'i only date feminists' - a social experiment (part 2 of the f-word)

Lili 6:43 AM , , , No comments
link to part 1


I met a lot of people in my life. Let's start with this sentence.
Some of them were nice, some of them not so much. Some of them were female, some of them male.
Some of them i loved, some of them i strongly disliked. Some of them are still in my life, some of them left. Some of them were feminists, a few of them part of the patriarchy, most didn't know who they were.

I met some girls and very few boys who got to know me and found out that i'm a feminist and felt like this was a turn-on. I met too many boys and a few girls, who didn't liked my attitude regarding feminism and sexism and social issues in general.

Because of missing education i guessed that most just didn't know what feminism was and that they were afraid of the big word and just too lazy to google it and get informed.




I wanted to start an experiment.
Let's take one of the most popular online dating sites at the moment and see who would be interested in me when all they know is, that i'd only date feminists.

To have the best endresults i started a "normal" account a few months earlier and filled in the questions with my own personal preferences, uploaded a cute picture of me and tried to be flirty and funny and like the common girl on this site would be.
I never was openly promiscuitive, didn't tell anyone too many real facts about me and tried to keep calm whenever their ruthless behaviour irritated me.
It wasn't bad. let's put it that way, i got quite popular. I got a lot of messages, some very openly sexual, others more shy and some really seemed interested in getting to know me.
I even exchanged numbers and facebook details with some of them, because - i'm not gonna lie - some of them actually did interested me despite of this being an experiment (by the way, i never actually lied regarding personal details of my life or person, i openly told everyone who asked me what i was doing there and what i was looking for, that it's for an social experiment and that i'm just looking for nice/interesting people).

As time passed i got a bit closer with some of the guys and girls of this site, i met some of them, had some "dates" and met some actually decent people.
So if you're reading this and you met me there: No, i didn't use you.
I was just never looking for something real and i didn't found anything real.
Most of the conversations on this site actually made me doubt humanity itself. It's unbelievable how pathetic or stupid or just plain rude some people are. But i tried to keep it together for the sake of this experiement.
And as i already said, some of them were okay or actually very lovely.

Moving on, after 1 month of just playing around and getting to know the site and some of it's members, then 2 more months of being more me and more selective, forming friendships and enjoing myself on dates, i changed my behaviour dramatically and stopped taking all the bullshit.
I deleted my account,started a new one, uploaded a photo of myself which didn't show my face anymore and all i posted were the words 'i'd only date feminists'.
I 'liked' everyone's profile and waited for messages or reactions.
Again, i was very open about this being an experiment.
At first nothing really happened.
I got less messages, but that was predictable.
It was the same audience as before, a lot of plain rude sex messages, some slow interactions and then a few people who asked me about my status.
I had some people who asked my if i was interested in feminism and social issues and we talked a bit about how society works, but (s)he never made it clear if (s)he was a feminist or not.

Something i found quite funny was a question i received early on which was:
"Do you really only meet girls?"
Of course i knew what he meant, but i asked him back "What made you believe that and where did i ever say that?"
He then continued saying that i stated this on my profile but lost interested in that pretty quickly:


Later on i had the following conversation about different social issues, about education and political points of view, and he answered my question about him being a feminist with "no, because i don't want to label myself. i have my own conceptions of equality, freedom and so on, including all human beings."

Again, we droped this topic after that and moved on to the typical small talk.

One thing that still bothers me, are the misconception about feminism, sexism and basically the fact that no one really knows what they talk about, (me sometimes of course included).


What guy x speaks of isn't sexism and has nothing to do with feminism, it's about being a polite human being and should be common behaviour for everyone towards anyone.

The next result i want to share with you is this conversation. He asked me about my status and what it meant. I asked him if he knew what feminism is. His answer: "i think it means that women should be treated with respect. But i'm not sure."
I showed him the blog post "the F-word", because i couldn't be bothered to explain it in my own words again, and he replied that this is basically the way he thinks and was quite surprised that he's on holiday and suddenly a text "tells" him, that he's a feminist.


And that was all.


Something that actually kind of surprised me, because i already lost all faith in humanity, was the guy who just answered "yeah, absolutly, because every human has the right of equality". it's not that it shocked me or anything, but he didn't thought about it or started a long discussion and arguing with me about the definition of feminism. He just said yes and we were done.



All in all it was not what i hoped it would be, i wished for a lot more discussions to take place, but let's be honest, what can you expect on such a plattform.I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, it's just not the enviroment for deep talks about our society.
I think my experience can be summarized with this conversation:



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