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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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In the wake of her weakness incredible historic strength among young men, Kamala has a new ad out on IG and SC, "Don't Get Popped":

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1847720298335948932

For those who don't want to view it, I'll transcribe the ad and set the scene: a speed dating scenario where women rate the man.

Trey: Hello ladies, I'm Trey. It's good to be here.

Ladies: Hey, Trey. 😃😃😃

Trey: Hey hey!

Ladies: So what do you do and how much do you make? 😉😉😉

Trey: I work in finance, making six figures.

Ladies: Oooooh. 😍😍😍 How tall are you?

Trey: 6'5".

Ladies: 🥵🥵🥵 [Fat woman asks:] Do you work out?

Trey: I like to stay active, yeah.

Ladies: 💦💦💦 Do you have a plan to vote?

Trey: Uhhh, I didn't plan on it.

Ladies: 🤮🤮🤮 [pop balloons, indicating rejection]

DON'T GET POPPED. VOTE

On the face of it, this seems entirely tone-deaf. The theory seems to be "vote Democratic, or we'll Lysistrata you" but I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to. Most would just roll their eyes, and, if you're a young man frustrated with dating, it would probably provoke outright hostility. So you might write it off as a clueless campaign hiring a couple of rich white women and gay men trying to imagine a way to make young men vote Harris and failing, just another example of the empathetic gap between who the campaign gets ideological inspiration from and the voters she needs to win.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

Interesting is that only the presenter and one or two of the women are with high fuckability score.

Fits with the "power fantasy for women" hypothesis. It's not to convince men that if they vote for Harris they'll get lots of hot women, but to convince the average woman that she can be a top woman too with the pick of the litter if she votes for Harris.

Your description should mention that both the man and a plurality of women in the video likely qualify as black. (You might not care about that, but the target audience will.)

I agree that it the spot does not work targeting men. The message is basically: to get a girlfriend, you need to (1) make 100k$ a year, (2) be tall, (3) be athletic, and (4) vote Harris. The number of men who fit 1-3, but still don't get laid and can be convinced that this is because of their lack of voting should be basically nil.

Also, I find that spot incredibly cringe. I am aware that income and hotness are influential for partner selection, but starting with 'how much do you make?' as an icebreaker question seems incredible vulgar. The way these things normally work (afaik) is that both sides have plausible deniability. There are whole brands surviving wholly on their value as an income signal. If a woman shows interest in a man wearing expensive, tasteful stuff, there is that veneer of deniability: there is always some probability that she does not care about his wealth at all, but just is interested in his charming personality or whatever. If you ask explicitly, that creates common knowledge of the transactional nature of the relationship, at which point the man might ask himself if he would not be better served by an escort. The male version of 'how much do you make?' might be 'I will pay you 500$ for a blowjob', which likewise highlights the transactional nature of the relationship. From my understanding, this is a big no-no when flirting with women who don't consider themselves sex workers.

Even for hotness, some people might feel offended if it is implied that their physical characteristics will get them the relationship. Invert the genders, and instead of height and athleticism, the suitors might ask the woman about her breast size or hotness on a scale of 1-10. The Harris campaign would be the first to decry this as demeaning the woman by reducing her to a sex object. (Aside, the lack of a screen between the man and the women makes the questions about his physique bizarre: presumably, the women can see how he looks.)

Also, there are unfortunate implications about the women who are so interested in their suitor's finances. Are these not supposed to be strong independent women, who have their own six figure jobs, and could well support a stay-at-home dad? The vibes I get from this clip are "I am looking for a hot, rich guy to earn my Mrs degree."

It makes more sense as a power fantasy targeting women ("of course I am so hot/charming that hot rich guys will want to date me, but I can be picky enough to just date Harris voters"). Still, the fact that the ad did apparently well on A/B testing is kind of scathing for the target audience.

Invert the genders, and instead of height and athleticism, the suitors might ask the woman about her breast size or hotness on a scale of 1-10.

"What's your BMI"?

The funniest thing in the world, whenever stuff like this hits, is to parse and put in plain language the assumptions that this ad makes, and by extension, the assumptions that this ad is asking you to make on its behalf.

