I think a good analogy is the Nigerian spammer.

Can’t find the reference offhand, but a study a few years back showed that spam emails look the way they do–bad grammar, weird formatting, and all–because they have actually EVOLVED to work. They work very, very rarely…but if you send enough, and you have a payoff of a few grand, it starts to look attractive in a place like Lagos. Because there is *no other option*.

I think a lot of harassers are the sexual equivalent of dirt-poor scammers in some shantytown Internet cafe under the oil pipeline. These guys aren’t gonna get any play, even from most of the women around them (who themselves are not the best catches in town). They don’t even know why women ignore them, even laugh at them (something every man is the most afraid of). Just as the scammer doesn’t know why he was born in Lagos in a slum, and there are rich people a world away who eat food every month worth more than he will see in a year. He thinks he has no other option, and he’s sure not worried about the elaborate ethics of scamming some rich old man out of his retirement.

And yet every once in a while it pays off. And in the meantime, it may make a helpless loser feel a little bit better to himself…if he cared what YOU thought, he wouldn’t be a helpless loser.

Do you feel personally insulted and attacked when you get a ATTENTION PLEASE BANK TRANSFER REQUIRED email? Of course not. The jackholes on a dating site are no more real than those spammers, and there’s no need for you to extend them the courtesy of thinking twice about them. If you’re really pissed, laugh at them. Or send them scam-the-scammer emails and make them meet you in the next state over. Or if that’s too risky, just tell the other ladies online about them and put something about them in your profile. You may find, in fact, that stuff like that will actually attract more good guys.

You know, a bit more than 40 years ago I tried demanding respect for my writing. They laughed at me, men and women alike… Perhaps I should start an organization of equal rights for poets–that’s not a flame, it’s an observation–the problem being the one Gene Wolfe and Samuel Delany had, among others; many times the message is lost in not only the image but the image as reflected, refracted and distorted by the preconceptions in the perceivers’ minds. Then again, that may be the first problem all writers or even thinkers encounter.

LMAO, no need to engage O_o … But, there you are, engaging! I think it’s fair to say you had a very pressing need to engage and are not being entirely truthful 😀

Ok, maybe. I’ll try engaging some of my dozens of suitors in conversation (I just logged on, and I have 25 new messages! Jesus.)

Well, as the guy in the Reddit post points out, a lot of the creepiness, rudeness, and abuse started not necessarily with the initial message, but when he didn’t respond to the messages or politely turned the guys down. I’ve often had it happen that I’d get a message like “Hey wanna meet up tonight?” and I’d be like, “Sorry, it doesn’t seem like we really have anything in common, have a good one!” and then receive back “fine you fucking cunt, you’re too ugly anyway.” Or worse.

And as my own screencaps in this post show, it often takes very little to bring out the nasty sides of people’s personalities.

To clarify, I did get some creepy messages. Here’s one. But that sort of thing was the exception, not the rule. Most of the messages were perfectly cordial, if maybe a little desperate and/or grammatically challenged.

But I did experience it myself, that’s already been done.

The behavior men engage in on dating sites is an extension of men’s behavior in other spaces, not a divergence. The hand waving away of their behavior in this comment thread is also an extension of the hand waving away of women’s experiences in other spaces. We are hardly ever believed when we say things can get as bad as they do. Someone will always, always have to interject that maybe it’s not so bad as we say, or maybe it’s our fault, or maybe we shouldn’t judge all men because those guys are just assholes/just drunk/just having a bad day/just teenagers and this guy isn’t like that.

It would be so awesome if for once when a woman highlights the harassment and abuse she receives, if people would simply say, “that sucks.” No excuses, no explanations, no hand waving, no cover, no deflection. Every time someone deflects, every time someone excuses or minimizes or provides cover for harassment, abuse, and bigotry, they are contributing to the problem. No, not every single woman will receive this same type of gendered harassment, but enough do. No, not every man will engage in this type of gendered harassment, but enough do. If something is more likely to happen than not happen, then that’s a problem, and it is not a problem which will be solved by making excuses for the perpetrators.