Being a woman online: a social experiment

The internet has made it a lot easier to get in touch with new people from other countries. This has many advantages. One can learn a lot from other cultures and meet many interesting people online. However, there is one disadvantage. Every horny and dirty-minded (or just lonely and hopelessly romantic) man has the possibility to contact thousands of women all over the world as well.

A couple of weeks ago a friend from Interpals, a website created for “meeting penpals, language partners, travel buddies or just plain old fashioned friends” online, told me she recently received a marriage proposal via this website. After joking a bit about what would happen if she would actually say yes to this proposal and marry this man from an undisclosed Arab country we came to the conclusion that it’s not always easy to be a woman online. I got curious and wanted to experience what it’s like to be a woman online. I came up with the idea to do an experiment. I would create a fake profile on Interpals for a few days to see what it’s like to be a woman online.

Experiment setup

First, I needed to fill in some fake personal details for my profile. I decided to call myself Maria the coming days and chose to be born on 25 June 1990 in a city in the center of Poland. Why Poland? No idea. It just came to me. I googled a casual picture of an ex-Miss Poland which could be my profile picture. Next, I had to write an “About me”-section. To keep this fake girl as boring as possible, I just wrote “Hi, I’m Maria from Poland.”. There are thousands of Polish members on Interpals who actually put in effort to make an interesting profile, so this profile should not stand out based on what was written there.

I was going to test 2 hypotheses:
1. A beautiful woman gets many messages, even if her profile is boring
2. Even when a woman writes bad things about herself on her profile, men will still be interested in her if she's beautiful.

And of course I was also curious how all those men try to impress a pretty woman.

Let the experiment begin...

To test the first hypothesis I had to do nothing but wait. And I didn't need to wait for a long time. Many people, all of them male, visited the profile of beautiful Maria. In just 20 minutes the profile was visited by 16 men and I got 3 responses, none of which were interesting. They were only writing things like “hi” or “you are cute”. Messages kept on coming in at an extremely high pace. Even if I would have wanted to reply to all these messages, I wouldn't have had enough time to do so. Within just 24 hours after creating this profile I had received 38 messages and the profile had been visited by more than 100 people. In comparison: my own profile with pictures of me and some, without bragging, interesting information about me gets me around 15 page views on a day that I spend a lot of time online and if I'm lucky I get 2 messages from new people on such a day.

The hypothesis that pretty girls get many messages even with a boring profile has been confirmed without a doubt.

Let's be a bad girl!

Now for the next phase of the experiment. I wanted to see if guys actually read the text on a girl's profile or if most of them only look at the pictures. To test this, I added the following text to my profile: I like shopping, maybe a bit too much because I never have money and always have to borrow money from my friends haha. I like to party often, I can drink a lot haha. Also I can be a bit temperamental and jealous sometimes, but if people don't like me for who I am they are not worth it to be my friends, right?

Any rational guy would know to avoid such a girl. She's a golddigger, an alcoholic and has some anger management issues. Not really marriage material, I would say. Ahmet from Turkey had a different opinion though and sent me a message a few hours later with nothing more than the text "will you marry me". Yay! My first marriage proposal! I could have a double wedding together with my friend!

The amount of messages i received in the next day, 16, was significantly lower than the amount of messages I got on the first day of my experiment. What interested me the most was that I only received one funny comment on my profile (so those other men probably didn't read what I wrote or were too lazy to write me a personal message) and that suddenly I got a lot of messages from men in Poland. Maybe the phrase "I can drink a lot" on my profile made me more attractive to them? Anyhow, this second hypothesis was also confirmed: a lot of men don't seem to care what a girl writes on her profile, as long as she's pretty.

What do men write to pretty girls?

Though nobody wrote dirty things to me, I was still a bit disappointed by the kind of messages I received. Most men write only about themselves and don't ask me questions. Only very few people asked me questions about me, even though I wrote nothing about myself on my profile! In total there were about 2-3 messages out of more than 50 messages that might have been worth it to reply to if I were a real girl. That's a disappointing score and I have to admire the brave girls who maintain a profile on Interpals for putting up with so many uninteresting messages. I wouldn't be able to go through 50 uninteresting messages just to find that one message that is actually worth it...

Funny messages I received

Now for the most fun part of this post, here are some of the most memorable messages I've received:
- One man from Pakistan sent me a video of himself playing guitar.
- One older man from the USA wrote to me his entire life story in three paragraphs and then just finished with "have a nice day", without asking any questions about me. How would he expect a woman to reply to that?
- A man from Germany understood that I would get a lot of "hey how are you"-messages and wanted to be different: he just wrote to me "truth or dare?".
- One man from Poland wrote me a standard message in English. Apparently he hadn't even noticed the flag next to my photo.
- One man from Turkey asked me to marry him without any further comments.
- One guy from Pakistan apologized at the end of his message for his creepy message and admitted that he just didn't know how to start up a conversation with a girl.
- A creepy man from United Arab Emirates wrote me that I had the perfect body to be a belly dancer. And this was my lucky day that day, because this guy was a coach who would love to teach me how to belly dance on Skype... I wonder how many girls will fall for such tricks.

And what surprised me the most: when I search for new penpals myself, I often see the name of one Mexican guy appearing in friends-lists. He must be friends with more than 1000 girls on Interpals all over the world. This same guy actually wrote me a message within 24 hours after I created my profile, stating in Google Translate-Polish how much he wanted to learn Polish and how beautiful he thought I was. Some men are really pathetic and tell all kinds of lies just to impress a girl...


Disclaimer: Some people may think it’s disrespectful to create a fake profile, let men write to you and then never reply. However, the kind of men that would reply to this kind of profile is not really entitled to receiving a nice treatment. Most of them would have forgotten all about Maria already 1 minute after sending this message anyway. By that time they are already way too busy checking out the pictures of the next pretty girl.