Profile bios across the internet (not just on dating sites) can tell you a lot about someone. Even if they are embellishing some aspects and obscuring others, they can give you a quick form of reference of what a person finds to be of value. There’s one making the viral rounds on the internet that is especially telling—and not in the way he intended. But the exacting endless scroll of attributes he’s seeking speaks to larger issues about the outsize demands our culture places on looks and politics, especially when we’re talking about “requirements” for what makes for an appealing woman.
Because the profile’s name is blocked out, we are just going to call this man “Oh Boy.” Oh Boy decided to opt out of a personal description and instead map out what amounts to a complicated shopping list for his ideal woman. He, like many before him, misunderstood the assignment, instead choosing to write the biography for this imaginary person.
Oh Boy starts his bio pretty tame, relatively, as he says he is looking for someone with conservative values. While he outlines that to be pro-birth (he writes “pro-life”), really into guns, and Catholic, there are at least two red flags already, but at least he doesn’t say MAGA. Oh Boy never explicitly says it, but as he goes on, he might as well, because it only gets worse from here.
*Screams internally.*
Let’s start with the weirdly specific requirements for height, weight, bra size (including the band), waist size, and shoe size?! Maybe he already bought all the clothes his future spouse will ever need and that is why he is so strict on all of these? Not okay and an absolutely ludicrous rationale, but like, perhaps marginally better than being a creep by demanding specific measurements of your significant other? No, it’s absurd any way you spin it.
Because please explain the waist size to bra size difference. I’ve seen people online who prefer a specific cup size, but a band size? The band size is the ultimate giveaway he has no idea what he is talking about. The band size for a 32 is 28-30 inches (71-76 cm) and for a 34 is 30-32 inches (76-81 cm). Even if you fudge the numbers, because standard sizing is weird, that isn’t close to a 12 to 15-inch waist. Oh Boy, that is half.
He didn’t say inches for the waist, but the alternative is that this is a typo and he meant shirt size. Still wrong. A person wearing a size 12 and weighing 125 (in most cases) is wearing a largeish shirt.
Good god, even wants her feet to be a certain size. He just needs a blowup doll.
— Vaxxed, masked, pro-choice, XX power NP (@Krispi_Largo) October 4, 2021
Clothes are also brought up because his ideal woman “should be 80% casual, 20% formal, but be into wearing costumes in bed.” Not gonna kink-shame, but as for the other clothing specifications, unless you are Clinton Kelly and Stacy London of What Not To Wear and offering a wardrobe makeover, it’s beyond not okay to give a percentage of when your partner should wear certain types of clothes. Also, as the yoga pants fad proves, the relative formality of clothes is very subjective.
Oh Boy also demands “PG13 with all others, R-XXX w/ me.” There are so many better ways to word this, but hey, at least he is consistent with awfulness. This is probably a good time to point out that this plus some earlier stuff give off the vibe that Oh Boy wants a “cool girl.” Not to be confused with the regular, not-cool girl, the “cool girl” is the fantasy of “I’m not like other girls,” implying by default that there s something wrong with other girls en masse. The Take did a great video on this in media, and something tells me that this sort of longstanding pop-culture concept is where he is getting all these ideas from—that and his imagination.
Like the “chick that can hang with one of the guys” trope, this woman that Oh Boy wants is not real—not because women, like men and non-binary people, aren’t complex and multifaceted, but because the math ain’t mathing regarding the aforementioned bra and waist size.
Instead of finishing with probably the most normal line in the whole thing, “You must also have or love dogs and no kids,” Oh Boy requires her to be 18 to 26 years old. How old is *checks notes* our “Student at Self-Employed”? 38. Oh Boy has already showed us a whole bushel of red flags, and while age gaps in adult relationships aren’t necessarily predatory, specifically demanding one—with the minimum 20 years younger than yourself—certainly sets off some alarm bells.
— Traith (@Traith4) October 4, 2021
Oh Boy would’ve been okay and not nearly as meme-able if he’d kept the bio about him with maybe just some minimal (and I do mean minimal), unique deal-breakers. Better yet, he should examine why each part of this is important him and whether it would be fair for the prospective partner to ask something equivalent of him. There is some give and take involved in dating, but despite the industry built around connecting potential hook-ups or partners, the process itself shouldn’t be seen as an actual marketplace.
The “shopping list” analogy really is perfect for how this behavior (prevalent on dating sites) mirrors the way someone would find the perfect item on a shopping website—seriously, even down to the measurements. An excellent 2018 Atlantic article gets into the weeds of what it means to treat dating the way we treat the shopping experience today. This objectification by thinking of dating someone as marking off a checklist or a game of odds also makes participants more likely to feel isolated and cold. This worsens the already toxic environment in which people treat people like crap through technology because they don’t feel real, and the consequences seem less with a screen between them.
Everyone, but (according to studies) especially men, needs to think about the cycle of harm put on others when you treat people terribly in a dating app. In Oh Boy’s case, while we’re blessed not to see his DMs. His demands for a woman to be his fantasy of what a woman should be are offensive and demoralizing. His bio is not the first time a bio has gone viral for being aggressive to strangers online. In addition to Twitter, there are whole subreddits and TikTok accounts dedicated to showing how mean people are on dating apps.
When I say “mean” I’m not talking about rejection, but the ghosting, uninvited harassment, name-calling, demanding lists, etc. Every time this happens, it both adds poison to the dating spaces you inhabit, and it results in real-life stress and anxiety that could have been avoided. There are already inherent stresses when dating or relationship building, so it’s best if we don’t collectively make it worse in new ways by treating people in humanely.
Saying who they are requires introspection though.
They’re more used to being demanding than contemplating I guess
— blifflesplick (@blifflesplick) October 4, 2021
(via Twitter, image: Alex Green via Pexels)
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Published: Oct 6, 2021 12:07 pm