Women should tell us if this is a problem, we males can’t really know that. However, on the point you mentioned: probably “hi” is better than an unsolicited obscene pic, I would say.
Personally I would never consider sending an obscene pic, nor simply saying “hi” because it’s probably useless… but ladies should understand that it is not the easiest thing in the world to approach a person you don’t know and sound interesting.
This is a problem they rarely if ever face, because in many western cultures women think they should not bother writing to men, that they simply should wait and the men must do all the hard work.
The policy OkCupid proposed is good: harassers should be banned. But the blog post they wrote is horrible, it depicts all men as perverts or sexual maniacs who send obscene pics and all women as victims of all the male users.
The reality is most of us are normal people who use OkCupid to meet other normal people. The main difference is that in many countries the men have to try desperately to get a reply to a message (and some idiots think obscene pics work… but those are a bunch of morons) while the women can simply ignore most of them.
