Dear Men — Here’s Feedback On Your Online Dating Pictures From A Woman’s Perspective

You’re the reason you’re not getting replies.

I posted an article about feedback on women’s online profiles from a man’s perspective. One guy I’m dating allowed me to scroll through Tinder on his phone to see what other women’s dating profiles in my age demographic look like.

The consistent feedback I received on my article: a lot of the feedback applies to men as well.

I don’t disagree, however, there are some subtle differences. And because I have so much feedback for men, I’m dividing my articles between men’s photos and their bio writeups (coming soon to a Medium near you).

And so, I present to you, feedback for men on their dating pictures.

Don’t be weird about camera angles

Updated this article thanks to Jennifer M. reminding me of this irritating habit men do with their pictures.

Dear men, please stop taking pictures with the camera below your face. We don’t need to see up your nose. At least 50% of men do this on their profile.

Stop posting pictures with only half your face.

Don’t post that picture if it looks like you dropped your camera when it took the shot.

No joke, most men post pictures like my drunk grandmother learning how to use technology. Don’t be weird.

Stop showing group pictures

I’m going to copy this verbatim from my previous article. It’s your profile, not your profile with your friend. Women don’t want to guess which one is you and, even worse, find your friend more attractive. It’s not hard to crop out the other person. No one cares what your friends look like.

Sometimes there are pictures of a guy standing next to someone that I assume is a celebrity of sorts. Great, you took a photo next to Chris Martin from Coldplay…how the hell does that make you more attractive than a picture of you on your own? Plus, fuck Coldplay.

Stop showing pictures of children

My guesstimate is that 30% of men’s profiles with children don’t even have kids. They comment in their descriptions that the kids are their nephews and nieces.

Why? Like really…why?

Women want to know if you have kids. We don’t need to see you standing next to children. They’re not cute puppies that attract women at the park. It’s creepy.

Stop showing pictures of your dog

Do you have a dog who is a big part of your life? Great! Just take a picture with your dog. I don’t need to see images of just your canine pal. While you think Stella is the best dog in the world (said in a baby voice as you scratch her belly), she is not so amazing that I’ll see her picture and think, “Wow, look at that fantastic dog. I absolutely must date this man!”

The reaction we have to seeing a picture of your dog is the same reaction you have if we posted a picture of our favorite lipgloss.

Ditch the fuzzy pictures

Gentlemen, I get it. You don’t know how to take selfies. You don’t scream at the end of an evening with your friends, “oh my God, we have to take a group shot!” Photography isn’t your strong suit.

Still, there’s no excuse for fuzzy pictures. It means you right-clicked on a picture from your friend’s wife’s Facebook page to download the picture taken of you from last summer’s barbecue. If it’s a picture from far away and you have to crop 99% of the picture to get your face, then that 1% appears granular and fuzzy when blown up to fit the profile picture width.

Take your fucking sunglasses off

You get a pass to have one picture with sunglasses if it’s to show a full-body shot or an image of an activity you want to convey that you enjoy doing. And it can’t be your main photo. It’s infuriating because odds are low we’re able to pick you out of a police lineup if we haven’t seen the upper part of your face.

It also looks lazy, like you grabbed the last 3 pictures from your phone and patted yourself on the back.

Take your trucker hat off

Like sunglasses, you get a pass for a photo or two with a hat. But the majority of them need your hat off. If you think it shouldn’t make a difference because you want a woman who loves you anyway blah blah blah, consider looking at before/after pictures of men who have had hair transplant surgery. They look like two different people.

So if you don’t have any hair, there’s no point in hiding it because it’ll be obvious on a date anyway.

Clean your bathroom mirror

I try to cut guys slack that they’re useless at taking selfies. But if you’re going to take a mirror shot, clean the mirror because all we see is the toothpaste gunk and not your face.

To add: clean your entire bathroom too. While men look at the woman in the picture, we look at everything in the picture. If it looks like a tornado passed through your bathroom, that’s a massive red flag. Especially for women with children, we don’t need another child to clean up after.

Don’t be crass

Pictures with you flipping the camera off aren’t sexy. We’re not your bro.

Pictures of you sticking out your tongue while doing that is-it-the-devil-or-is-it-YOLO hand gesture are also unsexy. We’re not going on a keg run. I don’t need to picture you as an adult fratboy.

Your workout picture isn’t as hot as you think

You’re posting pictures from the Male Gaze and not the Female Gaze. What does that mean?

It means you’re assuming what women would want to see instead of what we actually want to see. You think we want to see some macho, buff stud with ripped biceps surrounded by massive weights. You associate an image like that with manliness.

While I want to know that you exercise, I don’t need to see a faux testosterone shot of it. You can wear a t-shirt that shows those shredded arms in a well-posed picture in an office. Or you can show it shirtless in a beach shot (you get one pass, otherwise you look like a douchebag).

Seeing you all shiny from sweat with a sweat-laden shirt is only sexy in pictures if you’re chopping wood.

Pick some facial hair and stick with it

Like hats and sunglasses, facial hair completely changes a guy’s appearance. If you have a mix of clean-shaven and full beard photos, how do I know which one will show up on a date? Also, how far apart were those pictures if the beard photo was potentially taken after the clean-shaven picture?

It’s also a major influencer on women’s attraction to you. Many women find beards super hot. So if you always have one, you want to appeal to those women. For me, I loathe facial hair (because my skin is too sensitive, I enjoy kissing every part of a man’s face, and it reminds me of my dad) so if I see a mix of pictures I won’t reach out unless the guy is exceptionally good-looking and I’ll roll the dice.

