I gue-ess, although if a first date really pressured me to buy them a much more significant amount of consumables than I offered when I issued the invitation, I’d be somewhat bothered.
And if a first date was really pressuring me for sex, I wouldn’t be merely bothered, I’d be flat-out scared. Obsessive stalkers do sometimes exist outside the pages of creepy thriller novels.
Yeah, I’ve picked up a stalker or two but being a man it’s not in the same ballpark of concern as it is for women. I make sure that all of my first dates are in well lit public places and that they know my real identity prior. If I was in the position like the OP I’d turn down getting them dinner unless I was having an incredible time and a dinner wouldn’t come close to breaking the bank anyway.
I don’t think this is anything new. There’s been variations of this going on since forever. Invite a young lady out (or she suggests it) and spend a bunch of money on her and she ends up not being the least bit interested in the young man at all. It happened more than once in my youth. (I’m 70 later this year so we’re talking early 70s)
I’d be scared of a man who was pressuring me for sex at ANY time in the relationship! It needs to be a mutual decision.
Can someone remind me how this got to be a thread about
I was asking if anyone knew the name for the phenomenon of women (mostly) going on “dates” where they had no interest in the person they were meeting but a lot of interest in getting a meal for free, which a couple of people did know the term for. And now the topic has become sexual assault and pressure for sex? I don’t see how we got here, exactly.
Topic drift from your query about a particular type of bad behavior in dating (which, AFAICT from previous posters’ linked cites, seems to be known either as “dating for dinner” or a “foodie call”) to more general categories of bad behavior in dating.
If you think your question has been sufficiently answered and you don’t want the thread to wander in other directions, I suppose you could always ask a mod to close it.
I’ve seen it in gay bars when one guy (usually barely 21) gets someone to buy him drinks (always top shelf) and then disappears ‘to go to the bathroom’
But, most bartenders have seen this and will usually ban the younger guy if they pull that on a regular.
“I don’t have to ask my friends if someone likes me. Everyone I know has DateChip installed in their brains.”
Yes I have encountered this and the women were called “dinner whores”.
I am female and tried online dating around 2004 or so. Before Tinder and similar. A lot of the guys, especially on Craig’s List, were super jaded about this phenomenon. On all my Craig’s List dates, I would ask each man very nicely if they could do me a favor… they’d agree without knowing what I was about to ask… then I’d ask for them to let me pick up the tab instead. You should have seen their faces!
The angry jaded guys actually weren’t happy about this offer, but the well-intentioned guys were flattered. I was trying to send a message “not for sale” and frankly, when one of the jaded guys told me about the dinner whores, I was shocked too.
My other message was “you’re not the only person I’ve dined with, so don’t get to thinking that I’m a whore because I’m not dating you exclusively on the first date.” At least one guy was angry when I admitted having met up with several other folks for coffee, and while he didn’t quite call me a slut it was clear that this was how he perceived me. This was on a first meeting for a CL dating ad. I don’t know what was he thinking.
Sometimes I’d say “I’ve been out on several Craig’s List dates and people were so kind, but it’s not fair for the man to pay all the time. I’d like to pay it forward.”
It’s not necessarily misandrists doing this, since you can also see these same women viewing their women friends as just fodder for their MLM upmarket.
That’s so sweet. I never encountered that but it would definitely make me smile.
The idea I would be owed anything from a second date to affection for the price of a meal is insane. And of course if we are on a first date I would expect both of us to be going on other dates. That’s how dating works. Ideally we’d go on a few more dates and maybe decide to go exclusive
“We’ve got a blind date with destiny… and it looks like she’s ordered the lobster.”
-Mystery Men
Bennett Cerf told a story of composer George Gershwin remarking on his first date with a beautiful blonde the night before: “She looked good enough to eat. And oh boy—did she!”
More recently, comedian Andrew Dice Clay observed, “Women are always on a diet. Until ya get ‘em to a restaurant “.
That’s the great thing about societal patriarchy, it sets up gendered behavior norms for women that it can then mock women for conforming to.
