A Reddit user hoping to see online dating from the perspective of the opposite sex, signed up to OKCupid as a woman.
Using a female friend’s photograph, the Redditor – known as OKCThrowaway22221 – lasted only two hours as a woman on the popular dating site.
He found himself receiving messages before he even finished the profile, despite the fact that “my friend would be the first to say she’s a pretty average looking girl.”
Though initially pleased with the amount of messages he was receiving, he soon realised that the majority of them had a pretty common theme.
He wrote: “Guys were full-on spamming my inbox with multiple messages before I could reply to even one asking why I wasn’t responding and what was wrong.
“Guys would become hostile when I told them I wasn’t interested in NSA sex, or guys that had started normal and nice quickly turned the conversation into something explicitly sexual in nature.
“Seemingly nice dudes in quite esteemed careers asking to hook up in 24 hours and send them naked pics of myself despite multiple times telling them that I didn’t want to.”
This is another example of a story surfacing and getting good coverage from the media – TIME, Huffington Post, Metro – centred around the compromised experience women can have on dating sites.
Such stories, while rather throwaway, do show the media’s appetite for stories around the problems of being a female online dater.
This appetite is in line with prevailing winds in the industry to create models which seek to improve the experience for women on online dating.
As the Redditor said: “I would be lying if I said it didn’t get to me. I ended up deleting my profile at the end of 2 hours and kind of went about the rest of my night with a very bad taste in my mouth.”