A City Doesn't Suck Just Because You're Stupid

"He said what about Toronto ladies?"

Hey everyone, there’s a new controversial blog post to get mad about! This particular rage-freakout du jour is wildly misogynistic and narrow-minded, and it makes a poor attempt to drag down all of the women in Toronto with comments like the “women are obese” and there are “too many Asian and Indian girls.” The latter sounds like a bonus to me! But yikes, where to begin?

The article in question, titled “15 Reasons Why Toronto Is the Worst City in North America for Men,” was posted yesterday on a wildly inconsequential website called RooshV. It appears to be a follow-up to an article written by the same author entitled “15 Reasons Why Washington DC Sucks for Guys.” Interesting. Is it these cities that are sucking, or is it you, brah?

Of course, it’s always just better to let articles like this fester in the sadness of their own morally bankrupt, lukewarm bathwater—without giving them any extra attention—but the reality of viral hits and social media news feeds is that crappy articles like this will always surface in front of people's eyeballs, and then everyone will have to get mad about them. So let’s get this out of our systems now by taking a look at a couple of the more boldly offensive claims that this article makes. I won’t go through everything because then I’d be here all day.

“If you make just one mistake with a Toronto girl, you will be rejected.”

First, this whole branding of a Toronto girl is a bit problematic, don’t you think? What can really be the common denominator among an incredibly beautiful diaspora of females that Toronto—and many other multicultural cities boasts proudly—besides a common set of area codes and a mutual understanding of where the CN Tower is located? So this phrase is totally dumb already, but beyond that designation, the whole idea that women in Toronto have particularly low patience does not make sense.

What is the author’s (LOL, sorry for using that term, literary tradition) expectation here, and what defines a mistake? Well, here it is in Roosh’s words:

Your conversation has to be 100% perfect and 100% politically correct. You can’t say anything that can be remotely construed as offensive, weird, or needy. Once I told a girl that I like “feminine women” and she immediately ditched me as if I farted. In Toronto the best game is to speak like you’re a White House spokesperson.

We already know that this guy is completely unqualified to talk about what is and what isn’t politically correct, so there goes that comment. And why does a girl owe you anything because you’ve taken time out of your busy schedule writing god-awful blog posts to speak to her at a bar? You should be lucky to even be sharing a common pocket of oxygen with a female given the way you carry yourself. Also, it seems like you’re holding yourself up to some pretty sloppy and casual standards regarding your own unreachable perfectness, which is amazingly ironic given how incredibly authoritative and wildly stupid this whole article is in the first place.

Try again, homie.

“It takes a lot of work to date up.”

Sorry, what? I don’t speak “failed pick-up artist,” but I’m pretty sure I have never heard any human being in Toronto, or elsewhere, use the phrase “date up.” But fine, let’s just presume you spoke like a normal, non-mouth-breathing human being, and let’s analyze your complaint that it’s difficult to ask a woman out on a date in Toronto—even though that’s false.

Under this heading, the author states that Toronto is a “penis paradise where a woman can date a man much more attractive than she is pretty.” Seems like this guy is pretty interested in the abundance of penises and hot guys in the city. Interpret that how you will.

Recently, a very smart and attractive girl (in Toronto) was telling me about how she was going to go on a date with a guy because it was so novel that she was asked out on a date in the first place. So there’s some advice for everyone who isn’t this loser. Ask girls out for dinner. You might be surprised!

“It beats men down.”

This is the last complaint in the article, and while I could sit here and continue to run through this guy’s murky swamp of a psyche, I would rather just work towards a conclusion. If the “it” here is Toronto, and men are being beat down by the city, well, maybe that’s true of angry man-children clacking away on their dirty keyboards about why they can’t get laid—but the actual men I know in this city don’t feel that way.

They’re busy, they’re happy, they’re smart, they’re professional, they know how to speak to women in a way that isn’t just engaging in a game to get laid, and they wouldn’t spend half a second around a dude like Roosh.

Generic image of failed bar pickup.

So what’s the lesson here? Is it that Toronto is full of wonderful women who are worthy of praise? Yes, definitely. But it’s more than just Toronto.

Stop shitting on the city you live in just because you suck at living in it. There’s no way, if you have the deep-seated mental-health issues that have been detailed in this article, that you will be able to make it in any other place. Period. So don’t drag a whole city down because you suck. It’s not them, it’s you. Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

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