Disclaimer: I'm not ashamed to say that I have a Tinder account. I'm not ashamed to say that I am an active Tinder user. I'm not even ashamed to say that I've met people from Tinder before. What I experienced is not the fault of Tinder in any way, and this experience will not make me shy away from Tinder or any other social media.
I experienced something new this week, something I had only seen happen to other people up to this point. However, before I can get into the actual point of this article, there is a bit of necessary backstory to tell. I matched with a Justin Bieber impersonator, known as AlmightyJBizzle, on Tinder. From there, he and I got to talking, and he eventually asked me to go out with him. I was originally interested, so I said yes. However, while in the process of making plans, he told me that he would pay for dinner "as long as we [would] chill after." This comment made me uncomfortable, as it seemed like he thought that him buying me dinner obligated me to have sex with him. After this comment, I made up an excuse to avoid going out with him that night.
The next day, he texted me, and I chose not to respond. I figured it was easier to simply stop responding in this case than to explain to him why I was no longer interested. If I thought he would understand, I would have told him, but the type of guy who makes comments like that is not the type of guy who understands why those comments make girls uncomfortable... If it were, they wouldn't make comments like that in the first place.
Anyway, as the day went on, he texted me a few more times, and I continued to ignore the texts. At that point, things took a pretty awful turn. He began to call me all sorts of awful names for ignoring him. At one point, he called me a whore, which I find a bit ironic considering his problem was that I was choosing not to sleep with him.
While I was not overly upset about what he was doing, it was still awful to deal with. I tweeted some of the pictures, as many women before me have, as proof of the harassment. Like I said, I had never experienced harassment at this level from someone I didn't know, so it was something new for me. I have, however, seen far too many pictures like this on the Internet from other women who have been talked to this way and worse. I honestly count myself lucky that this is the worst I have experienced from strangers on the Internet, as many women receive significantly worse messages, including death threats, from strangers for various reasons.
Overall, this experience is one that I would not like to have a repeat of, though I'm sure that I will. I hope that exposing this kind of behavior as the disgusting harassment that it is will help the problem, but it's likely that it will cause even more, especially aimed at me. That's a risk I'm willing to take, however, because exposing this person and his behavior is worth it to me.
