How Low Will Guys Go for a Date? Man Posts Fake Woman's Profile Online to Find Out
"Tara_IceAge4? is an attractive 23-year-old woman from Beverly Hills, and her OKCupid dating profile paints her as semi-literate, grossly insensitive, possibly racist and willing to be sexually intimate with a relative.
That doesn't harm her prospects. Within six hours of the profile's posting, it had been viewed 400 times and 40 men had messaged Tara wanting to get to know her better.
But the profile was a fake. "Tara" was, in fact, 31-year-old Rob Fee, and he created the profile as an experiment to see just how low some guys would go to get a woman.
Fee, a 31-year-old writer and comedian who blogged about the results of his experiment on the website Mandatory.com, used a picture of an attractive woman and wrote an accompanying profile rife with misspellings and grammar errors.
"Tara" loves dancing, and wrote that "krumping and interpretive are my passions, but I feel like it was ruined by blaks and now asiens."
In the section where people talk about what they're doing with their lives, she said her job was nobody's business, then mentioned that she posted Willy Wonka pictures on her Facebook page along with messages such as these: "Like oh your sad about 9/11? Wel animals are killed evevey day and no one cares!"
Fee created the profile after he heard a friend complaining about the kinds of men who'd contacted her on OKCupid, a free dating website.
"I was like, 'It can't be that bad,'" Fee told ABCNews.com on Wednesday night.
He said he made Tara "just vile and repulsive" to see if men would be turned off. Some of the men who messaged Tara seemed to be "genuinely nice guys," and Fee said he deterred them right away because he didn't want to be mean to anyone.
Those who persisted lived down to the stereotype, despite some of Tara's illogical and often disturbing answers to their questions.
When one man asked how she was doing, she replied that she'd had "horribel diarreh" earlier but was O.K. now. Seemingly oblivious, he replied, "Well that's good now lol." He talked about his day and then asked her what she was looking for on the site.
And when another man asked her how she was doing, and she replied, "so good, not pregnant anymore yay!" The man replied: "Yay :-) lol." She later tells him that she had to go to the doctor to get her arm refitted, then asks him if he's a Lakers fan. He replies, "Clippers," sends her his number and asks her to text him.
Fee was shocked by the persistence of Tara's would-be daters, including one who kept pursuing her even after Tara admitted she got drunk and let her cousin touch her genitals.
"I put myself in their shoes and I would think, What would I tolerate from a girl? And they tolerated everything … I mean there was just no line as to what they would tolerate just to try to strike up a conversation or meet up with this girl," he said.
"It really made me sympathize with females, you know, what kind of things that they go through," Fee added. "As a guy you always think that the girl is just stuck up, or 'Oh, she thinks she's so great because she won't even let me buy her a drink.' But what you don't realize is she's had 30 other creepy guys try to [do that], so it definitely gave me a brand new appreciation for what girls go through, absolutely."
OKCupid did not respond to an email for comment from ABCNews.com.
Reactions to Fee's post, which came complete with screen shots of several of the conversations, ranged from amused to critical.
One woman called Fee "incredibly naïve" for expecting that men weren't attracted mainly to "youth and beauty."
"The girl is young and cute, and that's pretty much all a guy needs. Is this really news? Is this really all that surprising given everything we know about men throughout history? Come on," she wrote.
Fee acknowledged that he expected some of the men to be that way, but added, "I was hoping to prove that wrong, but a lot of them proved that right that a lot of guys are just, you know, just after the physical and are not really concerned about anything else. Hopefully they're not the majority."
Another poster wrote that Tara "actually sounds like a nice person who isn't very smart and not very socially adept. I think a nice guy may actually want to speak with her, maybe look past her issues. He may have been surprised in the past and willing to take a chance, or have some issues in his own life."
Still, most readers found the humor in the blog post.
"I honestly don't think you made the profile completely undateable … it just made Tara seem kind of quirky and sarcastic, with a really odd sense of humor. The responses still had me rolling!" one commenter wrote.
Another called the post "comedic gold," adding, "The negative commenters need to relax."
Fee said he believed the profile was removed after Tara told some of the men she was underage.