Online Dating Landscape Inhospitable Toward Women
No Way to Treat a Lady
Why is it becoming so difficult for single men and women to meet each other in a way other than virtual dating? Not to say virtual dating platforms aren’t a tough place to meet people who might interest them — in fact it’s just as difficult to meet people online as it is IRL. The reasons are men behaving badly — worse than ever, and women recoiling and sequestering from that oppression of unbridled testosterone frenzies.
That good manners, politeness, and deference to women are considered old-fashioned modicums of behavior seems to be a fait accompli, whether guys like me still subscribe to them or not. The online platforms are guilty of creating the virtual dating arena at the expense of otherwise meaningful IRL social transactions. The forum and mechanisms they offer are intended to lead to IRL interaction, but I find their models implausible, tedious and demoralizing.
The facility for the real and palpable abuse in virtual socialization contexts opened new avenues for men to ratchet up the heat of their sexual salvos — anonymous dick pics, bullying, shaming, and unfettered misogyny, are all trademarks of virtual socialization that the Internet makes possible, and renders virtual dating platforms an extremely dubious milieu for dating. That is, unless you’re a masochist.
Virtual Dating Ipso Facto Breeds Contempt
If you ask the platforms, they’re all about the nuances and delicacies of romance. They conjure up monetized totems (likes, favorites, bagels, etc.) as surrogate meaningful gestures, and infer that these are the tools with which one pursues a person of interest. These, in lieu of honest, genuine and heartfelt discourse that would otherwise take place offline.
The anonymity of Internet operators is just one facility that enables men to abuse online with impunity, and without restraint. Men who feel the need to abuse are likely insecure and too cowardice themselves to come out and act the way they do online IRL. But that perception is beginning to change — with online misbehavior bleeding over in real life (IRL). The result is men treating women like shit everywhere, and women ducking for cover, disengaging.
Aberrant virtual socializing inevitably encroaches on IRL behavior in ways that may be more subtle. Clueless men adopt the same misguided, toxic attitudes they exhibit online by treating women as badly as they ever did IRL — as if virtual dating miscreancy somehow made it OK to become monstrous IRL. Without moderation, men will always be at their worst. Sadly, there is almost no way to police this behavior until it becomes criminal, and even then, criminal sexual misconduct can never be addressed on the massive, epidemic scale it which it flourishes.
“The virtual dating arena is a masochist’s paradise.
Women sense and experience direct male abuse online, which is why the virtual dating platforms make it easy for them to swat or swipe away annoying, malicious abusers, as well as any other profile that disinterests them. Virtual dating women windowshop mens’ profiles in secret by hiding their own profiles, rather than expose the fact that they looked. If a woman looks at a man’s profile and he sees that in his feed, he is likely to assume there is an interest. So women hide just like they do IRL.
The trade-off of firewalls that virtual dating platforms create for their female members is that men will behave as badly as ever under their own firewall of anonymity, an exclusion that they take advantage of by behaving at their absolute worst toward women in a way they wouldn’t dare IRL, and would be roundly sanctioned if they did.
“Looking for rejection and abuse? The loving arena of virtual dating is an abundant medium.
A whole lot of confusion arises from the jaundiced way singles meet — i.e., virtual dating platforms. We see this in the ways men and women interact IRL. Or rather, in the ways women avoid men altogether. That means all the gentle, kind, and considerate IRL ways of interacting with the opposite sex I practiced growing up are off the table. Now I’m confused — and feckless at that, despite adoring women, and always treating them respectfully — to a fault, I stand no better odds than a serial rapist for lack of due diligence dissemination.
That’s because I grew up in an era where some men still put women on a pedestal (for better or worse). That was the popular culture and the norm that we subscribed to. The notion of abuse equal to shaming, dick pics, and other male antagonisms was well beyond the pale -: men were more reserved in what they said and how they behaved toward women, or else they would be sanctioned. Forced sex scenes in movies always completely unnerved me, made me incredulous, and sorry for women at their lot as the “weaker” sex.
Women assume that any man making overtures to them has only one thing in mind, yet they continue to patronize a facility that encourages just such single-minded brutalism in hopes that somehow a knight in shining armor will surface amid the offal. Phrases like LTR, soul mate, and best-friend populate women’s virtual dating profiles, and are antithetical to men’s lascivious interests. At the end of the day, women are looking for love in all the wrong places.
IRL smiling, waving, winking, saying hello, furtive glances, all are routinely presumed as leering, ogling, antagonizing, and abusive behaviors, regardless of context. No matter that men with the best intentions are flicked away like the worst of men. That’s classic throwing out the baby with the bath water. Such equivocation (most men online are horrid : thus are most men IRL) betrays a weakness in women that serves them poorly by robbing them of their powers of discernment. Most virtual dating women subscribe to or succumb to this cynical wisdom despite the self-defeating nature of it.
If a woman wants to be treated fairly and respectfully she needs to put herself in the game somehow — off the virtual dating platform, and away with the mask (smartphone). Despite the propensity, the onslaught, the sexual charged feeding frenzy that describes most virtual dating transactions, there are actually good men — men who know how to treat a woman, and don’t need to be taught.
It won’t be easy. Most men have juvenile mentalities in dealing with the opposite sex, which is ever-present in pretty much all of their dating behavior — virtual or IRL. Nonetheless; the alternative is the loneliness and abuse ridden landscape of the virtual dating wasteland, a desert where no tree grows, and no bird may nest.
“Virtual dating robs a woman of her better discernment and judgement of character.
For myself, I find it exceptionally difficult to mate because — well, I am The Introvert. Guys like us are shy, reluctant to approach a woman, and more likely to be called “sweet” on account of our gentle, unassuming manners. We are known to become enfeebled by rejection. That is, on the rare occasions when a woman might deign to pay attention to us. Other times, we dwell in the background, as our neanderthal brothers poison the well of romance, running it dry.
