Sunday, November 06, 2016

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.