A 6-Word Text From A Dating App Guy Changed Everything I Thought I Knew

Hi, my name is Abby, and I’m extremely single. In my butthurt state after facing one too many rejections, I concluded that Gen Z men simply aren’t interested in sex anymore. But I may have spoken too soon when I assumed slimy men were a thing of the past. So let’s talk about it.

Perverted men who overstep the line and only want sex? They exist. But in today’s day and age, they just work in more undercover, mysterious ways. These men have found a way to fly under the radar with a facade of a shy, respectful 20-something who keeps his hands to himself and fantasizes about God more than naked women.

After my first eight months on Hinge, with minimal success, I figured either I’d suddenly become heinous or — more likely — the algorithm now hated my guts because it knew I was reliant on it. The “delete for two weeks, then download for two weeks” method wasn’t increasing my number of likes, and Hinge knew it could hide all the men I’d actually be interested in behind their paywall section. So basically, it was a freakin’ ghost-town, with no dates or hotties on the horizon.

At this time, I truly wasn’t looking for anything serious; I basked in the freedom of singlehood after being burnt out from a long-term relationship gone sour. But now that I was over it, I wanted a little “something something.” A ‘lil smooch or compliment from a man would never comprise my self-worth, but it’d be the cherry on top of my already-fulfilled life.

So I caved. “I think I need to download Tinder,” I told my friend Claire one evening after seeing, yet again, a whopping zero new likes on my Hinge. “I’m awfully celibate.”

“Well, if you’re looking to change that, Tinder is the place to go,” she affirmed.

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Being a total nerd, of course there was a degree of strategy to my decision. “I know the algorithm is best when you first download it, so I gotta wait until my life is less hectic,” I continued. At the time, I’d just finished a week of interviewing celebrities on red carpets at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was about to enter a non-stop period of Jewish high holidays. “But I want to do it once everything calms down. It’s time for me to hook up with someone again.”

She replied with a laugh. “You should give it a try. But hey, I have to warn you, the guys on there can be pretty gross,” she said. “And others pretend to be gentlemen at first, only to hit you with super graphic stuff a bit later on.”

Although she has plenty of dating expertise, Claire was now in a long-term relationship and hadn’t been on Tinder in a couple years. So although I appreciated her advice, I took it with a grain of salt. Besides, I was in my “why won’t men look at me anymore?” phase, so I genuinely couldn’t remember what it felt like to feel violated by a comment a guy made. Perhaps this problem didn’t exist now that apathetic men polluted the dating scene.

So a couple weeks later, after yet another night of watching TV with my parents instead of going out, I downloaded Tinder for the first time.

The first few days were chill. I didn’t find any Abercrombie models on there, but at least I was getting matches. The conversations were relatively boring; they faded out quickly, and nobody was really asking me on dates. But the adrenaline of the gamified experience kept me going.

Enter Brad: an unassuming 28-year-old man with a modest two out of four shirtless photos on his profile, along with an inspirational quote as his bio: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

“Hi Brad! How are youuu?” I wrote after we matched, around 7 p.m.

“Never been better. What are you looking for?” he replied. Many guys are immediately curious to know what women are seeking on Tinder, which I later learned is their way of asking if you’re cool with casual sex without seeming desperate.

When I didn’t respond by 1 a.m., he followed up with a question mark. Persistence, not bad, I thought.

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“Honestly depends on the person!” I texted. “Just wanna see where things go.” Read: “If I’m super attracted to you, I’ll probably want to hook up with you. But I’m not about to promise anything until you prove yourself to me.” Keeping my mind open, like a true divine feminine woman.

“Same,” he replied. “Any plans today?” Boom. In for the kill. First guy on Tinder to suggest meeting up.

“Just watching the baseball game actually, haha!” I said, hoping he’d follow up with another time option, or at the very least, say something flirty about how impressed he was that I was into sports.

But oh no. His word-for-word response was: “Can you sit on my face so I can eat my way to your heart?”

I looked back at our conversation, puzzled, then reread those first six words in disbelief: “Can you sit on my face?” Since this was my first time receiving this kind of comment, I actually responded, something I now know isn’t worth my time. “That’s a bit forward, isn’t it?”

“Too direct?” He wrote. “Potentially,” I replied, obviously a huge understatement. And his final message to me before I ignored him was: “I’m a man who knows what he wants.”

Spoiler alert: It didn’t work out between Brad and me. Although I was definitely grossed out by his mic-drop sexual rhetorical question, I shrugged it off and moved on. Still better than no matches at all.

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But then, over the next few days, I realized just how many men like Brad there actually were. He wasn’t an exception — an unusually horny man who put himself out there far more than any other — he was the archetype. Claire’s warning was spot-on.

