I dislike online dating. And I think the initial stages are weighted heavily against men. Don’t believe me? Click here.
But how do I write an article complaining about online dating without sounding like a hater? How about by identifying it as part of a larger problem of online interaction and communication? A poor and pathetic substitute for real life? And with different rules to boot?
I’m not a maninist. Guys send women some pretty shocking offensive and dumb messages, and once Phase 2 of the dating process commences the deck is stacked heavily against women. You already know all the crap girls have to deal with so I won’t rehash it right now. Back to complaining:
With online dating, everybody loses. Unless you win. But if you did, it was an exception.
I recently came across a hilarious comic series called OKComix where the woman took the most drawable offenses against her search for a mate, and turned it into deliciously punitive art. Many savvy internet goers have by now heard about or glanced through “straight white guys texting”, which is a collection of the best–or worst–come ons, one-liners, canned wittiness and pretenses to lame sex aimed at women.
Try it yourself!: do a google search of “OKCupid problems” or “men” or “nice guys of okcupid” and you are sure to run into some of the endless commentary about how disgusting men are online.
My online dating experiences have not been good. From a certain point of few, online dating provides an insightful and very beneficial buffer for women against having to engage or encounter the most aggressive wooers in the ‘real’ world. To the extent that it could allow some women to see what (some) men are ‘really’ thinking without being put in a physically uncomfortable situation is not, well, ‘good’, but its several degrees less traumatic, and thus a potentially beneficial gate-keeping mechanism.
For awkward men like me, however, this one-way street can be difficult and confusing to navigate. Picking up the rhythm of an online courtship can be confusing and non-intuitive.
For instance, what should you put in the opening message? How long should it be? There are some obvious rules that seem to have been laid out and algorithms which claim to have answered these questions, but we’ve already internalized and adapted those to the point where its not so difficult to sniffed out canned opening lines, and nobody is going to respond to such dopiness. If you get a response, how long should you wait before asking them out on a date? How can you tell for certain your online chat is going well? How do you interpret stalled responses? How much can you take at face value? (for instance, if they have to cancel the date, should you try to reschedule? Is it just flaking out? Did they change their mind?)
The big question I’ve been leading towards: What if men’s gross and inappropriate dialogue is not a cause but a symptom of the terror of online dating?
Are there guys who are less hesitant to be their obnoxious, hateful selves online, just looking to have bad sex, and ready to be rude because they just need 1-in-1000 odds to say yes? Possibly.
But everyone desires some combination of intimate physical/platonic relationship and so let’s temporary ignore entitled bros and pickup artists and the rest of the community of privileged assholes, instead focusing on the fact that As the above study showed, undesirable males who receive something like fives times less responses than the least desirable woman, are still likely to be mocked for even trying.
So here’s my thing: if as a man, you are ignored for sending the ‘perfect’ message, and you are ignored for send the most ‘imperfect’ one, then the end result should rather understandably be neurosis. And neurosis cannot but lead to anything other than more strange messages. It’s a vicious cycle until you finally just give up, which doesn’t exactly solve the problem you were trying to solve with online dating.
This again is not to say that many men wouldn’t be equally harassing in real life should they get the chance. But the infinite one-way man parade that is the online dating world is tailored as a conduit to forced errors on the part of men. And such nonsense only re-enforces the sad sexist paradigms that govern social interaction. And it only exacerbates the sexual confusion and
The internet has helped mobilize feminists and minority groups, giving them a voice and an ability to coordinate a progressive message. But the internet has also ignored and distorted the realities of gender dynamics and healthy understanding about sex and the sexes. (incidentally, this is why I hate porn and find it very unstimulating) In other words, the internet is good at prescriptive battles (beating down the men’s rights movement, calling attention to racist cops murdering people, et al), but terrible at preemptive ones (sex ed, and even a basic knowledge of the biologic processes underpinning and motivating our drives and interactions, or how to stimulate another person pleasurably).
I also wonder how LGBT dating experiences compare, or if there are a completely different set of paradigms and pitfalls.
Culture Time 
Get a mentor. NOT a dating coach or pickup teacher. Find something difficult but rewarding to learn and someone to teach you–NOT your equally rudderless friends. What you need to learn is manhood, which has to be taught and too often isn’t.
Dating is a part of a man’s life, but not the majority of it, and certainly not something you should need to obsess about. Learn about the rest of it and put dating in perspective and you’ll wonder why you worried about it.