Are Women More Censored and Surveilled in Online Dating?
I’ve been banned from three dating apps, and no, I did not harass anyone.
(Photo of street art taken by the author, seen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Did I violate their terms of service? Probably. I mean, see this list on OkCupid, the site many of us love to hate (or one dating app among others that we love to hate).
I am a single mom sole-care provider, so excuse me for telling a guy that he could help pay for my babysitter if he wanted to see me.
I received this email in my inbox and then checked to see my account status, finding out that I’d been banned.
I haven’t reached out to the moderators at OkCupid about my profile, and I don’t care to. I’d expected that I might be banned because of my profile linking to some of my Medium articles on dating and my social media profile on my healing work. (See above terms of service: sharing information about your hobbies, “if it’s not for dating purposes,” is prohibited.)
I’ve long been disillusioned by the approach to dating as constructed by dating apps and by the lazy, consumerist dating app culture. OkCupid’s guidelines are also blatantly anti-women, promoting shallowness by disallowing sharing of hobbies or outside interests.
When women take on significantly more care work than men, and most of that care work is unpaid, for OkCupid to disallow any form of women asking for men to contribute to the date in any way is misogynistic. I said what I said. Hello, gift-giving is one of the six love languages. Let me express that gift-giving and acts of service are important to me. As I’ve already laid out, we live in a patriarchal society, and I’m done accepting the bare minimum.
OkCupid, and other similar dating sites, care more about continuing their inflow of paying customers than they care about users being able to express other aspects of their identity. But an even bigger issue is that apps like OkCupid do no screening of their users and prioritize having a paying customer base over protecting women’s safety in general. While OkCupid gives lip service to instructing men to behave, from my own experience and according to others I’ve engaged with, the reality of their monitoring of users’ behavior falls dangerously short.
Yet these apps do little to the police or enforce men’s behavior. I’ve had men on these sites ask me questions like “how dark are your nipples?” and repeatedly instructed me to wear high-heeled shoes — *before* we’d ever met in person. Suffice it to say. I didn’t meet either of those poor excuses for men in person.
On at least one occasion, I have been sexually assaulted by a man I met from a dating site that I believe was OkCupid. Social media posts tell me my story is far from unique.
It makes me sick to my stomach that, in practice, apps like OkCupid are more ok with men showing predatory behavior toward women than with any users sharing their outside interests or for women to ask for any form of gift-giving.
As I’ve said before, sex is not an activity like any other. I am banned from Tinder as well. I regret it in some ways, as I’ve written that I don’t believe that men and women are naturally monogamous. Yet, these apps cheapen the energetic connection of sex and facilitate a way for men and women to hook up without men having to put in much if any, significant time, effort, or money.
Let’s remember to pay homage to the divinity in all of us. This means putting in effort and showing all the love languages a partner or prospective partner needs. This means showing up authentically for our own needs while also not devaluing those of others.
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