Here in the Weird Alternate Future, the internet has proven, despite its serious problems, to be something of a gender leveller. Yeah, there’s a lot of ingrained sexism in internet culture, but it’s not like that’s somehow absent in meatspace culture, and there are a lot of places where the everyone-is-text phenomenon allows men and women to enjoy a more nearly level playing field than ever before.
There is, however, one phenomenon that one finds online that is so strictly and so heavily gendered that it is a source of much bafflement to many. I am referring, of course, to random spam messages on dating sites.
Every woman I know, when she joins OkCupid or Fetlife or any of the assorted pay sites out there, experiences the same thing, regardless of her age or profile contents: a slow but steady trickle of messages from random guys, all of them between one and eight words long.
“hi”
“You’re hot want to get togeter sumtime?”
“u wanna get down n dirty”
“Hey sexy”
“I want to cum on your tits”
And so on ad infinitum. You get the idea. Why the ever-living fuck do guys (and it is, as far as I’ve been able to observe, only guys) do that? A reasonable if profane question, and one that I’ve answered for enough women IRL that I feel I should answer it for the vast audience of this humble blog.
The key is to remember that this doesn’t happen to guys. Most of the time, we sit there refreshing our empty inboxes and thinking “Well, clearly I am unlovable and gross” and wondering whether we accidentally used a profile photo where our skin is covered in spiders or something.
The culprits are our old friends transactionality and initiative. So long as men are expected to be the pursuers, the persuaders, the purchasers of affection and sex so on, we’re going to keep seeing these unfortunate second-order effects. Until we live in a world where I never hear a woman say “Wow, this guy seems cool. I hope he messages me!” (how I wish I were making that up) we’re going to keep seeing this kind of bad behavior.
The fact is, the spam messages are part of a strategy. It’s a strategy with two goals: to get the guy practicing it some attention from one or more girls, and to keep him emotionally protected in the process. People keep doing it because it basically works, and even when it fails at the first part, it succeeds at the second. So on average, it’s a pretty good strategy in a Tragedy of the Commons kinda way.
Here’s the thing. As I’ve said before, having the pressure on you to make the initial approach is incredibly difficult. It involves putting a lot of your ego on the line, just laying bare your sense of self and sticking a big KICK ME sign on it. This point is impossible to overemphasize.
Let’s say I take the time to carefully read the profiles of five women, and craft five individual messages to them. “I see you like macrame and duck hunting… I too enjoy killing things, and while I’ve never tried ducks, I bet it’s a lot of fun. Perhaps we could get coffee sometime and twist the heads off some canaries to get to know each other?” Now when I don’t hear back from any of those five, that is a genuine, personal, very specific rejection. It is a rejection of me in particular, based on the very best effort I could make. It means (I must assume) that I am physically repulsive, personally uncharming, and generally inadequate as a human being.
Now, let’s say that instead I randomly send “You’re really fucking hot” to 300 women whose profiles I didn’t even read. Straight, gay, married, not looking, doesn’t matter. Everyone who I think might have boobies gets the same message.
I just accomplished three things. First, I annoyed between 298 and 300 women who are now sighing and hitting the delete button. Second, I potentially found the one or two women who are willing to message me back based on that. Third, and most importantly, I did not make any effort or expose even one inch of my actual humanity. If, as is likely, none of those 300 women respond at all, I can deal with that. It’s like lying on a bed of nails: the pain is distributed so widely that it’s entirely bearable.
The guys who adopt this strategy tell themselves that they’re being this guy:
But on an emotional level, what they’re doing is closer to this:
The real problem, of course, is that this really is a Tragedy of the Commons situation. By adopting a strategy that works for them individually, they’re making the entire site a more toxic environment for everyone. I don’t pretend to have a solution here. All I can suggest is that for those who get random spam messages, just remember that behind their crude language and dreadful spelling, what each one actually says is “I’m afraid of being hurt.” It won’t stop the stupid things coming, but it might help them seem more sad than irritating.
Hosstale – so you think that the deciding factor about whether men should act with decency and politeness to women is whether or not that would get them more attention?
Coming to this discussion late, but one thing strikes me: there seems to be a notion(both in the original post, and in many of the comments) that if guys quit sending spam and rude messages to women, it would make the online dating experience more pleasant for women, and therefore, online dating would in turn be less frustrating for the men. Noah’s use of the phrase “tragedy of the commons” pretty much implies that the misbehavior of some ruins the situation for the many. Is there any evidence to support the thesis that men would be less frustrated with online… Read more »
So, AB,
What is your reaction to getting messages along the lines of “hey, how r u ?”, or do you find those just as offensive as ones saying “hey, wanna f***?”
@Schala : For the seen as an insult deal. Blame people who say that male sexuality is toxic No, I blame people like you, who refuse to address the issue of how men choose to treat the women they have sex with, but instead do their best to oppose anyone bringing it up. I blame the sex-positive feminists whose view of female sexuality nine times out of ten boils down to “We’re so tolerant. Now go play in the no-sex corner” because they don’t know how to deal with the huge group of women who struggle with their sexuality (their… Read more »
The be more pro-sex is intended as a suggestion for the whole of society, not any one person.
Kitty,
The no-feedback situation is almost exclusive to the internet. Street harassment generally takes place in some kind of social situation. People who send messages to “profiles” on the internet tend to do so while alone.
