044 What is it like being a woman on a dating site

1. You get many (as in dozens.. A day?) messages from random men.

2. You don't want to write them off as creeps, but most of them are.

3. Your standard isn't actually any higher because you reject them: you become sanitized to this "process", realise most men are shooting from the hip to multiple women (who can blame them?) in the hopes of finding one that sticks; someone who will reply.

4. You realise that repeated rejections don't really bother most men.

5. The one day in a year when a man writes you a fully formed, grammatically correct message, AND sounds like an interesting person to talk to, AND looks ok, that becomes an exciting event even though if you met this person in regular circumstances you might not be as keen.

6. If you are gay, like me, you have to preface all your posts with "If you are a man, or a couple, fuck off" or other similar messages.

7. People show a bizarre amount of interest in you even if you are a fairly regular woman. As long as you're not hideous, dating sites have a pretty high response / success rate (although the quality of the applicants are not guaranteed). This means 300+ Facebook requests. 1000+ foursquare requests. Okcupid is full of shoot-in-the-dark creeps. Other dating sites are worse.

8. You are careful with what you post on these sites. You may post a picture, but most likely it's not too revealing. Even if you are out to titillate, and have no qualms about your body, it is still a major thing women have to deal with, and not just about your photo (content as well): how much is too much, and what about what I just posted could be misconstrued?

9. Just as you may worry about "putting out", meeting someone on the Internet has even more negative connotations, at least in my part of the world. We are always told to avoid the semblance that we want more than we should have, i.e. appear excited about a man, for fear of that being misconstrued as slutty behaviour.

10. You worry your peers, students (if you are a teacher or something like it), and relatives will judge you for not being able to find a man in more normal circumstances, as though it was a deficiency. People will talk about it in hush whispers, or gossip vehemently about how you had to resort to a dating site, or, you know, The Internet.

11. If you are on the personals section of Craigslist, in w4m you will be jumped upon like jaggery in an ant colony; if in w4w, you will also be jumped on by creepy men who somehow chose to read "w" as "m". Since you "want some" anyway, it is perceived to be not too different from wanting anything else; and at the end of the day it all comes back to how you need a man to have real sex, as all these faceless Romeos will persuade you.

12. You will never be persuaded to like anyone you don't want to be with. At the end of the day, the economics of this whole business is that the average woman gets what she wants more easily, can have her pick, but not without going through a whole bag of nonsense. Supply always < demand so you get some perks out of that imbalance but some people will forever be creepy.

Men on dating sites forming a large percentage.