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As soon as I changed my photograph on the dating site, visitor numbers shot up.
As soon as I changed my photograph on the dating site, visitor numbers shot up. Photograph: WestEnd61/Rex Features
As soon as I changed my photograph on the dating site, visitor numbers shot up. Photograph: WestEnd61/Rex Features

Showing my cleavage brings me plenty of messages, but no dates

This article is more than 8 years old

Swapping her Fair Isle sweater for a plunging neckline leads to presumptuous messages and invitations to Skype-sex, but no offers of lunch

As it is easy to change the photographs that we post in order to market ourselves on dating sites, I decided to swap mine for radically different ones, to see what happened. My pictures thus far had not shown any cleavage. They were what I would call Girl Next Door Grown Up – I’m fond of a chunky sweater, a long, full skirt and boots – and what my pal Jack calls “50-year-old headmistress of a progressive girls’ school”. Jack has his detractors but he can be relied on not to gild the lily, and sometimes I need that inability to lily-gild.

So I hunted through my camera files and found the perfect thing. It was taken at a black-tie do five years ago, and features a silky black frock with a plunging neckline, smoky eyes, scarlet lips, a bit of a come-get-me expression and lighting so flattering as to render me unrecognisable. Bingo. I went to one of the sites, posted the photograph, and sat back and waited. In seconds, men were clicking on the photograph to look at my profile page and – more to the point, I suspect – to look at that photograph at full size. My visitor numbers immediately shot up and began to accelerate in a crazy way. “You’ll get a lot of attention if you do this,” Jack had said, and he was right.

Intrigued, I went to another dating site and changed the photograph from the sweater shot to the cleavage one. I’d been getting about 10 views a week, but when I went back half an hour later I’d already had 63. Messages began to arrive that said, in short, in ways both innocuous and presumptuous, that they liked the new me. Among the approving responses there were explicit descriptions of what some of them were doing with the picture and many invitations to Skype-sex. I didn’t get dates, though. No lunch offers. No offers of non-legover meetings.

I wondered what response I would get if I signed up at a new website and used this as the only photograph. So that’s what I did: I joined a free dating site, and got 27 responses in 24 hours. I was fresh meat for the waiting wolves. None of the wolves’ messages were conversational and none talked to me as a person. Perhaps I had removed the need to talk to me as a person by appearing to set the agenda myself.

After 48 hours, I had more than 100 responses, most of them one-line stuff: “Mmm great tits, howsabout we get together xxx.” There were some that were much longer than that and detailed, and had phone snaps attached. I deleted the account and opened another one, giving myself a different name and using a different picture, just one, taken when I was 40 and looked a lot younger, and wholesome as you like, in a field in a Fair Isle sweater. I didn’t fill in the blank fields about achievements and interests, but let the picture speak for itself. By that evening, there were several serious-approach emails of respectful tone. Before answering, I went back to the page and added information about my achievements and intellectual interests; I was frank about being bookish and didn’t hold back about ambition. Not a single man sent me a message after that, not until I’d reverted to a more self-deprecating version of myself.

Back at the site where I had left the cleavage/evening dress picture up, I began to get hostile messages from men I had rebuffed. Several young ones thought it disgusting that 50-year-old women should be there looking for sex. What did my being 50 conjure up for them? Did they see someone on the verge of decrepitude, about to be elderly, on the downward slope to the bus pass, the pac-a-mac, coupons, bungalows and yellowing net curtains? Did they foresee trouble with hills and stairs, a retreat into orthopaedic footwear and elasticated trousers, false teeth and tinned ham, quiz shows at teatime and death? Not that there is anything wrong with most of those things; I will even admit to being keen on some of them (aside from death).

The psychology was debatable, but one thing seemed clear. When someone on a dating site appears to announce that she is ready for sex, she is treated rather differently from a woman in a Fair Isle sweater having a picnic in a field, surrounded by daisies.

Stella Grey is a pseudonym

@GreyStellaGrey

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