How Online Dating Helps Me Sift Through Men IRL
“How busty are ya?”
“FWB?”
“It’s a total plus you wear skirts. It’s great to see a feminine woman.”
“Are you awake?”
“Nice tits.”
Those are just a few of the messages sitting in my “Filtered” inbox on OKCupid, which holds all the messages from people with whom I have under a 75% match. There are more like it — but thanks to the filter settings, they bypass my regular inbox, so I don’t get alerts for them and I only see them when I remember to check.
It’s just one of several ways I filter men on OKCupid. I also flag many, many questions as “unacceptable” and block any dude who gives the wrong answer to questions like these:
“Does no always mean no?”
“Do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?”
“If the subway was crowded and you were packed against several people just to fit in the car — would you grope the cutest one next to you? …they would never know it was you, much less they were groped.”
“During sex, if the other person looked like they had a serious psychological issue, would you stop the sex or keep going anyway?”
I also filter out the ones who say they’re not interested in girls who look like me. There are so many ways to say “no fat chicks” on OKCupid.
“Which body type do you prefer?”
“Do overweight people annoy you?”
“Do you only date people with athletic and toned bodies?”
“If you were in a long term relationship and your partner gained weight due to something like surgery recovery or childbirth, would you think less of them as a person?”
There are also the more casually sexist questions like this:
“Do you believe that men should be the head of their household?”
“Do you think women have an obligation to keep their legs shaved?”
“If you were to get married, would you want your partner to change his or her last name to yours?”
“Is a woman who’s slept with 100 men a bad person?”
Marking questions like these as digital red flags made me realize that I should be doing so to men IRL, too. To some extent, I’ve always done that — but online dating has made me hyperaware and hypersensitive to every casually sexist comment from every man in my life, dating prospect or not. That guy who made a roofie joke? Gone. The dude who said that Beyoncé should “cover up more”? Dead to me. The friend-of-a-friend who says “females” instead of “women”? Nopeeeee.
My everyday reality is pretty much my own personal utopian matriarchy. I’m lucky enough to work with women, so the only straight men I talk to regularly are either related to me or dating one of my close friends — and to be honest, I would cut a few of those men out of my life, too, if I could.
I wish this weren’t the case! I wish it were easier to find straight cis men who “get it” — men who don’t joke about rape, who’d be happy and not “feel emasculated” if their girlfriends got promotions and made more money than them, who don’t worship woman-hating writers like Woody Allen and Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller. And please spare me from the self-described male feminists who mansplain feminism to you, then call you “sex negative” for not sleeping with them.
I guess I’m an angry, man-hating feminist who wants to #BanMen. But men as a group — and most men as individuals — need to do so much better before they can get past my filter.
Let me check my OKCupid messages again.
“What are you looking for? ;)”
“I made this specifically for you” (followed by a link to a YouTube video of him reading a message to “fair ladies of the evening that hopefully are not prostitutes”)
“I need a woman!!!”
“Nice.”
Yeah, men are going to have to do so much better.
