Am I Worth It?

Posted by Verity on July 21, 2025 in Environment, feminism, Living today, Rants, society, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

Hot on the heels of Dame B’s exploration of the distressing princess trend comes news of further developments in this area. In The Observer’s tech pages last week Sarah Manavis told the story of a disastrous dating app encounter gone viral. It made my blood boil.

The time and place for the date was agreed between the participants. The man then, very considerately, texted to let the woman know that he was running five minutes late, only to be informed that the date was off because he hadn’t confirmed it that morning. ‘I’m a gal [eeeuuuwww] who deserves the basic decency of you reaching out to let me know we’re still on ahead of time… You should be so excited the morning of our date you can’t wait to reach out and let me know you’re looking forward to it, but that’s the bare minimum.’ This is so wrong on so many levels (not least, with the trivial but soul-destroying use of ‘reaching out’ in two consecutive sentences.)

Apparently, women have been urged to ‘know their worth’ in such dating encounters since c. 2010. (I had no idea, of course, not having been on a date since the last century!) But there is a difference between knowing your worth and expecting to be treated like a diva. Surely a first date in the modern age is an opportunity for reciprocal exploration of compatibility, not some courtly rite requiring the man to pay tribute to a haughty damsel.

Has feminism been so despised and degraded that the aim of equality has been bypassed, in favour of a project to reduce men to serfdom? I know there are still thousands of years of oppression to make up for, but I don’t think think a tit for tat approach is going to work.

It’s clear the notion of respect is at play here, but if ever a word has been misused and deployed as a smokescreen for a warped form of aggression, ‘respect’ is it. To be sure, we should all be treating everyone we meet with respect, though I would argue that in this context ‘civility’ is a more useful concept. Beyond that, no matter who you are – parent, police officer, teacher – respect has to be earned. No one has the right to expect it automatically.

Finally, this is a perfect example of the verbal diarrhoea generated by social media. Once both parties have agreed a time and place, there is no more to be said – unless and until something changes: delay, need to postpone, etc. Clickbait stories that take ten minutes to get to the point while they harvest your data, meandering phone conversations with friends last seen an hour ago, self-righteous pile-ins on Facebook or X – it’s all communication largely without substance. Are we as individuals and our lives really more eventful and newsworthy than they were fifty years ago? I doubt it, though it serves the tech bros to think otherwise. And all this comes at a huge environmental cost: data centres are massive energy consumers, yet much of the traffic they enable consists of baseless hissy fits and needless ‘reaching out’.

One parting thought about our ‘gal’: at what point was she planning to contact/message/phone her hapless date to let him know that their encounter was cancelled because of his failure to add to the burden of bytes by confirming it: once he’d got to the venue? Once it was 10/20/30 minutes after the agreed time? Or was she even planning to do it all? Whichever, the word for that is ‘rude’.