“I’m too pretty for dating sites” — I mean, who says that?! No one does, it turns out, except for the Daily Mail who used the phrase in the headline of their article about Paula Jayne Allen, a woman who wrote in after reading an article in the same paper about a woman who chalked up her bad online dating experiences to being plus sized.
Most should know better know that flaunting your privilege is the fastest way to bring down a pile of vitriolic comments on your head. Paula Jayne Allen, the aforementioned tiny blond model, found that out the hard way this past week when she complained about the plight of pretty people in online dating. The thing is, I actually agree with her.
Verity Brown, the woman in the original article, had said about her online dating experience as a plus-size woman, “I was very honest about my size as I always have been, I have also lost a bit of weight in the last year, going from a size 30 to a size 24. So I thought, OK, I know big ladies aren’t a lot of people’s cup of tea but I feel very comfortable with myself and let’s give it a go. I got quite a lot of interest, but once you start messaging, I realised that the majority of men just wanted a hook-up — they just wanted sex. Literally, within an hour of messaging they start asking what your favourite sexual position is, which is a bit disheartening.”
After the umpteenth fetish request, Verity was done. “I’ve got to the point where I don’t know if I can be bothered, I am not even considering dating now until I have lost some weight because I’m fed up of hearing that I’m not good enough,” she finished.
It was this last part that Paula had written in about. “Verity is thinking that once she has lost this weight, everything will change and all of these men will come out of the woodwork,” she says. “But it doesn’t change, in fact it only gets worse.”
And I think she’s right: Some men — emphasis on the some — are jerks who only want sex and losing (or gaining) weight isn’t going to change that. Saying that you’re quitting dating until you lose weight isn’t going to make people nicer.
“I was reading the article and I thought that she shouldn’t lose weight — it’s not the answer to anything. Mr. Right will be there whether or not she loses the weight — she shouldn’t have to change that, she should be happy as she is. If you’re truly happy in who you are you shouldn’t have to change a single thing about you, because someone else will love that happiness — it will shine through in everything that you do,” she added.
But this message got lost in everyone’s enjoyment of bringing someone else down to size. “I know there will be some backlash but I don’t mean any of this in that way,” Paula says. “I’ve never won awards or used my beauty to get anywhere.”
Thanks to the Mail’s disingenuous headline, people are hating on Paula and tearing apart her looks in forums all over the web in an effort to prove, I guess, that she’s not all that. People are making snide comments about her pictures, her body, her husband and even her eyelashes. Even better, guessing by the usernames and pictures, most of the commenters are female in yet another example of setting women against women.
The funny thing is that all the haters are really proving her original point: that people on the internet can be huge jerks when it comes to judging a woman solely by her appearance. Nice job, internet.
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