What if a girl behaves like a man on a dating site
Tatyana Nikonova spent a week on a dating site hitting on men.
We asked Tatyana Nikonova, who has first-hand knowledge of Russian and Western dating sites, to conduct an experiment: to create a profile with his most natural photos, to start writing to men first and behave as usually “not accepted” to women. And then tell us what came out of it.
One of the profiles that Tatiana Nikonova created on the dating site for the experiment
Recently, when you want big and pure love in the hay (or not), people willingly go to dating sites – in the U.S. alone, its users more than 40 million. According to research, deating services are the second most popular place for meetings (the first is still dating through mutual friends), and every fourth couple met on the appropriate site, and this figure is constantly growing.
However, there, as in any other place, it is easy for a woman to come across rough and offensive forms of attention. Physical distance further untie the hands, so many in expressions are not shy. Sometimes there is even a feeling that men behave at the deuteronomy service, as in a store, looking at the “goods” and without curtsy specifying TTH. In addition, upset (and they upset) sex proposals in the first lines. User profiles are not so informative as to immediately recognize the person, so on the move sending a request for sex or wished you only on a fancy picture, or he does not care with whom, just to agree. That is, sex is not offered to a specific amazing you, and abstract vagina, who is waiting for his prince from the Internet for a one-time adventure. If you need an example of dehumanization, use it.
A normal person in most cases hopes that they will want it, not the sexual function.
Curiously, women themselves are not against adventure. Moreover, according to statistics for the past year, a third of women had sex on the first date after meeting at a deuteronomy service. However, it seems to me that a normal person in most cases hopes that they will want it, not the sexual function, and it is expected that the desire for a date will arise from mutual passion and the resulting attraction in some kind of communication. In short, the adventure has to be exciting and emotionally intense, and we have not signed up for service staff.
My personal experience at deating services is quite extensive: stupid stories and incredible acquaintances have happened, somehow even a terrific boyfriend was found (a couple of days we discussed “Game of Thrones” – how else could it end). Online harassment I used to ignore, but sometimes I wondered: who are all these people who insist on calling the numbers? What exactly are they counting on? Is the contingent of deiting services really through one – dashing satires with packs of condoms in all their pockets? Why reluctance to respond to a sexual call leads to insults? Maybe men are really ready to throw themselves at everything that moves, and annoyance is not impudence and consumerism, but simply a lack of empathy and inability to understand the mindset of another person?
I decided to test the hypothesis “it’s illegibility, not objectivity” as follows: I spent a few days on a dating site, on the move offering men a meeting. It is logical to assume that if the male users of the deiting service actively offer sex, they must willingly respond to the call – there is no need to even move, she came. For fidelity, I modeled the typical behavior of waving offers, so that it would not turn out that we have something different in mind.
For the experiment, I chose Mirlovez – a popular international service where the audience is motley, and in the end the picture should have been more realistic. Unlike the trendy Mirlovez, Amyrlove doesn’t require a mutual sympathy mark to start a conversation – according to the conditions of the task, the invitation should come without a preliminary wink. In addition, from “Amyrlove” and its partners Badoo favorably distinguished by the fact that there is virtually no search and offer sexual services for money, and, accordingly, there should be no misunderstandings.
Examples of Tatiana’s correspondence on dating sites, when the initiative showed men
Writers of exciting sentences don’t usually shine with beauty and grooming, and I was going to…
The problem was that you can’t send messages to more than ten new contacts per day on the site, and I was going to dial at least a hundred in a week. I will say right away that it was not easy – at some point, so many men merge into such a monotonous spot that you can only distinguish them by spelling errors. Nevertheless, I boldly created two profiles and approached them with special attention. In both I indicated my own name and age, 36 years old – and the service immediately offered men from 31 to 46. But this is not my size, so I greatly expanded the search towards younger – this variation is more suitable for me personally and the experiment: men on the sites usually prefer to write to girls younger than themselves.
