Note - This has been copied over from my Substack, so formatting may be wonky.

Twitter (or at least my corner of Twitter, where these kinds of things happen) exploded last weekend over New York City dating discourse in the form of a screenshot of a Hinge conversation shared by influencer Clarke Peoples.

Discussion…ensued! The people, of course, had takes. A number of people (myself included) were taken aback by Clarke’s harshness towards this dude who, if I’m being uncharitable, is likely just lazy and DTF. Alternatively, he may genuinely really like the bar he suggested, knows it well, and thought it would have a nice vibe. There were plenty of people in Clarke’s camp as well, some of whom made valid statements about putting the onus on a woman to travel alone at night using public transportation (which is not uncommon in New York City, but I understand the sentiment and will allow it for the sake of argument). Others actually alleged it was possible this guy was somehow in conspiracy with the staff at the bar, running a grand scheme to slip drugs into the drinks of the unsuspecting women he had lured there.

I have to assume a lot of people interacting with the tweet are not familiar with who Clarke is or the role she plays elsewhere on the internet. This context is important- if there is anyone who could be called a real-life, modern-day Carrie Bradshaw, it’s Clarke. She’s gained a following on TikTok flexing her admittedly badass lifestyle in part bolstered by her “roster” of men who bring her on lavish dates. She also happens to be extremely accomplished in her own right- she’s a Senior at Columbia on the pre-law track and has racked up a six-figure income through brand partnerships alone, according to an article published by Insider last year.1 Her breadth of content is wide, with recurring segments such as “What I Spend in a Day” or narration of her five-hour-long walks.2 A lot of people took issue less with Clarke’s feathers being ruffled by East Williamsburg Patio Guy and more so with the principle of screenshotting and sharing a Hinge conversation at all, but that is very much her brand- she is at the end of the day, a dating influencer.

I don’t want to dwell for too long on Clarke or even her tweet specifically so much as what I feel that the latter represents: the growingly concerning sentiments among women and men on the internet with regard to how the two sexes should conduct themselves in the dating world. Her tweet and its corresponding discussion about who was in the wrong made me think of a phenomenon I’ve noticed all over TikTok, the notion of the “High-Value Woman”.

Like so many of the things that I see on the internet, “High-Value Woman” content is presented to me against my own will. Much to my chagrin, I have become well-acquainted with the concept of the High-Value Woman. She is considered to be the most sought after by men and therefore the most worthy of respect, adoration, protection, and financial support.

If you were to look up “High-Value Woman” or “Divine Feminine Energy” on TikTok, you would find a lot of women with beachy waves and men with strange facial hair patterns in front of podcast microphones presenting you with a lot of guidelines about who is and is not a High-Value Woman. You would be quick to pick up on the vocabulary. For example, it’s important that the High-Value woman is “comfortable in her feminine energy”. Her key traits are “compliant, feminine, attractive, fit, not promiscuous”. Her ideal counterpart, the High-Value man, can be described as “a leader, a provider, is confident, a problem-solver”. A particularly unsettling term you’ll hear a lot is that the primary role of women in relationships is to support, but also “receive”. It is never explicitly stated what it is she is “receiving”. Watching these TikToks feels like listening to a Vanderpump Rules cast member explain the plot of a Margaret Atwood novel.

I can try and explain it like this: It’s gender essentialism for people who collect crystals and huff essential oils. It’s governed by the belief that men's and women’s personalities are meant to be fixed and concrete. If you are a woman who comes off as aggressive, ambitious, or argumentative, you are in a place of “wounded feminine” energy.

Fortunately, High-Value Women and Men aren’t born, they’re made- and a major component of that involves strict guidelines on how to approach dating. The rules for women are pretty much the same things most women have probably heard at least once in their lives: never ask a guy out, never choose the restaurant, never accept last-minute plans, and do not even think for a moment about splitting the bill. The wildest one I’ve heard is to never accept an invitation for just drinks, only dinner. What if you realize the guy sucks before your waiter even has the chance to bring out the shishito peppers and accompanying lemon garlic aioli??? In calling Patio Guy out for his suggestion that she go out of her way to meet him, Clarke was following the High-Value Woman’s Dating Handbook to a tee.

Granted, I have plenty of concerns about modern heterosexual dating, particularly as it impacts women. I had a very Southern upbringing and take chivalry seriously, I have no problem admitting as much. I’ve always felt that my viewpoint on dating and relationships probably trended slightly more conservative than most of my peers. So of course, I see nothing negative about women having standards for what they would expect from a partner. What I take issue with is women becoming so preoccupied with our own self-preservation from potential embarrassment, belittlement, or undermining, that we lose sight of the actual goals of dating: genuine emotional intimacy, being known and understood by another person, or yeah, sometimes just sex!

Women my age (and Clarke's age) were raised in tandem with the boom of Ruth Bader Ginsburg tote bag liberal feminism. We received a lot of feminist messaging and reassurance, at least by the time we were in middle or high school that I remember feeling as though had come out from nowhere. We were told we were just as strong, just as smart, just as athletic, and that we should feel empowered to be just as outspoken as the boys were. And that messaging was and still is important- but I wonder if every time we heard we were “just as” anything as the boys, we were panged with a reminder that the boys will never see us that way, hence the need to defend it so fiercely. We will always exist as having something that they want to take from us.

