[Dusty]

Part II

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Singles have heard years of married-splaining from Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter and others about how you should “make your partner a real partner.” Yes, we know that couples who share housework have better sex lives and that the idea of a man down-shifting his career while his wife takes on more responsibilities at work is more rational than radical.



As an experiment, Megan Downey, a 24-year-old social marketing specialist in Washington, has a very succinct Tinder profile: a few pictures of herself and the word “feminist.”

“I was just wondering if there were men out there who were not afraid of the word ‘feminist,’ ” she tells me.

Downey says she heard from one or two guys who wanted to fight about what the word meant.



And then she found one who wasn’t afraid of the F-bomb: A man wrote to her that it was “great to see a feminist on Tinder” — he self-identifies as a Marxist feminist and has studied the history of gender inequality and how it has affected the economy, she says. They saw each other for about three months.



Laurie Davis, the founder of eFlirt, an online-dating consulting company, says there’s been a shift in how people refer to their ideal partners in online profiles. “I see people allude to feminist traits in their profiles,” she says, such as men seeking women who are “independent or similarly successful” — or listing “Lean In” as a book they’ve read recently.



Sometimes the signs of a person’s worldview are more subtle. When I spoke to Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a former executive editor of Feministing.com and the author of “Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life,” she complained about men’s online profiles that list their favorite musicians and writers, but don’t include a single woman. “Everyone loves Thomas Pynchon,” she said. “It’s like: Do you know that women make art, too?”



In fact, I was so bold when it came to love that when I was having trouble mustering the chutzpah to apply for a promotion a few years ago, a friend said to me, “Lisa, if this job were a guy, you would’ve gone on a first date already.”

That was all it took for my workplace assertiveness to kick in. For other women, though, it might be the other way around.




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