-Assumption A: Of course black men can work in finance and make six figures.

-Assumption B: Ladies will consider you a mate if you work in finance and make six figures.

-Assumption C: Ladies will consider you a mate if you are tall.

-Assumption D: Ladies will consider you a mate if you work out.

-Assumption E: The disqualifier for a potential mate is that they don't (have a plan to) vote.

-Assumption F: The disqualifier for a potential mate is that they don't share the women's politics.

If you swallow all of this as one whole, poisonous package, the message that the Kamala campaign is sending is thus: broke, short, unhealthy and politically apathetic or unaligned males will not have sex with willing partners.

What are we to take away from this - that Kamala's campaign has a strong interest in eugenics? Or that they're re-enacting, as someone pointed out, the World War 1 white feather campaign? Do they expect black men to respond to this messaging? If this is how they're targeting black men, who is advising them? And if the world is crawling with "incels" like many of their politically aligned ilk believe it to be, what message do they expect these broke, short, and unhealthy politically unaligned men (let's be fair and include broke, short, and unhealthy politically unaligned women and they/thems) to take away from this if they want sex?

There is a further, meta-level set of assumptions that go along with this, if the ad is in fact targeting women. What is a woman going to take away from this ad, if she is already in a relationship with someone who is broke, short, or unhealthy, and doesn't share her politics? Are they counting on women who aren't already in relationships to add an additional qualifier just in case the Republican Evil is hereditary?

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend.

The tweet says it targets about 65% women.

65% is also roughly the portion of single women that identify as Democrats.

I would not be surprised if it is that dumb.

I find the "six figures" part interesting. If you take it to mean 100k, that's...not that impressive.

I'm seeing 80th percentile in the US at age 30. 127/170/300 get you to the 90/95/99th percentile. At age 27, it's 91st percentile; 121/190 get you to 95/99th percentile.

Presumably it's a lower percentile than these for men (but probably higher than that for black men). Downgrade the impressiveness again in blue areas (cities).

This raises the question: what percentile or dollar amount is impressive enough to offset what degree of attractiveness? Or more broadly, what is the marginal utility as you move through those levels?

There have already been some studies on what income is required to ‘make up for’ being a very short man. I don’t know that I believe them, necessarily, but I think they exist.

I think it’s best to model them differently. For women, wealth could make some difference at the margins but not a huge amount; eg. when Adele was fat her ex husband was a schlubby looking also-chubby bearded white guy. Fat female celebrities don’t generally have hot husbands, although exceptions presumably exist. For men, wealth can make a lot of difference, but even so, there are comparatively poor bartenders, line cooks, sound engineers, high school drama teachers and so on who are more successful with more attractive women than many super rich men.

Among the PMC (the truly rich are more heterogenous as a class) assortative mating is now so strong that it largely filters looks-based matching to an intra-class level. The ugly junior banker will marry the ugly junior banker or corporate lawyer or doctor or whatever of the opposite sex. The hot one will do the equivalent. Neither will marry particularly up or down.

high school drama teachers

Checks out!

Among the PMC (the truly rich are more heterogenous as a class) assortive mating is now so strong that it largely filters looks-based matching to an intra-class level.

According to Gregory Clark, it's always been thus. He claims that in the anglosphere, mating has been assortative on socioeconomic status at a correlation of approximately 0.8 for centuries.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

A plausible theory given the "White Guys for Harris" ads. Those also failed to address any real concerns of men and instead cast a bunch of gay men and gay-ish men to talk about womens issues.

If anything, it's women who need to change their political philosophy to improve their dating prospects.

Women are the gatekeepers of sex. But men are the gatekeepers of relationships. It's trivial for men to fake woke beliefs in order to get sex in the urban dating environment. That's why we find so many examples of progressives who act like cads in their personal lives. It turns out that men will lie to have sex.

But women who are batshit liberals are doing themselves a big disservice. They are signalling low quality partner status and will find that, though lots of men are willing to bed them, few are willing to stick around. During my own brief experience with online dating, I swiped left on anyone who had overt political statements in their profile.

Women with unnaturally colored hair, face masks, piercings, tats, and radical beliefs will eliminate many of the highest quality men from their dating pool. They will soon learn that "all men are assholes" as they are used and dumped by a bunch of flaky woke dudes.