“If offering sex to a woman is seen as an insult, then the man who hit on a woman and is rejected can be seen as a man who insults a woman and get away with it. A victory instead of a defeat.” For the seen as an insult deal. Blame people who say that male sexuality is toxic and that no self-respecting woman would willfully desire sex. You know, what conservatives (both men and women) say. Some feminists (the anti-sex ones) also say that, that’s where the “heterosexual sex is rape” stuff comes from. Be more pro-sex, and this… Read more »
I’ve been thinking about something related to this. I could never relate to this idea that practically all women everywhere should get all this validation from men, because so many men express this wish to have sex with a lot of women, because it seems like most men go out of their way to make sure women understand that there is nothing positive about it. Very often, men joke about exactly how low their standards are (even going so far as to joke about which women they’d fuck if they with a paper bag over their heads), as if to… Read more »
@AnonymousDog
That is the whole problem with the patriarchy/misogyny. People do not consider women as people. Women are these strange creatures no one knows how to figure out and most of them are shallow bitches. This is not a specific dating site problem. Why do you think street harassment, rape, victim blaming and so on are such huge problems?
Here’s another thought: Are guys sending spam and/or rude messages to women because those women, out there, somewhere, have become less real to them? If a guy posts a profile, but gets no unsolicited messages, and receives no responses to ones he sends, basically receiving no feedback, do those profiles cease to represent real women(in his mind) who might be offended or inconvenienced by spam messages? Once the possibility that those profiles are mere figments hits you, consciously or unconsciously, is it harder to regard them as fellow humans?
@Paul Hobson, I read it as saying that approaching someone for a possible romantic relationship doesn’t mean that it’s a foregone conclusion right then and there. It was a fair statement, even in a romantic context, but I agree that there’s still some problems with it. Yabbayoni doesn’t seem to consider that with so few women approaching guys, then a good portion of the times when it does happen ends up being when the women really do want sex and don’t care if the guy knows. Guys won’t think that it’s a “normal” approach and not just a booty call… Read more »
Paul and JE:
The approacher might very well want to have sex, and to have sex (sort of) right away.
I guess what Yabbayoni is trying to say is that, when approaching someone, she doesn’t YET have enough information about that person to know wheteher it is the right/compatible person to do it with.
By the way, for the amusement value, from the time when people put Want Ads in newspapers …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUWIXOy1LQ&feature=bf_prev&list=UL5lBlwh08g-I&lf=mfu_in_order
@Paul Hobson: Let’s make a comparison to “American Idol”: Just because the main guy (don’t know his name, I’m from another country) gives a singer a heads up after his first performance doesn’t mean that he’s also ready to give him a million dollars record deal. Same principle applies with dating/dating sites. @tovyasagain: I think you’ve got a good point there: Subtracting the vulagarity-laden messages, the women who get lots of short messages are presented with a list of men who would like to get in contact with her; so she can scan the profiles, see if someone she would… Read more »
It sounded to me like she didn’t like the assumption that she would want to have sex right away rather than at all. Still, it does give the impression that there’s one right time to want sex and that’s problematic.
Yabbayoni “Being female, I’ve found that approaching men on OkC or in real life has often led to them thinking that I am already down to have sex. My making the first move seems to mean that I have already decided that I want them. That’s not actually true. Possibly these are guys who decide that they definitely want to have sex with a woman before they ask her out, and they’re projecting their own style onto me. Whatever the case, it’s sort of disheartening to deal with. Maybe if fewer guys made that assumption, more women would be willing… Read more »
Talking about 100 males for every female.
Am I alone in being curios what dating looked like in post-WWII Germany and post-WWII Russia.
What I have heard there was something close to 100 women for every man during those times.
Good read. One of the reasons I won’t be caught dead on FetLife or CollarMe.
@Amphigorey, I know the author of that letter, he’s a well-known and frequently-quoted pick-up artist, and the letter itself has a few interesting tweaks of the genre, like the false take-away (“unless you want to miss out on my fun energy”), future pacing with ungrammatical ambiguity (“As you think about what it would be like to find someone you could really share it wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to experience?”.) I knew he was still around but didn’t think he’d have the same boilerplate on the web. I am guessing OK Cupid or match.com, somewhere in the Los Angeles… Read more »
I think it’s important to distinguish between spam in the vein of “Hey, you’re hot, want to go out?” and “Yo babe I want to (stream of vulgarity)!”. The latter is just flat out offensive. On the other hand, the former is actually a *more efficient* time investment than sending out carefully crafted messages. If I spend an hour perusing profiles, picking out things from a profile to comment on (which already means skipping people with fairly flat profiles, even though conversation might actually prove them to be really interesting), and crafting a brief message about mutual interests, I can… Read more »
And all because I used a cliche about cause-and-effect.
@Noah, do you see what I just did there? I derailed an entire conversation by picking on the word choice that someone used to get their point across instead of talking about what they actually said. How do you feel about people who do that kind of thing?
@Schadrach, but what if the bird changed, but the egg remained the same? In that case, the egg which was henceforth used to birth chickens was previously used to birth pre-chickens. The problem is in our assumption that chicken come from chicken eggs.
@AnonymousDog:
That depends on semantics. Do we name the species of an egg by the manner of creature that laid it, or the manner that resides within? If the former, the chicken came first by definition, as a chicken egg couldn’t be a chicken egg unless laid by a chicken. If the latter, the egg came first because it couldn’t be a chicken egg unless it contained a chicken, and the first chicken would accordingly have to be carried in an egg laid by a pre-chicken.
@AnonymousDog… do you see what I just did there? Some people would accuse you of not using proper qualifiers 😉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d2LAs-WL_4