Man lasts less than two hours dating online as a woman

Fake social media profiles rarely are used for the public good, and doubly so for falsely created online dating profiles. Which, of course, is why it's a shame Reddit user OKCThrowaway22221 only lasted two hours dating online as a woman.

Coming to us from the TwoXChromosomes subreddit, OKCThrowaway22221's tale begins in a familiar place: full-blown sexism. See, OKC didn't believe that women had a harder time dating online, and so he set out to prove that woman have it much easier than men.

Turns out he was incredibly, astronomically incorrect. But it didn't appear that way at first:

"Last night I was bored and was talking with a friend on skype about her experiences with online dating. I was joking with her that "girls have it easy on dating sites" etc. etc. I had never really done anything in the online dating world but I had set up a real profile a few years back and didn't use it much aside from getting a few nice messages and decided it wasn't really for me. But, as I said, I was bored, so I decided that I would set up a fake profile. Set it up as a gender-swapped version of me essentially see what would happen. So I did the username, and I was up. Before I could even fill out my profile at all, I already had a message in my inbox from a guy. It wasn't a mean message, but I found it odd that I would get a message already. So I sent him a friendly hello back and kind of joked that I hadn't even finished my profile, how could he be interested, but I felt good because I thought I was right that "girls have it easy"

You probably can probably guess what happens from there. Sexism, harassing messages, sexual intimidation—it's all there, and more. But, interestingly, the most surprising thing to OKC was the speed with which the messages arrived the inbox that ostensibly belonged to a potential female partner.

"I finished setting up my profile, used a picture of my friend for the profile pic with her permission, and said I was interested in Long term dating/short term dating and was good to go. I thought I would check on it in about 24 hours. But before I could even close the tab another message was received. It was another guy who seemed nice asking how I was doing and I messaged him back staying as neutral and as uninterested as possible without being mean. I was about to leave again, but I was kind of curious now, so I waited another minute, and sure enough, a third message popped up (also I feel this is a good point to say that my friend would be the first to say she's a pretty average looking girl). I messaged him back, but before I could send, I had gotten a reply from the first guy, so I had to do that, then a reply from the second guy. So fine, people are interested in going out with me. Then I got another message that opened with a line that while not wholly vulgar, kind of came off a little strange. I ignored it and went back to send the message to person three now. Before I could send it, I got a followup message from Mr.4 which was needlessly sexual in nature. I continued to ignore him and finished. I then began to have some small-talk with some guys (remember this is like minute 20 of having the profile up) and all of the conversations kind of get weird." 

From there, the messages continued to increase in their aggressive sexual nature. No surprise to most women participating in online dating, but OKC was completely taken aback. It was, in essence, a deluge of pressure, anger, and general vitriol:

"Guys were full-on spamming my inbox with multiple messages before I could reply to even one asking why I wasn't responding and what was wrong. Guys would become hostile when I told them I wasn't interested in NSA sex, or guys that had started normal and nice quickly turned the conversation into something explicitly sexual in nature. Seemingly nice dudes in quite esteemed careers asking to hook up in 24 hours and sending them naked pics of myself despite multiple times telling them that I didn't want to."

This appears to be where OKC realizes the different dating pressures men and women face online. And, what's more, it had some type of lasting impression, with OKC saying that the situation made him "really uncomfortable with everything." Even as a regular on the infamous 4chan boards, OKC was shocked:

"I would be lying if I said it didn't get to me. I thought it would be some fun thing, something where I would do it and worse case scenario say "lol I was a guy I trolle you lulz"etc. but within a 2 hour span it got me really down and I was feeling really uncomfortable with everything. I figured I would get some weird messages here and there, but what I got was an onslaught of people who were, within minutes of saying hello, saying things that made me as a dude who spends most of his time on 4chan uneasy. I ended up deleting my profile at the end of 2 hours and kind of went about the rest of my night with a very bad taste in my mouth." 

Two hours later, the brief and horrible experiment was over. As a result, OKC now says that "women have it so much harder than guys do" in the online dating world. The takeaway here, though, is this: "boys being boys" seems only to have any validity when you're the boy tossing the phrase—otherwise, two hours would've been a warmup, not the duration.

For women, though, that experiment still continues.

[Jezebel]