Marc had a mix of pictures like that but without a beard, dude is better looking than 99% of the guys in my feed. On our first date, where he thankfully showed up clean-shaven, I told him he was too good-looking to hide his face behind facial hair.

Enough with the action shots

Do you waterski? Great!

Do you snowboard? Great!

Do you do crazy skateboard stunts? Great!

Don’t show us nonstop pictures of you doing these things because we can’t see what you look like in any of them. You can post one good image that you’re proud of but ditch the rest. You can list those activities in your written profile.

Those pictures are so hard to discern who’s in them that you could take a picture from an outdoor living website and we wouldn’t even notice that it’s a different guy.

Being goofy is fine

I wonder if guys are too scared to show silly pictures of themselves online. If the other pictures are good images that show your face and your body (while meeting all of the above criteria), then showing a picture of you doing something silly is great.

Lots of guys have serious pictures. Many don’t know how to do a proper smile but y’all get a pass because as I keep repeating, we know selfies aren’t your strong suit. Showing a goofy picture goes a long way to demonstrate you have a sense of humor and you don’t take yourself too seriously.

This includes pictures where you were the subject of a prank, such as a pie thrown at you, or a funny Halloween costume.

We get it. You fish.

Is there a picture of you smiling while you’re out on a boat? Fantastic, use that picture.

Is there a picture of you with a big grin, wearing a hat and sunglasses, showing off a massive fish? For the love of all things pure and holy, don’t post it.

It’s great that you fish and if it’s a hobby, post it in your writeup. Because men use fish-catching pictures like some kind of dick-swinging contest. There is no female alive who has seen a picture of a guy holding a fish and was so impressed by the scaly creature that she thought, “dayammm…that guy catches some big ass fish! I have to get to know him better!”

In other words, the fish is irrelevant. We’re looking at you. And I have yet to see a fish picture where the guy looked so good, it was worth posting the image. Don’t be a cliché.

Limit the car pictures

As with women, the appeal of car pictures is obvious. The lighting is gorgeous. It’s diffused natural light.

You get one car image. Two if there’s a significance behind the second photo; you’re showing off something you just bought that you’re excited about, that genuine excitement translates in the image, and it’s related to a major interest of yours (like a comic book).

Anything more than that looks lazy and it doesn’t give us an idea of what you look like in your natural habitat.

Professional shots scare us

Acceptable professional photos are meant for work or ones that were family pictures and you cropped the others out.

If it’s just you posing with no other context, then I give a pass for one image. Anything more than that comes across as vain. While it’s fantastic that you can pose well, photoshop well, and take sepia-toned pictures well, it tells us nothing about you other than you think you’re hot stuff.

Confidence is great. Arrogance is not.

A confident man will post a goofy picture of himself. An arrogant man will post endless photoshopped images of him standing next to a motorcycle.

We know when you’ve altered photos

Hey guys, most of us know you hate filtered photos.

The same applies to us. Unless the image is professionally taken like in the aforementioned section, you guys aren’t the greatest at digital manipulation of images.

We can point out the flaws in a Kardashian picture that show how and where an image was tweaked. Do you think you’re better than a fucking Kardashian at picture alterations? Bitch, please.

This only applies to the parts of the image that are you specifically. If you do a shitty job at trying to photoshop out others around you, then that’s acceptable. I’d rather date a guy who has the common sense to blur out the other people in the image (if it wouldn’t work to crop) than one who thinks I won’t notice that he has no pores.

Don’t show old pictures

It floors me that guys think we won’t notice a picture that is over a decade old. Sliding that between two recent pictures doesn’t nonchalantly make it less obvious.

I get that it’s a great picture of you and you’re proud of it. Really, I do. But we don’t care because it’s not the “you” we’ll ever meet.

And if I haven’t made it obvious already, we’re masters at decoding pictures. Not only can we tell that the image is old from the lack of wrinkles, but we also can see from the style of clothes and hair what era the picture is from. We also can tell by the picture style if it was taken with an older camera compared to a shitty cell phone image.

You can’t bamboozle us.

My personal preferences

My feedback in this article speaks on behalf of most women. I do acknowledge what I do and don’t like but aren’t the views of other chicks.

I’m not a fan of pictures where the guy is drinking a beer in the water while sweaty (or even worse, wearing suntan lotion). Maybe because I’m weird about food and drinks in pools. There’s something that looks white trash about those shots. Plus they’re usually combined with sunglasses and baseball hats, which render the picture useless.

I don’t like gun pictures. I don’t mean the kind with a redneck guy wearing GI Joe camouflage with a gun that compensates for their lack of penile length. I mean even the action shots that are meant to show off a hobby. I’m very gun-averse and if it’s that much of an interest that you want to show it in pictures, then I’m not interested.

Full-length mirror images make me cringe. Guys don’t know what to do with their lower bodies in mirror selfies. Women know how to pop their hips out or bend their knee to make them dynamic. Men stand like they’re taking an awkward mugshot. Plus, full-length pictures like that mean they’re standing in front of their bedroom closet. I’m going to judge whether they had the common sense to clean the room before taking the picture.

I hate tank tops on men. I don’t care if you’re at the gym. I don’t care if you’re outside working out. I don’t need to see any clothing that will reveal your armpits. Shudder. So gross.

Hopefully, this feedback will help men out there who are humble enough to take a second glance at their profile pictures and make appropriate adjustments.

If you are happy with the quantity and quality of women who match with you, then don’t feel the need to change anything. This is for the guys whose hearts are in the right place but are utterly clueless on why their profiles aren’t attracting women.

You’re welcome, gentlemen.