Kevin Samuels Is Wrong

 

You might have noticed a particular podcaster named Kevin Samuels making a rise in the extended black internet-tainment universe and dating podcast sphere. He is famous for

1. Giving women a numeric ranking that he considers objective (with Beyonce as an 8 by the way). Also, you can’t say 7 because everyone says 7.

2. Telling women whether or not they are “high value” based on if they can marry a man who makes $300k a year because, according to his calculations, that is what it takes to live comfortably on one income.

3. Telling women over 27 to get a dog and prepare to die alone if they are not 120lbs and an 8 or 9.

 

This is literally what he says. All the time. He used to make videos coaching men how to dress, what cologne to wear, and how to talk to girls but he went viral for telling a woman she was ‘average at best’ so that is what he does now.

 

Now, why did I listen to a dizzying amount of him, and also why is he talking to Nicki Minaj?

Because he’s really popular.

My brother recommended that our dear single sister watch Kevin Samuels’ videos for dating advice. I started watching one with her and was so offended that my actual brother would suggest this as advice for his flesh and blood sister that I could not believe it. There had to be some good advice in there somewhere. He can’t really just be telling women that they are fat and ugly and will die alone? Then, I was shocked that even though this is all he does, every broadcast there are women that still call in. Many times he only accepts calls from female callers and there is always someone, usually a dozen or so black women asking to be ranked or if they are good enough to get a high-value man.

Here is why Kevin Samuels is wrong (and it’s not just because Beyonce is a 10)

Photo by Larry Crayton on Unsplash

1. You do not need to make $300k to support a family with a house spouse.

The median household income in the US is $67k. That is how much most families live on and it’s usually two incomes. Not $300k, not even $100k. You do not have to marry someone making six figures to live off of one income. That notion is simply not based in reality and is the foundation of all of his systems. From here he says that less than 15% of men make six figures and less than 10% make $300k so you need to be in the top 10 percent of women to deserve a man making that kind of money. A top 10 woman is a ‘10′ and that’s not about education or achievements, it’s about being prettier than Beyonce in her prime, 120lbs, and feminine (not argumentative). The internal logic of it falls apart when you take away that absurd income requirement.

I know that a lot of people from bigger cities may think the numbers for income that I am quoting are low but statistically, across the US they are not. People like to pretend they are richer than they really are. We are constantly advertised luxury and we imagine ourselves as we will someday be once we make it big. If we come back to planet earth where our parents live and look at how much we were raised on, very few of us (especially black people) lived like that. We are talking about life like a sitcom not like a music video.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

2. Men who make good money are not as picky as Kevin Samuels is portraying.

A little story here. I went to a party with my husband and his friends all between 23 and 27. They were really breaking balls when they heard one of them was only making $60k. I know literally none of my friends from college were making money like that at that age but all of these guys were. My point is that this is a party full of people who are making money that is statistically enough to support a household and there was not a single 10 in the building.

Half of the guys are UNABLE to get or keep girlfriends. The other half is dating/ married to regular girls because they are regular guys who think normal girls are pretty. Men (especially anyone you’d actually want to date) don’t immediately get an inflated sense of self-importance when they bump up a tax bracket. They are the same guys they were before and they probably want normal things like for a pretty girl to like them back and to start a family with her someday.

Photo by Say Cheeze Studios on Unsplash

3. Men don’t get asked to rank themselves

I don’t think most men are walking around with a number that they attribute to themselves. If they do, it certainly isn’t just a flat salary-to-ranking ratio as Kevin Samuels acts like it is. Even if men rank themselves and even if it was a salaried based ranking, Samuels doesn’t just ask a man how much he makes and say, “You make $40,000? well you are a 4, prepare to die alone”. Only women are valued on this flat system. Men really base their ranking of themselves on how effectively they’re able to talk to girls. In other videos, before he was talking about high value, he was talking about alphas and describing high-value men as the few men that everyone wants. That’s what makes a man a 10, it’s being highly desired by women.

This brings up a paradoxical point that very few high-value men are listening to his podcast because the men that already have a lot of attention are not spending their time watching dating podcast on how to get attention. They have girlfriends, friends, and probably work a ton. Even with a monetary basis for high value, my brother who sent the first video to me was not making 6 figures for the past 10 years like Kevin Samuels said a high-value man should. However, because the focus is on women men can brush away the criticism that could be applied to them because they don’t rank themselves. I’ll tell you what my brother did, he looked at his wife and ranked her and based his ranking on hers. He said she is an NC 10 and that’s what I deserve because I’m going to be a high-value man.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

4. You don’t have to be a 10 to marry someone making good money or to be a house spouse.

I’ll keep it 100 with you, my married sister and I have been over 200lbs our entire adult lives (ironically our single sister is 127lbs). On Kevin Samuels’ show, he would cue the tuba music here to indicate we are fatties. We wore our first full face of makeup on our respective wedding days, we are not into fashion, we do our own hair. We do not make cosmetic appearances a central part of our lives, we were taught we are beautiful as we are. We are not 10s and do not try to be. Yet my big sister has been a stay-at-home wife for almost a decade now. She got married at 26 and spent the years 27–35 barefoot and pregnant with her 5 children. The oldest is 8 years old, youngest is 9 months. This woman is the happiest person I know. A buoy on the sea of life.

She is 12 years older than me, but we look very similar and are frequently mistaken for each other. I am married and even though I am currently working, my husband and I entirely live on his income. My husband does make six figures and he is under 25 so this is the floor and not the ceiling. As he once put it “our budget does not have a minimum amount of money for you to make”. My earnings are for vacations and making extra payments to get out of the little bit of debt we have.

Kevin Samuels probably would give me and my sister somewhere around a 4. He would tell us we are unworthy and to expect nothing. My sister’s life, supported by a blue-collar black man driving a forklift, does not exist in that podcast. If we called in to talk to him about how to get the lives we have right now, he would tell us it is impossible. That’s why I hate him because he is removing hope from people who don’t just need hope but have it. It is artificial hopelessness being instilled as advice.

Photo by Kashawn Hernandez on Unsplash

Kevin Samuels doesn’t talk about love or families or relationships or anything you would actually want.

His podcast is about transactional breeding partnerships and what social stratification to base them on. It’s terrible advice and does not correlate to life here on earth. From having binged literally every video he had made up until February 2021 (when I had to stop because it was making me crazy) I suspect the main audience is women trying to understand men, men boosting their confidence by demeaning women, the odd hate watcher (moi), people who enjoy roast comedy and those who cannot look away from a train crash. Ladies, please divert thine eyes.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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