Online dating is an easy way for women to meet great, normal guys, right?
Or so Redditor OKCThrowaway22221 thought when he decided to pose as a woman on OKCupid and see what happened. Convinced that women had it easy when it came to finding online romance, he was prepared for an evening of fun.
Initially, OKCThrowaway22221 was pleasantly surprised at the number of messages he received minutes after creating his profile -- but things got weird quickly:
At first I thought it was fun, I thought it was weird but maybe I would mess with them or something and freak them out and tell them I was a guy or something, but as more and more messages came (either replies or new ones I had about 10 different guys message me within 2 hours) the nature of them continued to get more and more irritating. 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.
Being on the receiving end of this behavior -- and coming to understand that his experience was far from unusual -- eventually proved too much for OKCThrowaway22221:
I would be lying if I said it didn't get to me. I thought it would be some fun thing, something where I would do it and worse case scenario say "lol I was a guy I trolle you lulz"etc. but within a 2 hour span it got me really down and I was feeling really uncomfortable with everything. I figured I would get some weird messages here and there, but what I got was an onslaught of people who were, within minutes of saying hello, saying things that made me as a dude who spends most of his time on 4chan uneasy. 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.
Few would argue that online dating is inherently bad. It can be a fantastic way to meet new partners and get to know your own preferences. But the number of men who consider online dating sites an appropriate place to send incredibly explicit messages or otherwise harass female users can't be ignored.
This Redditor concluded, "I came away thinking that women have it so much harder than guys do when it comes to that kind of stuff."
Welcome to our world, OKCThrowaway22221.