This is such a strange take. Those women didn't want to go on a date with men like you (conservative) and you didn't go on a date with them. Sounds like their filtering is working and you just don't like that it's a filter they care about.

Nah. It's not about politics, it's about mental illness.

I'm perfectly happy dating a liberal and they are perfectly happy dating me.

But people who signal far-left political beliefs in their profile are low value mates. (Same for far-right ones probably, although I never saw that).

Maybe these chubby purple-hair women tell themselves they wouldn't date a 6'3 chad in finance, but of course they would. They just don't pull those type of guys. They are deliberately lowering their value on the dating market with their poor signalling. In the end, they will have worse partners and worse life outcomes.

I think many women are lovely enough right up until you hit a hair trigger about Trump, politics, or whatever. And the tragedy of this situation is that this obstacle seems misguidedly imposed from one side of the gender dynamic. To quote a line from a pop song I can't really remember: "You're standing in your own way".

Is this kind of filtering 'working'? I guess you could say it is on an individual level, although I think even that's questionable, as I believe a lot of women are missing out on good catches with this zero-tolerance approach. Is this a good dynamic for dating writ large? Probably not given the endless bitching about it and the metrics getting fairly sloped.

A smaller irritant in the mix is watching the fuse on this behavior run down. I know women now in their late 30s or early 40s who suddenly pine for 'traditionally masculine' types, with their younger and luckier cohorts marrying red-hat yokels that take care of them - after years of setting up razor wire around that type of guy. You wish they'd gotten the act out of their system earlier. By comparison men will swallot a lot from their partners as long you're not screaming in their face or getting nasty about what TikTok has you mad about this week. A moderate 'blue hair' could be entirely dateable to most woke-averse men (assuming decently attractive and yada yada) as long as being political isn't the front and center of their being or a lense everything is seen through.

I used to see more couples in my life argue about politics without it ending in breakup or divorce. It seemed normal to me: you bicker about the 8 PM news a bit, you silently roll your eyes at thing your partner said, then you go to bed together before the next day of life's experiences - you know, the important part. To see this done away with so trivially is sad.

That's even a term for it.

I find it particularly funny because when I was single, I saw a lot of women whose Tinder bios included (or consisted of) "swipe left if you're a Tory/if you voted Leave". You're outright instructing men on which specific beliefs they need to fake to get into your pants!

Approximately no one dates based on politics. Everyone of both sexes looks for someone attractive, and the smarter ones in addition look for someone who they can have a pleasant time with and build a life together with.

Someone who turns their dating profile into a political screed is going to have a harder time forming relationships, but that's because they're revealing themselves to be an unpleasant person, not because of mismatches in political philosophy. A man who raves about Kamala and rants about Trump all the time is going to turn off even the most hardcore Democratic woman, and that's true regardless of the sexes and political valences involved.

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

I think that this is an oversimplification.

I think most Americans would not date a KKK member, a Stalinist or a Taliban. There is a certain (subjective) Overton window. Personally, I would filter less on who a partner supports than on why a partner supports them. There is a big difference between supporting GWB despite gitmo and supporting him because of gitmo.

Some disagreements are more emotionally charged than others. I would totally date an anti-nuclear woman -- I may believe that she is mistaken about what we need to get rid of fossil fuels, but that is hardly a moral failing. (Perhaps being pro-nuclear feels less excusable from the other side, though.)

Other disagreements are the opposite: abortion is always a hot-button topic, "baby murderers" vs "handmaid's tale".

Some beliefs, political or otherwise, indicate an epistemological incompatibility. Or, phrased less politely, I basically consider some beliefs crazy. Believing in Nazism is excusable if you are a kid raised in the third Reich, but if you were raised in post-WW2 USA, it is a red flag. Likewise, if you believe that Trump, once elected, will succeed in turning the US into a Fuehrerstaat, that would be a red flag. Likewise, if you believe that Trump won the 2020 election, and the deep state conspired to steal it from him.

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

"If I get pregnant, will my partner support me in getting an abortion?" is definitely something (some) women consider in their dating prospects. Although, there's certainly some amount of filtering by living in a city/more liberal area and assuming that's sufficient.

