{"id":11001,"date":"2025-07-21T14:30:46","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T14:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=11001"},"modified":"2025-07-22T13:09:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T13:09:50","slug":"am-i-worth-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=11001","title":{"rendered":"Am I Worth It?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Courtly love\/Epic World History<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Hot on the heels of Dame B\u2019s exploration of the distressing princess trend comes news of further developments in this area. In The Observer<\/em>\u2019s tech pages last week Sarah Manavis told the story of a disastrous dating app encounter gone viral. It made my blood boil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t confirmed it that morning. \u2018I\u2019m a gal [eeeuuuwww] who deserves the basic decency of you reaching out to let me know we\u2019re still on ahead of time\u2026 You should be so excited the morning of our date you can\u2019t wait to reach out and let me know you\u2019re looking forward to it, but that\u2019s the bare minimum.\u2019 This is so wrong on so many levels (not least, with the trivial but soul-destroying use of \u2018reaching out\u2019 in two consecutive sentences.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently, women have been urged to \u2018know their worth\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t think think a tit for tat approach is going to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 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, \u2018respect\u2019 is it. To be sure, we should all be treating everyone we meet with respect, though I would argue that in this context \u2018civility\u2019 is a more useful concept. Beyond that, no matter who you are \u2013 parent, police officer, teacher \u2013 respect has to be earned. No one has the right to expect it automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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 \u2013 it\u2019s 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 \u2018reaching out\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One parting thought about our \u2018gal\u2019: 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\u2019d 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 \u2018rude\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is there a project to reduce men to serfdom?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[297,309,55,56,307,59],"tags":[600,602,601],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11001"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11001"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11011,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11001\/revisions\/11011"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}