No one is ever obligated to date anyone else. But that doesn't make it okay to criticize people for their personality traits (which don't hurt you.)

>No one is ever obligated to date anyone else.

In lots of social systems, including the US up to some date, they are.

>But that doesn't make it okay to criticize people for their personality traits (which don't hurt you.)

Isn't that a critique of a personality trait?

And why would it be bad to criticize people for their personality traits? Personality traits are what inform people's actions and behavior.

We're not talking about harmful personality traits. Talking about marriage on the second date doesn't hurt anyone. Writing an article about the "odd" guy who did so is hurtful and unnecessary. It's not much better than a guy writing an article about how he went on a date with a woman with a big nose (the nerve of her!)

And if this were an article about increasing your dating success, it might be good advice to try to package what you've got in a more flattering way. But this article is about the opposite: Silicon Valley men not wanting to date.

>We're not talking about harmful personality traits. Talking about marriage on the second date doesn't hurt anyone.

But she didn't say it's hurting, just that it put her off. Shouldn't people be allowed to say what puts them off in other people they're trying to date?

If anything, this can be helpful information so that people in dates don't get pushy (towards marriage etc) in the first dates, before the other even know them or feel they've clicked, which is good advise in general.

>Writing an article about the "odd" guy who did so is hurtful and unnecessary.

But there's no naming who the guy is, and the name of the girl has been altered. It's not like anybody would recognize themselves as being pointed at.

>Isn't that a critique of a personality trait?

No, it's a critique of a behavior. If you don't like someone, that's your right, but keep it to yourself. Going on the Internet and broadcasting that you dislike various personality traits and then applying them to a population is immature at best and mean spirited at worst.

Every outgroup-is-awful rant reveals more about the ranter than about the outgroup.

That would depend on whether the outgroup is actually awful or not.

How about "neo-nazi's are awful". Does that tell much about the ranter?

It does.

Unless the content of the rant is literally the phrase, "neo-nazi's are awful", the rant will present arguments, anecdotes, feelings etc. that reveal the ranter's priorities and principles.

It's not in the what, it's in the why.

>the rant will present arguments, anecdotes, feelings etc. that reveal the ranter's priorities and principles.

And those "priorities and principles" could be very well accepted and approved by almost everybody priorities and principles, like "don't harm others", "jews and blacks are not inferior", "violence is not the right way to solve problems" etc, which don't tell anything particular about the ranter.