Women in Social Media

I read an article today on Reddit by a man who set up a fake female profile on a dating site because he wanted to see for himself how women are treated on such sites and on social media in general.  The results were not pretty.  He hadn't even completed the profile when he began to receive messages that became increasingly strange and/or vulgar in nature.  Polite responses of "thanks but no thanks" touched off a storm of name-calling and abuse.  He ended up deleting the profile after two hours.

Blogger Alexandra Tweten commented in one of her own articles on the subject: "...one comes to the conclusion that women can't win if they are not interested in certain men.  Under their logic, we are supposed to entertain any man who is interested in conversation or a date just because we exist on a dating site.  Which is completely ridiculous."

It's unfortunate that some women deliberately flaunt what they have in order to attract attention or to incite controversy: think Miley Cyrus' "twerking" or Kim Kardashian's naked pictures.  All this does is make things worse for the rest of us, because sadly there are many men out there who assume that all women should be that way.

I'm a fairly private person and I'm careful about what I post online.  However even I have received a few friend requests and private messages from total strangers on Facebook saying that I'm pretty and they'd like to talk to me.  Hello - look at my profile, it says I'm married.  That should be a BIG sign that I'm not interested in that.

There's a saying in the gaming world: if you can't respect your fellow players, stay out of the sandbox until you have something worthy to contribute.

Same goes for social media.