DABA, Dating A Banker Anonymous, is either evil genius, or evil garbage. Questions have been raised as to the truthfulness of the site (are there really girls so shallow that they have to complain about not being able to spend as much of their boyfriend’s/husband’s money?). Given the fact that the site explicitly states “all stories sent will be infused with our own special brand of DABA Girl humor,” you might believe that these stories are embellished in order to capitalize on the abhorrent shock the blog has caused.
My initial reaction to the first DABA posting was that these girls cleverly banded together to form a distraction from what their FBFs (Financial Guy Boyfriends) were mishandling on Wall Street. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the Wall Street blokes that are being torn apart by their “I’m not a gold digger” girlfriends force me to sympathize with the people that have personally and professionally had a negative impact on my life.
But then, after coverage of the DABA blog grew and it became more and more apparent that these were women that truly believed they were in the right to complain about their Bergdorf budgets being cut and the <gasp> horror of cooking dinner at home with their “beloved” instead of eating at Megu. Claiming that the difference between a DABA girl and “Bottle Poppin’ Girls” (these are women that the FBFs bring out when entertaining clients with bottle service. Did the whoosh of that “The More You Know” star flying by ruin your hair as it did mine?) is a respectable job, I wonder why the difference isn’t “respectable morals and values, such as loyalty, compassion, and patience.”
I didn’t know whether assuming the blog was real gave these shameless women the benefit of the doubt, but that’s what I did.
My effort to sympathize (no FBFs for me, so empathy is out of the question) with these women when their claims were as vapid as “he was the spicy mayo on my sushi, the truffles in my risotto. I had found my dream weaver” was taxing.
I nearly had an aneurism when the same woman in love went on to state that she “forced [herself] to date some analyst [she] had no real interest in to take the edge off and put the moves on. [She] hadn’t had sex in two months. In retrospect a Xanax prescription and a new vibrator would have achieved the same results minus the guilt” of cheating on her boyfriend. Bu then again, what else could I expect?
Sympathy-seeking “Sidney” (name-changed to protect the superficial?) closes out her story of woe with “somewhere out there, some other finance guy is raking it in right now. Have faith that if you continue to starve yourself to perfection, he will find you.” I’m sorry, but the leap from loving someone to cheating on them to seemingly advocating anorexia completely boggled my mind.
At this point, suffice it to say that I’m remarkably unimpressed with whatever the overall purpose of this site is: to be satire or to be a place to vent alongside like-minded women in positions comparable to your own.
The thing that I find interesting, though, is that DABA was (supposedly) established as a place for women to condole with each other over the poor job situations their significant others are in. I would venture to say that, had these women created a Facebook group, or a Twitter chat community, there wouldn’t be the same scrutiny.
One of the DABAs lost her job over her post; another DABA jeopardized her fledging marriage by discussing her husband’s bad mood, their move to Florida, and her general discontent with her post-economic downturn way of life.
The site states that DABA “is a safe place where women can come together—free from the scrutiny of feminists—and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships.” Any public website that gets significant coverage in the New York Times is not free from the scrutiny of ANYONE.
Aside from the truly callous content of the site, people seem to have taken a major issue with the fact that time and energy were not only put into establishing the blog, but into it’s maintenance and publicity. Linda Holmes of NPR makes a good point in noting that the domain name for the website (not the WordPress blog) wasn’t established until January 16th, 2009 (despite the first entry being dated in September). Also take into consideration that the proud founders are shamelessly vacuous, noting that sequined midriffs, side ponytails, and stellar dance moves are what brought them together (if that actually were the case, perhaps the DABA blog is not so surprising at all.
The long and short, I believe, is that the recession is affecting everyone, and there is a low threshold for listening to the sob stories of women whose boyfriends were affected, and by proxy, the ladies can’t mooch (for lack of a better word) off of them anymore.
There’s no need for DABA; after all, isn’t this type of complaining meant for LiveJournal?
Jackie for AMP3pr.com
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