Don’t Tell a Woman, “It’s Not So Bad”
In many cases, it’s much worse than you have ever imagined
“People are people, regardless of gender,” said a male commenter on a story I recently read about men behaving badly on online dating sites. He was trying to make the point that everyone has some bad online experiences. I’m going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and guess that he imagined he was trying to make the author feel better by assuring her that what she was describing was really more universal than she believed.
However, what he was actually doing was undermining her personal experience and gaslighting her.
The author had talked about being called a tease after politely telling a guy that she just wasn’t interested, and she described receiving two days of retaliatory dick pics in the aftermath. In the face of that, telling her that online experiences for men really aren’t much better, without actually giving a specific example to support this assertion, is really just a form of mansplaining — explaining a woman’s own experiences to her in a condescending way.
Although some men do have bad experiences online and some of them are from women on dating sites, it is objectively not true that men have the same volume and severity of unpleasant experiences when using dating apps.
