Online Dating: Horny Men Talking to Horny Men Pretending to be Women

In the weird world that is 2013, online dating is becoming more “normal” than ever, and why not? Everyone is a slave to their laptops and is too busy watching entires seasons of True Blood in single day to go outside and meet their future fuck buddy, let alone future soulmate. But when even star athletes start dating fake people online, us normies are bound to be misled by an online dating profile. It’s not just flattering camera angles, soft lighting and a hint of photoshop anymore. One of the biggest dating sites in Britain, Canada, and the U.S., Plenty of Fish (POF), has discovered many of the female profiles looking for casual hook-ups on the site are actually “horny men.”

Markus Frind, the Canadian founder of Plenty of Fish, announced a series of changes on Monday to the site to stop impostors from harassing members. Frind pulled an entire feature from the site— say goodbye to “intimate encounters” aka the no-strings attached hook-up part of the site. In a message sent to all Plenty of Fish users, POF’s founder said his company found that only 6,041 of the 3.3 million Plenty of Fish users are women looking for “intimate encounters.” Frind is calling that aspect of his dating site for what it is: “Intimate encounters on POF can be summed up as a bunch of horny men talking to a bunch of horny men pretending to be women.” Yowza.

Frind has also introduced age-specific safeguards. Now, users can’t contact members with an age gap of more than 14 years. “There is no reason for a 50-year-old man to contact an 18-year-old woman,” wrote Frind. “The majority of messages sent outside those age ranges are all about hook-ups.”

It sounds like Frind and Patti Stanger should get together and make a new set of rules for POF. Read every one of Frind’s quotes in her voice and it’s eerily similar to the Patti logic of finding love. No casual hook-ups! No really old dudes! No fake photos of hot girls if you’re a guy! It’s like he took all the fun creepiness of a dating site away. It’s strange, too, that POF’s founder is so upset about the site being used as a place to find casual hook-ups when he added the “intimate encounters” feature himself. Frind estimates 2 percent of male members use POF purely as a place for casual sex, a statistic that Frind is adamant in changing. “When I created POF, I wanted it to be all about finding relationships with the right person.” According to Frind’s rules, if that person has a 14-year age gap from you, it ain’t right, honey, move along.