll have to deal with varying degrees of emotional intelligence—hello, incels: Yes, men are slower to develop than women—meaning you’ll inevitably swing from belief to belief about the nature of relationships. You’ll stubbornly consider each truth about men and/or dating to be gospel, all until the next disorientating experience. It’s fun! It’s a fun time!

Here are those stages. Here is a timeline of everything you’ll believe as a woman dating men in your 20s.

High School ‘Love’ Is a Lie

You spend a happy year-and-a-half googling “famous couples together since high school,” taking performative cues from porn and pretending to orgasm from poor quality penetrative sex. Then your high school/freshman year boyfriend either cheats on you or sits you down and tells you they “love you but just need to have some sex… randomly? Spread my wings a bit?”

What, you think, is “spreading your wings?” We did shower sex? We did it up the butt??

If you’re honest, you knew this first pillar of truth was coming. You knew sex was supposed to last longer than 45 seconds; you knew that Tiffany heart necklace he bought you for your 18 birthday was fucking tacky; you knew you were living a lie. Well done on spending the first year of college on a Megabus back to your hometown to see a boring cunt named Dan. Thank you, next.

Men Just Want to Fuck

Turns out your mom’s not wrong about literally everything: Boys really are after one thing!

With that first breakup, you start to suspect that men are disgusting animals—pigs! rats! ratty pig-boys!—who see all women as pieces of meat and just want to endlessly have sex. Post-Dan, you’re reading introductory feminism, which is confirming this miserable life lesson.

While your sexual encounters at this point can be boiled down to “two people with poorly-formed personalities rubbing bodies together,” you’re deep in a mode of believing that sex could lead to a potential relationship with every person you sleep with, even though you actively don’t like most of them.

Age and Emotional Maturity Are Linked

There’s been one common thread so far: young men. Like dough, every man in their early 20s needs to be left on the counter to rise. Don’t even try to put him in the oven yet.

You know you should make efforts to date someone older.

Age and Emotional Maturity Are Not Linked

You decide to date an older man (he’s, like, 26), who turns out to be a vile little princeling. Your big grown-up move ends in you being lumped with yet another guy being constantly passive aggressive and going silent in arguments, which is embarrassing. You decide to spend a lot of time thinking about a man’s age before bothering to date him seriously in future. Biggest curveball yet.

A Partner Should Provide Financial Security

Riding a post-feminist wave, you either: I. get a legitimate pay-pig to see you through college and/or early employment; or II. meet someone who’s incredibly grateful to be dating you, who observes you like a breeder does a show pony, and who chooses to express their affection by throwing money at you. You get off on the transactional nature of sex and love—an empowered woman getting what she wants!

‘The One’ Is Real

This is it. Everything about the meeting felt fated, an instant connection you’ve never had with anyone previously. There’s no point in having verbal conversations because the two of you operate on a cerebral plane. This is what Beyonce was singing about in “XO,” each day feels a tiny bit like coming up on your first ever pill. They had your hair in a hand-held ponytail while you threw up, and went to the corner store to get toilet paper when you had the shits. They go down on you to completion and cook actual recipes off a phone when you come over. Friends comment that they’ve never seen you this happy. You don’t have to try. This person treats you like a human being, not like a girl or woman. Disney and your mom (again!) and heteronormative patriarchy were right! The one true love exists! That’s why everyone else feels terrible—they’re not in true love, the sad-sacks!

‘The One’ Is Not Real

One or both of you fucks it up because—you realize—one or both of you didn’t know yourself as well as you thought you did.

For the next year, you spend much of your free time in the corner of a pub, bitterly asking couples questions about how long they’ve been together, snorting smugly when it’s under two years. Pathetic! Importantly, you realize that no relationship begins until the magic two-year mark—before that is the honeymoon period, which is a lie—and that there is no “one.” Everyone older than you who stayed in their first real love relationship is made of less complex matter than you, doesn’t know themselves well enough, and hasn’t had the miserable life experience, so will definitely just reach middle-age and have an embarrassing period of…

Hoeing Is Real

…fucking everyone you can get your hands on. Yeah, obviously you once saw yourself settled down by this late stage in life, age 25, but why have another failed relationship when you can make everyone laugh at your stories (your life).

Expect cartoon bedspreads, pillows that smell of scalp, week-old discarded ready meal trays, and watching men play video games on a loop. You’ll also see some huge dicks.

You learn: Threesomes are high drama but ultimately unsatisfying; that sex can be very good and very bad, and all the shades in between; and that although it is possible to like many “types” of person, you mostly just gravitate toward the same guys like a horny homing pigeon.

Men Don’t Always Want to Fuck; in Fact, Do Straight Men Even Like Sex?

You realize dating is just turning up at a venue, having 3.5 pints of beer, and leaving thinking either, What is wrong with me? or, What is wrong with you? While you are desperately seeking sex, men are desperately seeking… a girlfriend? They also aren’t the sexual aggressors you once believed them to be. Most men are just clueless puppies, bemused but pleased when you flirt with them. This goes against everything you were taught and have been conditioned to believe. You are the initiator of the actual sex, while men reply to your sexts with nonsensical emojis.

In fact, the more you mature, the more you see other people clearly. A few men have fantasies about you, project them onto you, and see whatever they want to see at that specific time. You recognize this and back away. Are you… beginning to know what you want?

Okay, Age and Emotional Maturity: Confirmed, Not Linked

You date a man in his mid-30s who calls his exes narcissists. He has a tantrum because you subtly emasculate him by ordering first at a bar or beating him in a neck-and-neck game of table football, and exits the room screaming about his mother.

Partners Should Provide Nothing But a Good Fuck and Make You Laugh

Is this you settling or becoming more realistic? Who knows! The better part of a decade has shown you that all you needed from a man all along was: The ability to go three times in a night and a consistent flow of quality memes.

Clarity/Namaste/Death Is Coming/Look at All That I’ve Learned

You find peace with dating. Facts: Romantic relationships really do require compromise, should never be transactional, you should always be present when you’re with someone (get off your phone for an evening, Jesus), and it’s only going to work if you like the same kind of sex, I’m sorry. You see younger women giving inspirational dating advice online and feel ancient and content about that.

Maybe you meet someone else who makes you want to create another cult of two. Someone you look at while they engage with other people and think, Yep, I’d crawl across broken glass for that shithead. Maybe you have a second “the one is not real” meltdown six months down the line.

Either way, it is now that you realize you—and everyone else—ultimately knows very little about dating. That includes knowing what you want. But you are clear about what you don’t want. You leave situations that aren’t right quicker and with more belief that everything will be OK. You develop something resembling personal boundaries. If you’re very lucky, you won’t date someone with single raw pillows ever again.

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