Accounts dedicated to giving dating advice to young men are common on social media. These accounts range from well-intentioned to deliberately provocative, and often function as advertisements for expensive courses that promise to dramatically improve men’s success with women.

Many of these accounts are misogynistic. It is hard to claim that the same dating tricks will work on all women without implying that all women are, to some extent, the same. The implication that all women think the same and can be treated uniformly for the purposes of dating is insulting.

Some of these accounts also overtly sexualise and objectify women, socially exclude certain groups of women or claim that all women have particular negative characteristics. This brief looks at a few examples of misogynistic posts from dating gurus on social media.

The following two posts are from a dating-advice profile on Threads. They claim that a woman wearing make-up is a sign of sexual promiscuity. These posts feed into the idea that women’s behaviour is uniform and predictable, whilst also sexualising and degrading women who wear makeup.

Oftentimes, dating gurus give advice about types of women that men should avoid dating. These posts socially exclude certain groups of women and imply they are not viable romantic partners. Sometimes these warnings come with additional claims about why women of a certain type should be avoided, which often cast aspersions on and feed into negative stereotypes about women.

This post on Instagram shares a screenshot from an account which lists 12 different types of women that one should “never date”.

This next post from X cautions men not to date single mothers, because “they don’t need love, they need help”. As well as socially excluding single mothers, this post feeds into the idea that women only use relationships strategically for financial or social reasons.

The following post claims that women will only wait for more than three dates to have sex if they are “playing games”, and are not genuinely interested in the person they are dating. This feeds into the negative stereotype that women are deceitful or conniving in relationships. We also see this stereotype in the next post, where an X user claims that women only love “conditionally” and will “put aside her man for happiness”.