Patriarchy: “Women should be paid much less than men and/or restricted to less lucrative forms of employment because women’s social activities are financially supported by men, who are the ones who initiate dates and issue invitations.”
Also patriarchy: “LOL LOOKIT THAT GREEDY BITCH EAT WHEN U R BUYIN”
(See also: “it’s extremely important for women to look attractive” and “lookit all the silly shallow women obsessing about how they look”, etc., etc., etc.)
(To be fair, going out with a man only for the sake of the food as per the OP isn’t polite behavior in any system, but that doesn’t seem to be what the Cerf and Clay anecdotes are about: they’re just “how dare that bitch eat on my dime just because I asked her to dinner.”)
This has actually been a very useful thread. Talking with a few friends, some of whom are no longer dating (married, in a LTR etc.), some of whom have stopped all but personal introductions (i.e., given up online dating), some of whom are still dating online, most of them had thought of the times they’d been ghosted over the years after picking up a dinner check as “I guess I was wrong in judging how well that first date had gone–musta done something wrong, I thought she had a good time and liked me enough for a second date.” But after I shared the info that this was an actual thing, with a name and magazine articles describing it to a T, it clicked --“Oh, NOW I get it.”
You think that every time a woman opts not to go on a 2nd date, it’s because she only wanted the free meal?
How many times did they get ghosted after going Dutch?
Maybe the guy thought the date went well because the woman was being polite, but she decided there was no spark there.
DIdn’t say “every time” did I? What makes sense to these guys, who’d been blaming themselves for misunderstanding the vibe that they THOUGHT at the time was very positive, was that those relatively rare occasions that such vibes were totally wrong could be explained by this phenomenon. Most of the time, a date that didn’t go so well could be explained by no chemistry, fundamental disagreements, awkward conversation etc.
But that subset of dates where things went so well that the guy was confident there’s be a second date, and maybe a relationship, AND he’d shelled out $$$$ for a meal now made more sense, and didn’t involve the guy second-guessing his initial assessment.
As John Lennon put it (in a song I shan’t name, but the title starts with the word ‘woman’ and ends with the word ‘world’), “While telling her not to be so smart, we put her down for being so dumb”.
The phenomenon of a male giving gifts of food to a female, in the hopes of enticing her to mate with him, is seen in many, many different species, and the phenomenon of a female accepting those gifts even though she has no intention of mating with him is at least seen in other primates. Humans make a lot of the details more complicated, but that’s just because we make everything more complicated. The underlying structure is still there, even absent what we would call “dating”.
That might be a too confident inference, though. Some women are better than others at (or more committed than others to) being a charming and sociable companion for the duration of a date even when they’ve decided they’re really not interested in seeing this guy again.
Just because he thought it was a very positive vibe without any “fundamental disagreements” or “awkward conversations” doesn’t necessarily mean that she was deceitfully leading him on in order to extract a fancy dinner from him. It might well mean simply that she figured that she was ethically obligated to be “good company” and agreeable and a good listener etc. for a guy who had invited her to dinner. Even if partway through the dinner she had already made up her mind that she didn’t want to pursue a relationship with him.
In short: If she seemed to be enjoying herself all through the first date, don’t automatically jump to the conclusion that either she really likes you or she’s a conniving “dinner whore” trying to trick you out of a good meal.
Maybe she feels that she has to seem to be enjoying herself from start to finish or else she’s not holding up her end of the date.
Maybe she’s worried that you might turn nasty if she doesn’t continue acting enthusiastic about you right up until the moment that she can safely get away from you.
Maybe she was really enjoying your company but when she thought about it after the alcohol wore off, she spotted a number of potential red flags and decided to take a pass on following up.
I tend to mistrust any sociological hypotheses whose effect is to reduce a particular phenomenon in a woman’s behavior that a man initially felt confused about to a simplistic conclusion along the lines of "Now I get it, she was just being a deceitful gold-digger, and the only reason I got a wrong impression of the situation is because she deliberately tricked me into it!"