What Charles Manson Teaches Us About...Dating?!

There are a lot of possible reactions to the news that incarcerated mass murder Charles Manson is getting married: shock, horror, confusion, concern for his bride-to-be, annoyance that incarcerated mass murderers have more rights than LGBT people, and taking this as a sign we should model our dating behavior off of Charles Manson. Wait. What was that last one?

Yes, unfortunately, it's true that there is at least one deluded soul out there — a blogger and Return of the Kings columnist who goes by Troublemaker — who thinks that Charles Manson's upcoming nuptials are a sign that the men of the world need to take a page out of Manson's book and stop being "nice guys." To be clear, he is not advocating that men emulate Manson in other ways, such as, say, starting a cult with a fondness for white supremacy and LSD, trying to incite a race war by committing mass murder with your followers, and ultimately being responsible for the deaths of up to 35 people. No, Troublemaker just thinks we should learn a thing or two from him about how to get women.

"If you consider yourself a nice guy, is THIS enough to finally bring you to the dark side?" he asks his readers. And by "dark side" he means using pickup artist techniques and generally being a jerk as a way of "getting" women. (In his world, both this and "dark side" are apparently positive things). Because, he argues, if an 80-year-old guy with a swastika on his forehead can manage to make an attractive 26-year-old fall in love with him, that is clear evidence that women actually like jerks. So you should become one.

"This is even beyond the usual sob story of chicks chasing jerks," Troublemaker opines. "This woman is just an extreme case, but her actions in this case largely represent the way woman act as a whole. There is just no resisting the panty moistening allure of the bad boy for them."

While the idea of using Charles Manson as a source of any sort of information about dating is so ridiculous it's laughable, this overall attitude (which is incredibly pervasive in some circles) that mistreating women a correct form of interaction and that women in fact want to be mistreated, is actually pretty disturbing.

To say nothing of the fact that any time you're treating women as so homogenous that a single example is enough to justify a blanket attitude towards the whole gender, it's probably a sign that you no longer see women as individual, fully autonomous human beings. Just throwing that out there.

Seriously, though, you're suggesting we all use Charles Manson as a positive example? Seriously? I'm just going to go ahead and say that any time you're using Charles Manson as a way to support your worldview, your worldview is probably wrong.

Overall, though, David Futrelle probably had the best takeaway from the situation. If our dear friends over in the manosphere are going to start emulating Charles Manson, he says, "I actually sort of hope that would-be pickup artists start tattooing swastikas on their foreheads. It would make them a lot easier to identify at a glance."

Amen to that.

Image: Giphy