OPINION
The first time I met an internet date I was 13 years old. We had been chatting for months over MSN and the phone, exchanged timid 'I love you's, and finally, we were meeting IRL. He came to my school one afternoon and we snuck away to the top of a hill, where we exchanged gifts – I gave him a baseball cap, he gave me a few punk CDs. We held hands. We didn’t kiss, but I floated all the way home anyway, drunk on my first taste of what felt like love.
He broke up with me a few days later. It was the first full-body heartbreak I’d feel, and certainly not the last; he was the first boy I’d meet online, and of course, not the last. He was who he said he was. Nothing bad happened to me, other than hurt feelings. But years later when I confessed the whole story to my mother, she asked, how could you be so stupid to meet someone you didn’t even know?
In the decade and a half since, the perception of the internet has changed in myriad ways. Back then, we spoke in hushed whispers about meeting people online – what if they were old men pretending to be cute young boys, ready to chop you into a million pieces once they’d lured you to their den? Internet dating was considered a weird thing for weird losers who couldn’t get laid in the real world. Now, of course, most singletons have at least tried dating apps like Tinder, and many have ended up in long-term relationships from such services. I’ve been on dozens upon dozens of internet dates over the last few years. It’s normal now. Everyone does it.
We know the rules: meet in public, tell someone where you’re going, have an escape route planned out in case, don’t tell a stranger your address
But despite the ways in which things have changed, some things are the same as they ever were – namely, the threat of danger for women especially. We stay vigilant about safety. We know the rules: meet in public, tell someone where you’re going, have an escape route planned out in case, don’t tell a stranger your address. Don’t feel creepy for Facebook stalking someone beforehand to suss them out. Many bars have signs on the back of women’s toilet doors: if your Tinder date’s being creepy, go to staff and say this code word, we’ll bail you out. We’ve all seen Catfish and other cautionary tales. Things have changed, but the fear stays static.
Which is why it’s so incredibly demeaning, infantilising and downright offensive to see things like the NSW Police’s Facebook status last week, in which they riffed off Beyonce’s Single Ladies for a ‘cute’ post warning women about keeping themselves safe while online dating:
Putting the frustrating issue of the police continually trying to appeal to the masses via meme-y social media aside, what’s infuriating about this messaging is that it once again places the onus on women. If you’re assaulted, it says, it’s your own fault. Never mind that even if you follow all the rules –tell a friend where you’ll be, strategise an exit plan, meet in a public place – you can still be taken advantage of. Never mind that most violence happens at the hands of someone already known to the victim. Never mind that despite someone looking legit online, they could be a terrible abuser. Never mind that many men who call themselves feminists are the worst offenders of all, their manipulation crawling out slowly and insidiously until it’s too late to back out.
Never mind any of that, because ladies, if you’re foolish enough to dare to meet someone online, you should know what’s coming!
We call our friends, we carry our keys between our knuckles, we make up lies about having boyfriends to ward strange men off in bars
There are countless lists online of tips to stay safe while online dating, but all of these tips are useless, and the police’s “advice” is too, because the truth is this: the world is not safe for women. We know all the things to do. We call our friends, we carry our keys between our knuckles, we make up lies about having boyfriends to ward strange men off in bars (because intruding on another man’s “property” is more of an offence than refusing a woman’s right to say no), we text when we get home. And guess what? We get assaulted, murdered and abused anyway.
Online dating is just another way to meet people, and it contains the same multitudes and possibilities that all interactions do – love, joy, pain, loss. Online, offline, it’s all the same – we’re looking for love in a hopeless place, and we just cross our fingers that whoever we meet, wherever we meet them, will hopefully not kill us.
Women are already acutely aware of all the ways in which the world threatens us, and despite everything we do, nothing will change until the behaviour and entitlement of abusers does. Condescending social media posts from the forces that are supposed to protect us – and often fail to – don’t help at all, and instead perpetuate a cycle of blame where it’s always, always, always our fault.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a freelance writer, follow her on Twitter here.