I do have friends who are single women in more conservative areas for job reasons who have pretty much given up on dating until they move elsewhere because their possible dating pool of non-conservative men is basically just their coworkers (since any liberal not stuck there by the job moves to a bigger city).

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

A quick Google search will reveal that "couples who support different political parties" is in the 25-30% range, and I've seen as low as 5% for a straight "Republican/Democrat" couple.

Basically everyone LGBT is going to care about politics, for fairly obvious reasons. Only 5% of the population, sure, but I think a smart person could reasonably extrapolate how "someone I can have a pleasant time with" might turn on politics in both directions.

Approximately no one dates based on politics.

Leftists disqualifying potential romantic partners for not being sufficiently leftist is absolutely a thing.

yeah. funnily enough, this scenario has kinda happened to me in real life. I'm not planning to vote because (a) don't live in a swing state and (b) don't have a strong preference either way. But when I say that to single ladies they hate it. they demand that I vote. I wonder what would happen if I was like "ok, i'll go vote for trump then..." maybe they would like that better?

I got dumped a few weeks ago, and while I there where some other issues I don’t think she could see past the fact that I’m not a progressive

Just say you don't talk about politics and/or that it's none of their buisiness. It is socially acceptable to berate people for not voting, and it is socially acceptable to berate people for voting Republican, but it is not (yet) socially acceptable to berate people into telling who they voted for.

Im pretty sure that if i said that, they'd instantly guess that im voting republican (or some weird libertaruan 3rd party)

And in many cases, ‘some weird libertarian third party’ is itself bad enough

I recognize my demographics and interests make it much more visible to me, but as existence proofs go…

Try it and report back. Perhaps this is one of those "shit tests" I hear so much from the Red Pill folks about.

I can't imagine a single man who would react in the way the campaign would want them to.

Lots of liberal men would react the way the campaign wants them to.

The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.

A lot of advertising works that way. McDonald's commercials aren't designed to get vegans to eat at McDonald's. They're designed to get people who already like McDonald's to think "oh hey, I should get McDonald's for lunch today".

EDIT: I missed the part about the ad spending being targeted at women. That's utterly bizarre and I don't know what the play is there. I watched the ad itself, it says "Don't get popped." at the end. The man is the one who got popped. Men are at risk of being popped, not women. There is no possible coherent way for this ad to be targeted at women.

Maybe the message they're trying to impart to women is "no self-respecting woman would date a man who refuses to vote, no matter how physically attractive or financially viable he was. Be like the women in this ad and don't give politically disengaged fuckbois the time of day." And then if it became common knowledge that women as a group considered voting a rule-in criterion for any prospective partners, single men would adjust their behaviour accordingly.

That seems like the steelman to me, too. And from my experience this actually works, in the sense of a) directly benefitting the left parties through making some men outright change their voting and b) making coordination between members of other parties difficult, since they risk ruining their dating prospects if doing so in public. Though as @jeroboam notices, it usually does not benefit the women themselves.

The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.

Right. I note that they don't ask the man who he's going to vote for - they ask whether he's going to vote. They ask him if he "has a plan" to vote (which sounds weird to me, because you shouldn't need a plan beyond "rock up to a polling place", but maybe it's playing on ideas about voter suppression?). It's turning out the base, not persuading unsure voters.

They ask him if he "has a plan" to vote (which sounds weird to me, because you shouldn't need a plan beyond "rock up to a polling place", but maybe it's playing on ideas about voter suppression?)

It is because when you ask someone about how they plan to vote, it takes them from an abstract vague thought of voting as "I like candidate John and hope he wins" into thinking concretely of how they will commit the physical act of voting. Without that step a lot of people won't actually go vote. I've seen races decided by literally one family going to the polls instead of staying home.

Do they know the correct date? Will they have time to go before work? After? Need to request time off? Be out of town at their cousin's wedding and need to early vote or vote by mail? Where is the voting booth anyway? Can they walk or drive themselves to the polls or will they need a ride?

