GARY DOES NOT CHASE WOMEN

Let's do a critical reading of this Bumble profile . . .

I’m a professor whose expertise is in rhetoric, specifically a method called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which I won’t belabor in this post (if you’re into this, join us in the Facebook group or on Instagram, where we do this all day long).

For this article, we’ll focus on the profile below:

Ready? Let’s go line by line:

“Gary, 47,” who is actually “57, not 47.”

Gary just kicked off your relationship by lying to you and disrespecting your boundaries. Keep that in mind. Also, he’s trying to meet younger women, which should be taken into account as well.

He’s an attending physician who was educated at “Enough Schooling.”

Do not question Gary! If he says it’s enough, it’s enough. Here’s what makes this even funnier and more revealing: No one HAS to fill out the “Education” question on Bumble. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he could’ve just skipped it. But Gary-57-Not-47 here actually took MORE time to fill out a question he didn’t want to answer just to make the point to you that he will not be questioned. He’s above it.

He’s looking for “casual/fun,” and “if more develops, fine.”

Gary wants casual fun, with “more” being a way-distant preference. He says that more would be “fine.” I absolutely love sweet potato fries and become genuinely excited at the prospect of getting some. I think boiled sweet potatoes are “fine.” There’s a difference.

“Great relationships take time”

Gary, a single, middle-aged white man screaming at hypothetical women on a dating app, is mansplaining “relationships” to you. Listen up!

“as does avoiding mistakes & bumble has many mistakes.”

Please understand that Gray is framing you as one of the “mistakes on Bumble” before he’s even met you.

I DO NOT CHASE WOMEN.

WHO ARE YOU YELLING AT, GARY??? Seriously, this is a strange rhetorical choice. If I didn’t want to chase someone, I simply wouldn’t chase them. I wouldn’t scream “I’M NOT CHASING YOU” so that they would understand that I wasn’t chasing them. That’s actually kind of like chasing them, isn’t it?

“Busy men rest where there is peace.”

This is a new (but uninteresting) spin on the “I’m a very busy man!” rhetorical pattern, which is always a fairy tale. Women are way busier. You can learn more about it here.

If you are peaceful say hello.

Only space aliens come in peace. When men demand “peaceful women,” what they mean is “compliant women” and “women who are willing to tolerate all kinds of my bullshit.”

Conclusion: Gary is a disaster. There is not “Enough Schooling” or enough money in the universe to overcome the egregiousness of his personality flaws, I promise.

Thank you for reading this analysis . . . Keep Burning the Haystack, and Go Rhetoric!