In the late 1990s, the white supremacist bootboys at Stormfront decided to start their own online dating service, obviously, with the express goal of meeting some cute bootgirls via the Internet. I don’t imagine it’s all that easy to find a mate, let alone a date, when your musical tastes gravitate towards Skrewdriver, your bookshelf consists solely of Mein Kampf and you want to dress up as Francis Parker Yockey for Halloween.
Where is that isolated Odin worshiper in Pennsylvania going to find a nice girl he can take home to mama? For certain people, navigating the dating minefield can prove to be a real dilemma, but it’s getting easier, even for guys taking selfies in front of the Confederate flag holding shotguns…
Match.com. Christian Mingle. J-Date. Russian brides. Asian ladies. Vegans. Freegans. Hepatitis C carriers. Furries. It can get pretty specific. There’s a dating service for practically everyone now, even the most repellent people on the planet, like libertarians and the lowest of the low, Ayn Rand fanatics. Being a self-identifying “Objectivist” can be tragic and socially awkward thing in the “real world.” Where would that aspiring John Galt in Pawnee ever meet up with a Dagny of his own to throw up against the wall in fulfillment of her quasi-rape fantasy?
It’s as hard as Rearden steel to meet that certain special someone who wants a selfish lover!
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Hancock is a proponent of Russian-American author Ayn Rand’s philosophy of capitalism and self-interest. At age 30, he had already been “looking for a very specific kind of woman” for three years when Google searches led him to the Atlasphere, an Ayn Rand appreciation site with a dating component.
There, he found his dream date: a woman who also wanted to do logical cost-benefit analyses of every decision.
You hear that? Oh baby, let the good times roll!
Atlasphere founder Joshua Zader, 40, of Phoenix, says niche sites are more efficient than broader sites such as OKCupid or Match.com.
“If you assume that maybe 1 out of 500 people is a serious fan of Ayn Rand’s novels, on a normal dating site you have a 1 in 500 chance of someone sharing the same basic values,” he says. “On the Atlasphere, every profile shows you what you want,” he says. The 10-year-old site has seen a spike in membership in recent years—it has more than 16,000 dating profiles—after two “Atlas Shrugged” movies were released, says Mr. Zader, a Web developer. User handles include “Atlas in Arlington” and “ObjectivelyHot.”
So it’s not just fans of shitty fiction with a pseudo-philosophical component, it’s people who like shitty films based on that shitty pseudo-philosophical fiction.
Ms. Betit-Hancock, a schools special-needs coordinator, says she had been “kind of freaking out,” wondering how she’d find someone “rational” to date. She met a man at a meet-up group for fans of libertarian former congressman Ron Paul, but “he couldn’t explain why he supported Ron Paul and why the ideas behind his policies made sense.”
Because they don’t make any fucking sense to begin with, that’s why!
Mr. Hancock, an engineer, says he specifically wrote his profile to “scare people who weren’t serious Objectivists away.”
I don’t have anything to add to that. I’m all snarked out now.
Over at Vice, Dave Schilling trolled the Atlasphere. Read his story here. Part of his online profile, below:
