Am I too Right-wing to f ind love?
She says Joe Biden’s senile, only Lefties like lockdowns and complains that men today are insufferably woke
THE last time a man kissed me passionately, he stopped to say he was very passionate about politics. ‘Me too!’ I declared, before asking him if he didn’t find it fascinating that Americans were about to vote in a President with dementia. Big mistake. Huge! He looked at me as if I had just admitted I was pregnant with Donald Trump’s baby.
For four years, I’d listened to political obsessives debate whether the leader of the free world was mad or merely part-insane. Yet when it came to vote in his successor in late 2020, no one questioned the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden. Why? Because in a woke world, you need to be Ms Right-On to find Mr Right.
The exception that proves this rule is actor-turned-activist Laurence Fox, who this week announced his engagement to Arabella Fleetwood Neagle, an active supporter of his anti-woke agenda. But for the rest of the antilockdown lovelorn, the struggle is very real.
I have torpedoed all chance of a date in the post-Covid era. Essentially, the only man alive who won’t judge me for reporting on illegal protests and questioning the efficacy of face masks is Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens and, alas, he’s taken.
The first thing any potential beau does when assessing your desirability these days is Google your name and — if he’s clever — run your profile photographs through its image search. Any cursory search of ‘Emily Hill’ brings up an ever lengthening list of outlandish opinion columns I’ve fired off, including ‘The real epidemic is one of stupidity!’, in which I bemoan the fact that vaccines do not seem to have ended the Covid crisis as we were told they would, and ‘How ironic that the deranged Twitterati think censoring Trump is democratic’.
When signing up to dating apps, no one has to state useful information for the purposes of love and marriage — such as romantic intentions, STIs or past criminal convictions — but you do have to fill out a profile stating your political persuasion and religious beliefs, and get a badge if you are vaccinated.
Yesterday, when I downloaded dating app Hinge, the first man who wanted to match with me announced that he was Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim — in other words, so woke I have no idea how he sleeps. You’d think the app would make you pick one faith. It doesn’t.
‘I’ve noticed older men, in particular, put that their interests include Black Lives Matter, environmentalism and LGBTQIA,’ says one of my fortysomething friends who is looking for love with an older man. ‘I’m pretty sure they didn’t know what any of that meant two years ago, so when I find them writing it I wonder if they’re actually into it or think it will impress me because I’m younger.’
But advertising your woke credentials to enhance your Casanova status is such a successful strategy now that ‘wokefishing’ has become a phenomenon.
Essentially, single men dangle their progressive opinions (or at least, those they claim to have) in the dating pool to reel in a partner. On Hinge, members have to fill out prompts for conversation-starters and within minutes I’d scrolled through potential matches with opening statements such as ‘I won’t shut up about how capitalism is to blame for everything’ and ‘Best travel story — I got deported from Cuba because I was photographing too much. Until that point, I’d thought it was a communist Utopia.’ One chap I came across listed his hobby as ‘being open-minded’.
Before the pandemic, I thought I was Left-wing because I felt that liberal, apparently Leftie Sweden had the right idea about any number of social issues.
Post-2020, the country’s insistence on preserving the civil liberties of its citizens and sticking to the pre-Covid science regarding how to approach a pandemic has left me more convinced by the Swedish model than ever.
Yet because refusing to vigorously lock down is an anti-woke position to take, my admiration for Sweden now makes me the sort of rabid, Right-wing extremist no man wants to be seen dead with. Woke has taken over the world and anyone who won’t be woke — for whatever reason — must shut up or become persona non grata.
Virtue-signalling conceals a multitude of sins (that’s why it’s so popular with hypocrites and liars), so I am convinced most of this woke posturing is bogus. Like many women, I have found myself accidentally dating men who hate our whole sex.
‘If a man declares he’s a feminist on his profile, what he means is he’ll ask for explicit verbal consent to everything he does to you — except when it comes to ghosting you,’ another single friend explains (by ‘ghosting’ she means disappearing off the face of the planet after, say, the fourth date, which may have been more intimate than the first).
‘One of these men even wrote it in his bio, quite explicitly: “Feminist on the streets, misogynist in the sheets”. I shudder for girls who fall for that.’
Other woke terminology men include on their profiles refers to their interest in ‘polyamory’ and ‘open relationships’. Previously, this was known as ‘sleeping around’ and ‘cheating’.
‘What if I told you that I was into ethical non-monogamy?’ a typical lure will read from a man with long hair, wearing pink nail varnish, who has his fishing tackle tucked into a pair of pants illustrated with a wolf’s head — as if that’s the best offer a girl’s ever going to get.
Indeed, the only practice the woke frown on, sexually speaking, is commitment. That is a conservative value and as unconscionable on a dating app as it would be on any other form of social media.
Once upon a time, falling in love and getting married meant you were off the market, but thanks to woke innovations there is no longer any safety in a wedding ring. There is even an app, called Feeld, specifically for so-called ‘ethical’ threesomes.
Not all men here in Britain want to treat you like a human sex doll, obviously, but the ‘Never Kissed A
‘The only man alive who won’t judge me is Peter Hitchens’
‘Single men dangle their opinions to reel in a partner’
Tory’ movement — a slogan that increasingly appears beneath dating profiles — appears to have driven many actual Tories offline.
‘I need to steer clear of alumni of the woke nurseries Goldsmiths and SOAS [both institutions within London University],’ says one Brexiteer, who now sits around in rural pubs with a copy of The Spectator sticking out of his pocket like a flurry of peacock feathers, hoping to meet a lady.
‘My objection isn’t that woke people want to do good,’ he adds, and I agree with him. ‘They do, and that’s great. We all want to end racism and sexism. But they build whole personalities around being more woke than the next person, and the last thing I want on a date is a recitation from the liturgy of post-colonial studies.’
The truth is that forming relationships on the basis solely of physical appearance or political leanings isn’t likely to result in love that lasts. Last October, one UK study found that couples who meet on dating apps are six times more likely to get divorced within the first three years of marriage.
At least they made it that far, I thought when I read that. If you’re not woke these days, you’re lucky to even get a first date. As for a second, well, it wasn’t to be for me and my passionate kisser.
I still think Joe Biden’s senile and that means I’m still single.