Imagine if you and a bunch of your boys were like "You know what? We should all go to Yellowstone." If one of you looks at the best month to visit Yellowstone, starts pushing everyone to see if they can take off work during that month, finds some hotels, plans how you will get there, makes sure everybody is saving up and puts their vacation request in, etc it will probably actually happen. Otherwise "we should all go to Yellowstone" is going to just be an idle notion rattling in skulls for decades that never happens.

t. veteran campaigner

If the ad is actually targeted at men, maybe the "has a plan to vote" verbiage is to make it sound meaningful, agentic, and even heroic. You make a plan to found a business, or win a war, or build a home. If you just say "are you going to vote," it makes it sound like all you are doing is filling in a bubble on a sheet that has approximately zero chance of changing anything.

You need a plan to vote if you're an hourly worker who needs to put in for time off in order to get to a polling place at a time when you can vote. Or wake up early. Or go immediately to get in line after you get off work.

That makes sense in the US context - I'm Australian, so here voting is always on Saturday and legally compulsory, so if you work on Saturday, it is very likely that your workplace will make arrangements for everybody to go and vote. Or failing that, early voting is relatively easy here. I understand that voting is usually more of a hassle in America?

Varies wildly depending on where you live.

But the biggest thing in my mind is just that if you're not THAT attached to the idea you just might not get to it. Sleep in so you don't get to it first thing before work, didn't ask off work so you can't go until after, uh oh I have to go to the bank/mechanic/whatever. For some portion of people it might slip through the cracks.

Keep in mind that as of last week 800,000 ballots were already cast in PA. We're watching the strategy in the 8th inning of a baseball game in which neither we as the audience nor the players or the managers know the score or what happened in the earlier innings.

Well voting always happens on weekdays in America for one. Polling places usually stay open until around 8pm, but that still might be cutting it close depending on your work schedule, and unless you're a white collar professional you might have difficulty getting time off from work to go vote. In terms of actual physical access to polling places, most people will have at least one relatively close by, but some people might have to travel longer.

Or you can just do a mail-in.

There's no set closing time, even based on state?

Here, for instance, polls always close at 6 PM, in every state. I believe if you are in the line (the website says "still in the polling place", but since the place may be outside or split between several buildings, e.g. at a school, it is usually interpreted to mean anybody who's present and wishes to vote) at 6 PM they will stay open just long enough to empty the line, but no more will be admitted. In my experience (having worked as a polling official), it is extremely rare for that to matter, and usually at 6 PM there is nobody around any more.

Thus my usual experience of voting, when I'm not working at the polls, is to stroll down the road on Saturday and usually I can be in and out in five minutes.

I believe within a state there’s one set closing time, but different states can have different closing times.

We also have the rule here that if you’re in line before the closing time, they won’t kick you out.

Depends on your state--it's all very decentralized in the US. I received an absentee ballot, and the only real difficult part was getting through the annoyance at having to vote for over a dozen different offices and two dozen different propositions.

Men are at risk of being popped, not women.

If you extend getting 'popped' to the broader concept of social exclusion then women are absolutely susceptible to this. More so they would be more sensitive to the idea too.

To simplify, the message is 'if you don't sign up to vote (for kamala) then you will be socially rejected', but its sugarcoated with 'you have the power to do this to high status men' so it doesn't cause anxiety in the message's recipients.

Edit: There's also an element of 'thinking past the sale' where there is a presumption that the group consensus is already 'its low status not to sign up to vote (for kamala)'

the message is 'if you don't sign up to vote (for kamala) then you will be socially rejected', but its sugarcoated with 'you have the power to do this to high status men' so it doesn't cause anxiety in the message's recipients.

You might be right. That could have been the explicit idea behind the ad. But if so, it's deeply distressing that a candidate (and/or their campaign team) who would come up with an ad like that has a legitimate chance at becoming President, and it's also distressing that people who would be receptive to an ad like that are a large enough percentage of the electorate that their opinion matters.

This just feels like the absolute worst kind of petty high school drama bullshit. All pretense of engaging in actual object-level politics has been dropped. Only overt status games remain.

Funnily enough I find it far more upsetting that they're shoving politics into personal romantic relationships than that they're turning political discourse into a status game.

The second part of the first question is literally "how much do you make?"

