how to design a dating site that attracts females
i generally don’t do gendered articles (see my previous posts on categories), but this topic has been very interesting to me lately.
more and more data is coming out that demonstrates that in the west females suffer a lot with self-censorship. a good example of this is the fact that a female will have a hard time dealing with the promiscuous nature of our species and instead conjure up elaborate requirements for prospective mates.
one of these requirements is that the candidate must not be desperate for reproduction, because that might mean he is unfit. therefore, dating sites or websites where dating is accepted signal females that the males there are desperate for mating because they can’t get it any other way. this means dating sites in general are flawed in principle. if females favor males that are sexually successful, they will not want to join a website where males have to join it because they are sexually unsuccessful.
so how can a website be a dating site and still attract females? by restricting dating. if a website says “no dating on this website”, it signals females that the males there are (at least in theory) not there for dating and therefore, sexually successful through other means. this allows females to contact males with a good cover, even though they might be just interested in dating.
the best dating website capable of attracting females is a website where dating is forbidden!
let’s see some examples, not just for websites. on CS dating is forbidden, yet females are known to use it as dating very frequently. i personally have been harassed by females on the website, even though i state i do not seek any such encounter. i’ve never been harassed online in any other website, so there is definitely something going on.
being an Erasmus student, for example, is also another widespread, real life, covert dating machine. it provides, again, a good cover for females wanting to try exotic sexual encounters and express their sexuality freely. whenever someone asks what they are doing, they will say “i am in an erasmus exchange”. i’ve been to some of these parties, i’ve met dozens of erasmus students and to put it very bluntly, there are even females keeping a tally on how many different cultures they had sex with. what we have here, again, is a socially sanctioned way of allowing females to express their sexuality with a cover story that prevents their public “slutification”.
why is this important? we are dealing with widespread social misogyny, especially towards sexually promiscuous women. but towards sexually promiscuous men, there is no social effect, because that is considered the standard behaviour. women and therefore forced to go through elaborate ways of finding mates through networks that are not for dating, because of this paradox: a woman cannot be promiscuous, and the mate she’s seeking must not be desperate, two things that dating sites break by definition. so the easiest way is to join the local choir, the local ballroom dancing class, do an erasmus exchange or travel using couchsurfing. whenever someone asks what the female is doing there, there is a cover story. i’m just doing X, where X is completely unrelated to dating. and whenever a male hypothetically joins it, he’s actually just looking to do whatever activity that place was for, and not necessarily hook up.
we all know that this is false. people meet through networks all the time because that’s what life is all about (isn’t it?). be it the network of friends or mutual interests, it is expected that people will hook up or fall in love.
this means that the best networks to meet people are networks that are not designed to meet people and the best networks for dating are networks where it is forbidden. just like the best network for freeloading (CS) is a network where freeloading is not encouraged.
we are so driven by cultural and social definitions that we are willing to do the exact opposite of what it would be expected, exactly because it wasn’t expected. so if you’re starting a dating site, you better name it “just talk” and say dating is forbidden. i’m still amazed at how people are so incredibly skilled at being unintuitive and tortuous in their everyday logic.