Public speaker tells Texas high schoolers that ‘dateable girls know how to shut up’

People are certainly entitled to their own opinions. The First Amendment even means they are entitled to share those opinions. But, many students, parents and teachers from a Dallas-area school district believe public speaker Justin Lookadoo those privileges too far yesterday during a PTA-sponsored assembly.

Justin (pictured above) is a self-proclaimed Christian dating expert who co-authored Dateable: are you? are they? and The Dateable Rules. Among the tips he’s quick to share with teenage girls: know how to shut up, let him led and need him.

“Dateable girls know how to shut up. They don’t monopolize the conversation. They don’t tell everyone everything about themselves. They save some for later. They listen more than they gab,” Justin advises on the homepage of his “RU Dateable” website.

Meanwhile, dateable guys are instructed to “know they aren’t as sensitive as girls and that’s okay. They know they are stronger, more dangerous, and more adventurous and that’s okay. Dateable guys are real men who aren’t afraid to be guys.”

The website also features a true/false quiz to determine if you are dateable. I just went through the girl quiz and came up with the result “U R DATELESS,” which advises me to “Start talking less and listening more. Let him bring up things to talk about. Ask him questions about him. Stop talking about yourself so much. There is plenty of time for him to get to know you. Practice thinking about him and take your eyes off yourself so much.”

The reason I apparently turned up those results? I had the audacity to say I like to ask questions and would respond to his IMs. It seems worth mentioning that I am married… So someone found me “dateable.”

Parents from the Richardson, Texas school district were similarly outraged when they heard Justin was to share his “pearls of wisdom” with impressionable teens.

“I am extremely troubled by the fact that Richardson High School would bring in an ‘expert’ speaker who holds the dangerous, misogynistic views that advance a rape culture such as those expressed on his website,” Dr. Jaime Clark-Soles, mother of a RHS student and a professor at Southern Methodist University, told The Dallas Observer. “I was given no information about an unnamed speaker on an unnamed subject.”

In spite of parents’ concerns, the assembly went on as scheduled. During that time, #lookadouche began trending on Twitter… Because apparently 14- to 18-year-old students know more about dating than an “expert.”