Take this conversation I had shortly after, with a man named Nick. Unlike Brad, he actually engaged in innocent, flirtatious conversation, telling me he loved my smile and wanted to take me on a fancy date to show me off. Perhaps chivalry wasn’t dead after all.

“I’m super down to go out,” I texted. “Just say the word and I’m there.”

“OK. But Abby…have you ever been with a Greek guy before?” he asked.

A part of me knew where this was going, but I chose to ignore my gut in favour of radical optimism. “LOL no, why?” I asked.

“Well, get ready. Because I’m 6 inches hard,” he wrote.

I didn’t tell him what I, so badly, wanted to say: “Are you aware 6 inches is average?” Instead, I ghosted him. But I certainly mentioned that handy fact (no pun intended) when I told this story to friends, along with the obvious reminder that it’s not about the size of the waves, but the motion of the ocean.

I was perplexed. Besides that it’s just a gross thing to say, why would anyone brag about being average anyway? If you got a C+ on a test, would you go around shouting it in everyone’s faces? And more importantly, when did “let me take you out on a date” turn into “I’m having sex with you, whether you like it or not?”

I wisely started ignoring the men who jumped from “How are you?” to “I wanna blow your back out” (a phrase I had to define for my mother), and not waste any additional energy after the Brads revealed themselves as the sex-focused animals they are. However, I couldn’t help but view the room in a different light the next time I went out.

I was in a club, surrounded by the men who I’d previously written off as voluntarily celibate (or “volcels,” a term I’ve coined) because none of them ever approached me, much less flirted with me or requested my number. But now I saw the truth. Although a large portion of these men were definitely still voluntarily celibate, and neglected to try because they were too lazy or scared, I didn’t realize that many of them were the same ol’ pervs who’d simply found a more effective way to operate.

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Instead of hitting on a girl at a bar, having to determine through subtle clues whether she’d want to go home with you, and risking rejection (or worse, being accused of predatory behaviour), it was much easier to just go home after a night out and hop on Tinder. No hoops to jump through, or extra effort to put in — the digital format makes it possible to land a one-night stand with a woman without risk of humiliation.

In person, you’d get slapped if you jumped into a conversation with a woman by graphically detailing the sex you were going to have with her. But online, the crass sext opener is a copy-and-paste method you can apply to dozens of single women at once, significantly increasing the chances that one will actually indulge. Plus, the worst that can happen is ghosting, which hands-down beats being yelled at by a woman’s friends in the middle of a bar.

So I learned it the hard way: Many men are still, in fact, pigs, who see women as sexual objects and treat them as such. But our landscape has made it much easier for them to hide it, while still getting exactly what they want.

I started expressing this sentiment to friends, stretching my hands out in emphasis: “It’s either they don’t feel the need to try anymore, and use dating apps only as a band-aid mechanism for their loneliness; or they’re only interested in sex and approach it in a disgustingly forward way because they CAN. Either way, chivalry is dead and buried.” (Dramatic? Me? Nooooo.)

This might be a hot take, but I’m honestly not sure which extreme is worse. While the “blow your back out” Brads are revolting and will never receive a response back from me again, at least they’re proof that Gen Z men are still interested in capturing female attention. When I receive an inappropriate message from a Brad, I know the problem is 100% with their inability to control their impulses and respect a woman, an issue every generation knows all too well.

But the volcels are different, because it’s new; most older women haven’t experienced the crushing weight of unanimous indifference the way Gen Z has. The male loneliness epidemic is a growing phenomenon that’s pretty unique to men in their 20s. And this uncharted territory is freakin’ TERRIFYING.

With the Brads, we have the assurance our mothers did: that they’ll just grow out of the piggish behaviour as they mature. But with the overwhelming volume of lonely, lazy men, we don’t have proof that it’ll improve over time, because no generation has ever experienced this to the same degree before. Maybe social media and COVID have built Gen Z men into a species that is innately less interested in trying, incapable of just “growing out of it.”

But I guess that’s not the end of the world for us women. We’ve responded to this disappointment by becoming less dependent on men as a whole, adopting a positive, unanimous acceptance for singlehood. This sentiment is totally unprecedented in other generation. Women are more content with being alone than ever before.

That’s a classic “woman” experience if I’ve ever seen one: rising above a negative circumstance that’s out of our control, and instead reacting with maturity, independence, and grace. So amidst all this chaos and disappointment in dating, I’ve never been prouder to be a woman.

Want to stay in the loop on all my honest dating experiences? Check out the full series, Abby’s Dating Diary, where I’m covering my entire journey in brutal detail! New posts go live Sundays at 10 p.m.

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