We had to choose our own photos particularly carefully: we decided that we should not put “typical women’s” photos: without cosmetics, treatments, nudity and callous poses. In addition, in a personal conversation, an employee of a deiting service once told me that the unsightly pictures of ordinary life bite more. In addition, the authors of exciting proposals themselves usually do not shine with beauty and grooming, and I recall, I was going to act exactly like them. Interests indicated, taking a few neutral from the list of the most popular, but even enough to start a sane conversation.
All men in a row who had passed several filters were sent to the sample. In order not to disperse into fake, abandoned, and other inappropriate accounts, I turned to obviously interested in new contacts, namely, paying for the promotion of his questionnaire. All services of this type have a “Raise in search results” function. The first pages of photos falling out by any request (in my case “Moscow, 22-46”) – from users who paid for the first places in the issue. It is used often, because otherwise you will be lost on distant pages, where no one will ever find you. I have written to everyone in the world, not paying attention to whether I liked them or not.
I cleaned out the list of users who do not participate in the rating (it is calculated from the “yes/no” ratings automatically selected users). In my view, passively exposing myself to the top is enough, but it’s interesting to get some more information about the user. Of course, in this case the received number of those who agreed to the meeting should be somewhat overstated – after all, this is not the average temperature in the hospital. I myself took part in the rating in order to understand approximately how the local public perceives me, and my position in the local hierarchy of attractiveness. I did not write to those who paid attention to me with likes or attempts to get acquainted, because the rules of the experiment implied only my initiative.
Men who had come to my attention before usually used an appeal like “baby”, “baby” and “pretty girl”.
I treated men the same way as they treated me before – and any other woman in similar cases, that is, in a characteristic lenient tone. Men who came out to me before usually used to use a kind of “baby”, “baby”, “pretty girl” and other condescending treatment. This is a tricky approach – thanks to it, the addressee immediately feels humiliated and more calmly takes the patronizing tone and pressure. This is usually the way women are treated, and not only on deiting sites – any street pickup truck is more likely to refer to you as a “hare” than as a “goddess”. Or first as a “goddess”, and then quickly cut down to “bunny”.
The other pickup job I know of is to call you. It creates the illusion that you’ve known each other a long time and jumped over the phase of careful sniffing. However, I have repeatedly encountered the usual misunderstanding, why do you need politeness when meeting (strange question). I sent the first messages, emphasizing the appearance of the “victim”, using the definitions “cute”, “pretty“, “sexy”, “charming”, etc. Men often think they are making a strong compliment about your attractiveness, even though no one asked them to do so in particular. When discussing something fascinating (“Game of Thrones”!), it is much easier to arouse and retain interest. Out of curiosity, I wrote to every other person, describing his general attractiveness, like “You are so sweet. You’re already sick, and I’ve gotten that more than once. I turned to the other half, resting on specific appearance features such as “Sexy Look” or “Cool Feet”. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any really cool legs, so I had to invent them on the fly.
In five days there were 100 contacts, one had to be thrown out (judging by the answer, it was a fake questionnaire from the marriage agency), and the remaining 99 I divided into categories – those who responded and those who did not respond to my fiery call. All those who directly agreed to the meeting or made a counter-proposal were considered positive. For example, they were not ready to meet immediately, but offered to meet again sometime. Negative answers: polite and not very polite refusals, “I don’t know”, as well as all the messages that were viewed but not answered. Refusal to answer is also a refusal to meet. Needless to say, I did not schedule any specific meetings – it is ugly towards unsuspecting research participants. It was enough to get an unambiguous agreement in response to the meeting proposal from a playful stranger.
So, I had almost a hundred men on my hands, hard-working in tables, graphs and hand-counting. Did I manage to prove that male users of the action service are asleep and see how to climb under a skirt at least to someone? Actually, no. It turned out that less than half of those who received the offer answered me, and less than a third of the positive answers. Let me remind you that this is theoretically a higher rate than the average, because I only addressed men who paid to be in the public eye, and actively evaluated other people’s profiles – that is, in principle, ready to meet and get acquainted.