Sadly, this is—at least to some degree—true. Threats of physical or sexual violence against women continue to be very real, and it's greatly more likely that harm will come to us from a romantic partner or friend than a stranger.3 I would never encourage any woman to ignore that fact or suppress her gut instinct when it comes to approaching a first date or new relationship.

Not to mention we are not even one year out from the most major regression in the livelihood of American women, the overturn of Roe v Wade, which only confirmed our long-held understanding that we really are not in control of our bodies and what happens to them. A reactionary response to that notion should come as absolutely no surprise- it is frightening, and young women are grasping at straws. This looks like latching onto offbeat ideologies like the “tradcath” aesthetic, “bimbofication”, where the shroud of irony becomes thinner every day. Increasingly maladjusted attitudes toward dating and the role men should play in our lives are in the same camp.

What I am concerned with is how in the contemporary, the anxieties around dating men have evolved beyond the tangible risk of violence and now encompass the potential for vaguer, more innocuous things like ghosting, love-bombing, and “male manipulation”. The internet has fueled this fire as women have created and turned to strange new tools for self-protection from douchebags. After another New York City dating scene drama, the West Elm Caleb saga, a Google doc was put together and spread amongst women in the DC area titled "Caleb's List".

Caleb's List was a catch-all document where women could drop the names of men (albeit, using monikers similar to "West Elm Caleb") who had, in their eyes, mistreated them for other women to use as a resource. The issue with this was that for every one man named in the document who had demonstrated actual predatory behavior, there were 10-15 who at worst, were just kind of jerks.4 The Google doc was ultimately taken down, but a similar example continues to thrive — "Are We Dating the Same Guy" Facebook groups. These groups exist in a number of large cities, the purpose of which is for women to snuff out if the men they're dating are seeing other people and to get advance warning of any "red flags" they may have demonstrated in the past. It's vigilante digital surveillance of the dating pool.

This kind of mob mentality and the “High-Value Woman” model have a lot in common. They are joined by an insecure, paranoid desire for control, and mimic women’s empowerment by suggesting a woman can avoid maltreatment from men simply by perfecting her vibe or doing enough research. It’s a repackaged version of the same false solutions women are sold time and time again, not just by men but by each other, that promises the possibility to become both endlessly desired and completely safe from harm. Not to mention, the High-Value woman implies the existence of a low-value woman, who will not be afforded the same luxuries, and therefore should bear the brunt of male disrespect and even violence. This is a new approach, born out of disillusionment with third-wave feminism, that results in the abandonment of working towards actual improvement in the lives and safety of women. The proposed solution is to operate more selfishly and differentiate yourself from the pack. This is not only adverse to the cause of women’s empowerment, but it’s also bad for our mental health and interpersonal worlds— If you are entering every dating scenario with a suspicion that the person across the table from you is trying to trick you, eager to catch them in the act, I don’t know that it’s possible to ever find true intimacy.

This kind of thinking also peddles the belief that all relationships can and should be treated as transactions- exchanges happen therein monetarily and in terms of power. In the case of Clarke x Patio Guy, it is not necessarily the inconvenience of the 40-minute to 1-hour subway ride that presents the indignity, it’s the fact that doing so would communicate investment in another person who you’d rather have communicated that investment first. It’s vulnerability. Even to respond with, “That’s a bit far for me, would it be alright if we met halfway instead?” would go against High-Value Woman Divine Feminine theology.

Women are no safer in this world if we choose to travel 40 minutes on the L to sit on a secondhand sofa and drink warm beer in East Williamsburg with our Hinge dates than we are if we stay at home, do our skincare routines, bullet journal, and wait for the High-Value man we deserve to come round. That may sound horribly bleak, but I actually mean it very optimistically, oddly. It is true that every woman is living in a world surrounded by forces that wish to harm or control her, but we gain nothing from cowering and regressing into outdated ideologies as a perceived form of protection.

Not every woman who demonstrates the kind of anxiety I’m talking about or has ever taken to Twitter or TikTok to complain about an obnoxious Hinge date subscribes to the “High-Value Woman” academy. Most probably do not. However, these belief systems are connected by an overpowering sense of paranoia and overwhelm with the power men are still capable of wielding over women, despite all of feminism’s accomplishments. This is an understandable response and one that could be usefully channeled into tangible action to improve the health and safety of all women’s lives but is instead put into overzealous internet behavior and deeply, deeply lame “rules” for dating. Surely, we can think of something better. We have to.

1. “I was a full-time Columbia student who posted on TikTok just for fun — now I'm an influencer making six figures” told by Clarke Peoples to Jordan Hart for Insider.

2 .This is not an exaggeration- Clarke regularly goes on four or five-hour strolls in Manhattan, a fact that is somehow both admirable and bone-chilling.

3. “Perpetrators of Sexual Violence: Statistics”, RAINN.

4. I’d be remiss not to mention how well the brilliant Rayne Fisher Quann comments on this in her piece for internet princess , "west elm caleb and the feminist panopticon" which I immediately thought of after seeing Clarke's tweet.