I think we need more shame on the internet

Another wild dating story has me questioning the online world

As someone who has been using dating apps for as long as there have been dating apps, I really thought I couldn’t be shocked anymore.

Recently, I was proven wrong.

Thing started normally enough. I matched with a guy who was about my age — we’ll call him George — and we chatted back-and-forward for a while. It was the usual dross. How was your weekend? What do you do for work? Do you find this as exquisitely tedious as me?

Before long, George said we should meet up. He told me the name of the restaurant he managed in Double Bay, and suggested I come past after the rush hour that Friday night, and go for a drink nearby.

I loosely agreed, but did feel like something was indefinably off. I decided I would make my mind up a little closer to the date.

A couple of days later, on Wednesday morning, I woke up to several messages. They had been sent one after another, around 6am.

“How you doing.”

“What you doing.”

“You should join us”.

There was no further context.

“Join you doing WHAT?” I asked.

“Hahah have fun right now here hahaha”.

This, I think we can all agree, was a suspicious amount of hahas for one message.

It was fairly clear at this point that George was on the tail end of a big night. Frankly, if you’re trying to keep a party alive at 6am on a Wednesday, you’re not the match I’m looking for. But I sensed a story was afoot, so I decided not to immediately block his account, and instead set out to discover precisely what brand of fun was on offer.

I’m so glad I did. Nothing could have prepared me for the answer.

I asked again what he was proposing, and who he meant by ‘we’. I had to wade through a few more hahas, smiley emojis and opaque responses until I finally got an answer.

“I have a transwoman next to me. She is a mistress dominant. We drink, smoke first and she can dominate both of us. Would be fun.”

At this point, it was barely past eight. I hadn’t even had a coffee yet. I was fielding these insane messages while getting dressed to go the the gym

“My dude,” I replied with one hand while pulling on a sock with the other. “You have lost touch with reality.”

“Ohh” he wrote. “It’s fine if you don’t like it. Nevermind :)”

What I find most shocking about this interaction isn’t that a man genuinely thought he had a chance of me – completely sober – rushing to a stranger’s apartment, so we could both get railed by a mistress. The male imagination is a wonderful thing.

No, what I think is wild, is that he made this offer after adding me to his private social media accounts, and telling me exactly where he works. Lucky for him I’m not in the business of ruining lives; George could have discovered just how much he likes being screwed.

Meanwhile, on Instagram, things aren’t much better. A friend sent me a reel the other day, which featured a stocky man playing with a Staffordshire Bull Terrier. It’s an innocent scene. They’re both on the couch, with the man affectionately scratching the dog’s ears.

The text accompanying this video, however, was totally, unpredictably bonkers.

“He doesn’t know it yet, but he just gave me two STDs. I’ll get sicker and sicker until one day I’ll be admitted to hospital with an antibiotic resistant uterus infection”.

This bloke’s face was uncensored in the original video

On a quick glance, this reads as though the man in the video gave the dog an STD. Thankfully this isn’t the case. The text is, of course, referring to the account owner – a woman who is not on camera. She’s somehow managed to accumulate a staggering amount of followers — more than 200,000 — with benign updates about owning a rescue dog.

The STD post is wildly out of tone, but undeniably successful. Most of her videos get anything from 20,000 to 100,000 views. A couple have managed to hit the 2 million mark. The video publicly putting her ex on blast for raging – literally crippling – STDs? 13.8 million views.

Sure, most of the comments are asking whether her ex was rooting the dog, but engagement is engagement, right?

Which brings me to my point. I think people need to have way, way more shame on the internet.

There was a time, when social media was new, where we all presented an idealised version of ourselves. We would take photos of ourselves in beautiful locations, doing beautiful things, eating beautiful food. Everyone was an avatar of themselves online – richer, better, more beautiful, more shiny. Some people even became famous from just living particularly aesthetic lives.

But when everyone’s zigging, sometimes it pays to start zagging. So a few savvy people started to do real stuff. Celeste Barber, for example, became incredibly famous for recreating photos taken by celebrities and influencers. All it took was a normal-shaped body mimicking poses to pillory the model set. It’s funny how subversive what she was doing felt at the time.

But this quickly became passé, as a new crop of Instagram influencers sprung up. These people were (mostly) conventionally attractive women who would proudly show off a few skinfolds and talk honestly about their life and mental health. Being ‘real’ on social media was the new baseline.

Then the ordinary public caught on. Normal people would talk about their daily struggles, explaining their life was more complex than their online highlights reel. Perhaps they thought the whole world was watching their 5-day P&O cruise to Brisbane, tortured with jealousy. How humble they were to abate us of the mistaken belief their life was always pool chairs and half-price blue cocktails. It turns out they didn’t live on that ship at all. It was just a holiday!

But if everyone’s being real , how can anyone stand out?

By being VERY fucking real, apparently. Instagram is the wild west, these days. I frequently see people sharing things online that I would be embarrassed to see a doctor about.

In fact, there isn’t a private human experience that hasn’t been commodified online. Joy, grief, disease, shame – they all have their own little voyeuristic communities.

Don’t get me wrong; art comes from the gritty suffering we all experience some time between being born and dying. But what I’m seeing online isn’t a meditation on the complexities of the shared human experience. It’s people cynically packaging the worst moments in their lives into short, looping reels, in order to get as many views, likes and shares as possible.

It’s interesting how this behaviour is seeping out into the real world. Even workplaces are riddled with talk about authenticity and vulnerability. This seems bizarre to me. Surely there are ways to connect, that don’t enforce homogonised levels of intimacy? I think it’s fine to have casual friends and associates. Not everyone needs to know your soft, vulnerable inner core.

And what has this done for dating? I wonder if, twenty years ago, a stranger would have asked me to come over to his house and get dominated by a mistress? Well. Probably yes, actually. Some things are timeless; the optimism of horny men is one of them.

But I do think unsolicited sexual propositions, particularly of that extreme nature, would have been more rare. We’ share so much of ourselves online, without question or repercussions, that it’s warped what a normal level of disclosure to a stranger is. The being banged by a mistress stuff? I think that should at least be a fourth date proposition.

Just because the internet is eagerly listening – with its infinite audience and limitless attention – it doesn’t mean you have to tell it everything.