Update: Guys on Tinder still think I’m a sex worker.

In February of this year, I penned a sparkling morsel about men regarding women on dating apps not as single women for dating, but as sex workers they don’t have to pay. Where I got it wrong was that guys on Tinder aren’t treating women like sex workers, they’re treating us like poorly treated sex workers.

I thought I could achieve healing and community by calling a dick a dick, such is the delusion of an independent writer, and for awhile I’ll say it was helpful. Then on Saturday night I received the messages below from a new Tinder match I had never messaged before:

I know ladies, is it getting hot in here or is it just the wrath of hell boiling behind our core muscles?

This happens a lot. Most of the time, I do nothing. I ignore and move on for self preservation purposes. But sometimes I literally cannot silently take one more evil little sperm shooter thinking he can speak to a woman this way. Not on this woman’s watch.

A little more context, because oh isn’t this just such fun. When I received these messages, I was on a date. The first Tinder date I’d been on in seven months. I had taken a rather lengthy and fed up break from the whole swipe-match-girl-messages-first-guy-makes-her-make-all-the-plans-shower-shave-legs-blow-dry-hair-select-outfit-apply-makeup-take-G-train-to-fucking-Williamsburg-buy-two-musty-beers-expensive-Lyft-home routine.

But on Saturday night, I tried. I matched with what appeared to be a cool, tall, interesting person who in reality was the angriest little yelling man I’ve ever been on a date with. Seriously, he yelled at me. He also wore the same old band tee shirt he wore in half his Tinder photos which is a habit I feel one should grow out of by age 36. I’m wearing heels and perfume, the least you could do is, I don’t know, not select your outfit from a dirty laundry hamper? He was bald but I am positive that if he’d had hair, it wouldn’t have been washed. I digress.

While he was in the loo I checked my phone and saw Casahellnova invading my life with his disgusting lexicon. Let’s evaluate his process, I don’t have much to do today:

Ew.

Sure it is.

This is the one that gets me. This garbage weasel is the one who doesn’t understand what Tinder is. Or what manners are. Or what women are. But he purports to make me feel wrong for having a problem with his revolting choice of (first) words.

Tinder is a dating app. Manners are treating other people with respect. And women are not your toys. Tinder isn’t the place you come to speak to women like they are objects in a vending machine waiting to satiate you. Tinder isn’t the place you come to select the next hole you put your penis in from countless options all there for no reason other than to sexually please. The thing you are looking for isn’t here, and it isn’t free.

I do appreciate that there are some women who might love for a stranger to inquire about their sexual tastes with sincerity. Good for them! But can one of them please build an app specifically, blatantly for this purpose? Mama’s gettin’ tired.

When it comes to dating apps I’m trying not to face the next 30 years alone and these guys are trying not to face their next ejaculation alone. My one real problem with that? We treat each other like our goals are equally appalling. Are they?

I’m probably really am going to be alone forever. I’m getting progressively more and more okay with that. (Meany McLaundry and this embarrassment of a man are certainly helping me come around on that point.) I get that there’s an argument for me just “learning to be okay with” exchanges like this, because it’s “the way things are now.”

But when the way things are now are a way things should never be, you have to fight a little. You have to get a little angry, you have to make a few points that will make a few people shake their heads. And you might have to do it a few times over. I understand that some people use Tinder strictly for sex, but not all people. Not a lot of people. And if we don’t, you don’t get to suggest that we’re stupid. Not unless we get to suggest that you’re disgusting.

And when you do hire a sex worker, please be more respectful to her than this.