As far as the ad is concerned, personal romantic relationships and status games are literally the same thing.

My point isn't about shoving petty status games into romantic relationships (which as you point out were always there), it was about shoving politics there.

it's deeply distressing

It so is, these are the same kind of people who ask for height requirements right in their profiles or judge based on what brand of high-tech-slop your phone is. The worst kind of superficial narcisists, and the trend is for their kind to increase.

I'm surprised no one has commented on the racial angle. The target audience is specifically black women, who are being urged to pressure black men to vote (for Harris, obviously).

Harris is having trouble getting support from black men - she will obviously still get the majority of their votes, but her polling is relatively low for that demographic. A lot of black men seem to be actively turned off by her. Not being a black man, I can only speculate, but I suspect a lot of black men, even liberal ones, find the combination of resembling their wine mom auntie who tells them to pull their pants up, being a woman whose career seems to have mostly advanced by blowing the right men, and being a former prosecutor, is making her a hard sell when her campaign naturally assumed that black men would prefer a black woman to Donald Trump. (There is also the fact that her "blackness" has a bit of an asterisk.)

I remain actually shocked at the tone-deafness of the Harris campaign ads, though. Do they not have any heterosexual men on staff?

Even aside from the laughable cringe of "full-throated endorsement" from guys who "eat carburetors" and... give bear hugs, and fat black women turning down a 6-figure, 3-6s black Chad (as if), it just screams weakness. "Vote for her! No, really, vote for her! Vote for her.... please? VOTE FOR HER GODDAMIT!"

being a woman whose career seems to have mostly advanced by blowing the right men

Got any sort of source for that? I'll admit I live in a liberal bubble, but that's a new one on me.

Her climbing through the patronage of Willie Brown is well known. The rest may be hearsay, but she was certainly part of the celebrity/politician axis in California.

I'm completely flabbergasted by their advertising. It reminds me a bit of Hillary Clinton going to Utah--like, WTF? She's not going to get the votes of stereotypically masculine men, but also she doesn't need the votes of stereotypically masculine men. I get the temptation to try to claim "cross demographic victory" as a mandate to swing for the fences in her presumptive legislative agenda, I understand the culture-building angle of "let's make ideological conservatism extinct." But conservatism is already doing tons of work toward extincting itself, and trying to urge it along only strengthens the perception that partisanship is a fight for ingroup survival rather than a neighborly disagreement over the optimal tax rate.

I don't think Trump can win this, ultimately--but I've been wrong about that before, and if I'm wrong about it again, he will owe Kamala's campaign team a thank-you card.

But conservatism is already doing tons of work toward extincting itself

Huh?

Yeah aren’t American conservatives one of the only non-hyper-religious groups left with an above replacement fertility rate? (only like 2.3 if I remember right but still)

This does not matter as much as you think, because politics is not genetic.

The argument I have heard is that an effective administration requires skilled bureaucrats, i.e. university educated elites, and that the Trump administration had trouble attracting such people.

Well, taken as a realistic depiction of a speed date, it's ludicrous. Certainly my experience dating has been that you don't talk about politics at all, especially not when first impressions are on the table. Occasionally it is worth soberly reminding ourselves that most people find discussion of politics actively unpleasant, and avoid it wherever possible. There are minorities who are interested in politics, and I'm sure that the sorts of people who make and approve political ads are disproportionately drawn from those minorities, but most people don't like politics, and don't bring it up unless they feel they have to.

Aside from the realism of the scenario itself... I suppose I think there's potentially an interesting strategy here, particularly in light of the increasing gender gap on politics. Women do swing a bit more to the left on average, and men a bit more to the right. But men and women usually want to attract each other. "Come over to my side, it'll make you more attractive to the opposite sex" is a crass but perhaps effective strategy. You can see the echo of this strategy in those "don't be weird" ads, portraying right-wing men as repulsive and unattractive to women. Insofar as being attractive to women is something a lot of men value, is it a useful tactical approach? Perhaps.