Less than a third of those who agreed! That’s less than the number of women who had sex on a first date. My theory was falling apart. On the other hand, the sample wasn’t extensive enough for serious research, so I looked at the answers on the other hand. For this purpose, I compared the age and rating of the study participants with mine, because the reaction was probably corrected by the components of my questionnaire. If I had 25-year-old Angelina Jolie or 70-year-old Jane Fonda in my profile, the data might have been quite different.
In the diagram below, on the vertical axis, the age scale of my poor test subjects, and on the horizontal axis, my personal rating. It cannot be said that the rating absolutely shows the attractiveness of the person of the opposite sex. Not all people who are attractive in life know how to put the right photos, not all popular and interesting people are attractive enough in photos, not all highly rated photos cause a desire to get acquainted, and so on. But it is approximately like the truth, sometimes frightening. For example, a user with a rating of 7.61 is the owner of photos of 40-year-old young man who looks very successful, looking for someone over 30 according to the questionnaire. Yes, this is the same marriage agency questionnaire, it was created by professionals. The owner of the questionnaire with a rating of 5.10 indicates that he is 38, he is married and looking for “adequacy” (read: mistress without requests). My rating at the time of sending out the messages was 6.10, that is, quite low, which is understandable: no photos on the beach, no draft positions, no neckline for half a frame. So I put myself in the center of the schedule – at the intersection of the axes of coordinates.
What does this graph show? Actually, it’s what it shows in life. Highly valued people are less likely to agree to rough proposals, especially if they are younger than the applicant. They obviously think that they have a big choice, so the choice must be more picky. It is easier to get consent from a person who is rated significantly lower than you, than from someone who is rated significantly higher. Low self-esteem leads to consent to almost anything, hence the “likes”.
Young men agree more often than older men – assuming that they are hoping to have a decent sexual experience with older women, especially if they offer. Peers prefer someone else – in Russia it is still accepted to be interested in women younger than themselves. It is interesting that younger and more popular men are more willing to refuse, rather than just keep silent. If you are both young and desirable, you can’t keep silent in response.
Next, I began to consider the answers to different types of requests. I used two methods: “general” (“what a cute puppy”) and “specific” (“such a belly you want to touch”). I find the second option more disgusting, because the first one fits into generally accepted schemes of positive evaluation of women. Nobody gave men the right to hit on us with their assessments, but if almost everyone does so, it is difficult to reproach for following universal standards. But “specificity” is already a natural dissection. Men write about your legs, eyes, lips and ass, leaving behind the existence of the person who owns it all. However, it turned out that when addressed to men themselves, “specificity” gives more than one and a half times more positive response than the proposals “in general”. That is, men perceive this approach as personal attention, not as objective. Or they have not received compliments for a long time.
Why did I end up looking for sexy hordes? Actually, men are not too different from women in their behavior on dating sites. They want individual attention to their personality, not stamped messages. They are not ready to jump into bed with anyone, and their self-esteem is just as dependent on the assessment of others, even if we are just talking about photographs. A man is also a man who wants to be appreciated and respected, and then he can go to bed.
What else? A high willingness to have sex without knowing you doesn’t mean a high grade for you personally. If you are persistently molested or immediately agree to sex, most likely, a man does not care about you at all. He wants to have sex with someone, and you don’t spread any special vibes of sexual irresistibility. I don’t have any pictures in my swimsuit. All the man knew about me was that I thought he was sexy. The writers themselves didn’t know that either.
Of course, dating is a complicated thing, and many people simply do not understand that attempts to interest and gross harassment is not the same thing. It is better to seem ridiculous or stupid, but not rude and disgusting. Even obviously hopeless character can entice a girl to a normal date, and every third, as we know, loves adventure.
