God help me. I recently joined Tinder for the first time.
I will confess ulterior motives. I was working on an essay on hookup culture, and I needed some brutal conversations to murder my Panglossian darlings.
Three days later, and with over 3000 "likes" to sludge through, a curious phenomenon kept happening. Men I matched with kept asking me to send a selfie.
Huh? I have recent pictures on my dating profile. I verified it too. Why do I need to send more pictures?
Naturally, I braced myself for the usual shenanigans. These men were going to get frisky and ask for nude photos. But no, each guy just wanted me to take a selfie and send it to him.
I was baffled. Why ask for some bathroom selfie when I have six sharply focused pictures on my dating profile? Those pictures included a mix of professional and nonprofessional shots. And, of course, I included full-body shots. Duh.
And that's when it hit me — these men were fishcatting me.
For my married readers laughing at this bullshit, catfishing is when a person creates a fictional persona or fake identity on a social networking service. Usually, this deception happens with photos. Online daters will post outdated pictures or photos that are so filtered; they look like a fembot…with cat ears.
Fishcatting is the opposite of catfishing. Fishcatting is when you try to circumvent catfishing by verifying the woman's (or cat's) identity beyond her social networking services. (And yes, I totally made that word up. And no, I don't expect it to catch on any time soon.)
To be clear, in every request for additional photos, the guy knew what I did for work. All publishers require their authors to have a professional headshot for publicity, and it has to be recent. Imagine showing up for a book signing, and you are expecting a fembot with cat ears? Awkward.
You also can find me online by my first name. Thanks, mom.
Asking for additional pictures screams of paranoia. It's not like I can hide my identity.
So for the love of blind love, why can't we just let attraction evolve organically?
So here's the thing, gentlemen. When you ask a woman for a selfie when her dating profile already has six-eight pictures, you insinuate that she is deceiving you. It would be like walking up to a woman in a bar and saying, "I think you are hot and would love to go on a date with you. But I first need to know what you look like without makeup and your hair unbrushed?"
Sheesh…Let's just skip ahead in this love story because I am too lazy and shallow to get to know you beyond physical attraction.
Better yet, imagine if you were looking for a job. The interviewer calls you up and says, "We got your resume, and we are interested. But before we interview you, we need to verify your references."
If we don't put the cart before the horse in your professional life, why do we mess with the plot curve in our relationships? Have people lost the art of flirting? Because there is a narrative arc to this online seduction dance. And it goes a little something like this…
Step 1: Your curiosity is piqued enough to meet someone in real life. They look cute in their pictures and are not boring you to the point that you want to drive a pickaxe through your skull.
Step 2: You meet in real life. You are either attracted to them in the first thirty seconds or not, usually because they smell like ten-day-old Bratwurst. (So not a personal reference…maybe.)
Step 3: You agree to go on another date or part ways.
Why are we making this so hard? It's only a date. No one has asked you to donate a kidney.
And to be fair, it's not just the men who are draining this vast ocean of love possibilities into a shallow kitty pool. I recently heard from several men that women now put their "height requirements" on their profile and insist that men measure up to that height.
Why is listing height even a thing?
Now, I would be remiss if I didn't point out the hypocrisy in women objectifying men's bodies. But have no fear. I have a solution.
All the ladies asking for a particular height should list their bust/waist/hip measurements. That way, the guy can also know your exact measurements. It seems only fair. And vain people need to find their tribe.
And while we are at it, I think those same women should list their IQ. Looks fade. Stupid is forever. He needs to know what he is signing up for.
The prescreening shouldn't stop there. Your credit score should be listed too. You can have a perfect hip to waist ratio and genius IQ, but if your credit score is crap, you have clearly made some poor life decisions. Long live the meritocracy!
Where does it stop? How transactional are we going to get on this slippery slope into this dating cesspool? Maybe someday, we will be exchanging our genetic profiles, medical records, and stock portfolios…before the first date.
I will not interrupt my busy day to send selfies. Sorry fishcatters, you are just going to have to slow down and have a little faith.
Faith not only that I look like my pictures but faith in romance. Remember romance? It was that little thing that used to be spontaneous. Try letting it happen.