(One might wonder a bit about the opposite, but I think female attractiveness tends to work differently to male, and certainly is presented or constructed differently socially, so it's not a mirror image. And in general I'd expect to see less of this just because there's less conservative media in general, and significantly less of it aimed at women. Evie is trying her best, but it's a different field, and in general I think women's attractiveness tends to be more self-focused, more you-are-the-belle-of-the-ball, whereas men's attractiveness tends to be more other-focused, look-at-all-the-people-you-can-attract. So strategies have to be different.)

I think the core issue with this ad (at least if intended to target men) is that men typically fall into one of two groups: those who don't struggle with dating (either from great success or being in a monogamous relationship) and those who do and are frustrated. Men in the former category have no real reason to want to shift their political activities for greater sexual access, and the latter might, but they really aren't gonna like a gaggle of women salivating over a tall, fit, (moderately) successful man and then rejecting him for the minor sin of not caring about politics. Going with a short, chubby cashier who suddenly starts getting all the attention would better target the category who cares, but it'd strain realism too much, I guess.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend. My theory here is that Kamala is not offering a threat here, but selling a power fantasy. If you're a woman, vote for Harris, and you'll have a parade of men approaching you, who you can reject at will.

No no no no no. This is the Order of the White Feather strategy. The target audience for the ad is young women who are already committed to Kamala. The intended outcome is not to get the target audience to vote (they already intend to vote), but to get the target audience to pressure the men in their life to vote for Kamala.

The surprising bit is that the Harris campaign isn't targeting men with this but women, as indicated by ad targeting spend.

This makes a lot more sense. If directed at men its hamfisted and counterproductive. If (in)directed at women though...

They can't directly attack a woman in the ad (without turning them off), but they can show a very attractive man getting his social status destroyed. The message could be 'if it could happen to HIM, what do you think would happen to YOU?', but it's sufficiently buried under the power fantasy of rejecting a high status man to not get rejected by the women consuming it.

Biggest issue is probably to make sure the ad doesn't get viewed by men, but even if they did see it, were high status 6 figure men going to vote Kamala anyway?

Edit: Some random twitter guy says there are different versions of this ad that they're just ALPHA/BETA testing.

were high status 6 figure men going to vote Kamala anyway?

I imagine probably most people in liberal professions will; I guess COVID might have hurt them a bit, but I'm pretty sure doctors are still high status?

I feel like if the Trump campaign released such an ad, there'd be 18 dozen different articles up by now about how it's completely racist.

I don't think even the Trump campaign would be so crass to have a board of men rating a woman for her weight and cup size, liking her, and then dismissing her when she said she wasn't voting Trump. It's just a really gross image. Somehow, he manages to be classier than that very low bar (or at least knows how wildly counterproductive it would be).

The Trump ad would have the board of men liking her, then she says she wasn't voting Trump, then Trump himself appears and says "But we like her anyway!", possibly making a gesture with his hands indicating her nice body or something.

In a fever dream Trump's ad she-of-the-hack-tuah would be spitting on that thang.

One thing that helps Trump is that he's lazy. He just wouldnl't bother to experiment with weird ads like that, and wouldn't hire the sort of campaign mananagers that would either.

I really enjoyed the use of emojis in that transcription.

Kind of a weird ad. Someone's first in-person questions to a prospective date including "how much money do you earn" is pretty tacky, so despite it obviously being not real the only effect of the video on me was that I judged the female characters quite negatively. Also why would you need to ask how tall someone is when they're standing right in front of you?

I don't watch TV though, so maybe this is just standard for these kinds of dating shows. And I did like popping balloons to indicate when something is a turn-off. I could get into a showwhere the women carry increasingly impractical noise-making devices they trigger when prospective suitors do something unattractive.

"In the evenings I like to unwind by painting Warhammer 40k figurines."

BRAAAAAAAAP

I really enjoyed the use of emojis in that transcription.

The emoji in triplicate really works. Singular is visually small and doesn't leave the same imprint.

"What do you do?" sounds like a very reasonable 'getting to know you question' of the sort that tends to come up early on first dates if not before, but uh, "how much money do you make?" makes her sound like a whore and talking about politics that early is just crass.

This ad is tone deaf, but Kamala's campaign has released a true torrent of tone-deaf effluence recently, see the pre-recorded video for the Al Smith dinner(was there a single person who liked it?) so I'm guessing this is a Kamala problem just generally.

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