Bye Felipe

Let’s be real. You probably picked up this book because you’re a fan of the viral Instagram account @ByeFelipe and already know about the fresh hell that is modern online dating, or you have no idea what “Bye Felipe” means, but the phrase “dick pics” caught your eye and you were intrigued. Either way, hello and welcome! I’m Alexandra, and I started Bye Felipe, a website that calls out men who turn hostile when they’re rejected or ignored. It’s basically just screenshots of terrible things dudes say to women online, which the women send to me, and I share publicly. Kinda like this:

And this:

Now you’re probably like, “Oh, I get it, but WTF is this book about?” Well, after years of being inundated with thousands of dreadful examples of men being complete assholes to women for politely declining or ignoring their desperate pleas for attention, I decided there was much more I wanted to say about modern dating (and misogyny) that wouldn’t quite fit into a tiny Instagram square. Hence, the idea for this book was born. I wanted to start a conversation about the problems women are experiencing in online dating (and just navigating through life online) because the abuse and harassment don’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. I receive about twenty submissions a day with the worst insults from women’s inboxes, and with questions about how they should respond or what they can do to combat the abuse.

I also spent the majority of my twenties doing online dating in Los Angeles, and after more than two hundred dates, I’ve pretty much witnessed it all in terms of straight dudes’ bad behavior. It’s downright brutal out there if you’re a single woman right now. I wanted to write a guide to avoiding all the mistakes I made when I first started meeting strangers from the internet, and wanted to make fun of all the awful men.

Is this book going to tell you how to catch a man? NOPE. There’s already enough of that BS out there as it is. Straight and bi women, femmes, queer, nonbinary, and trans people, anyone-who-is-not-a-straight-cis-male, YOU’RE FINE. It’s mostly straight cisgender dudes who need to get their acts together. As such, this book is for anyone, regardless of identity, who is an unfortunate target for straight guys.

I wanted you to be able to use this book to learn how to best spot, avoid, and effectively take down asshole dudes you encounter. And I hope you’ll have some laughs along the way, because, well, there’s pretty much no way to read some of these absurd interactions and not cackle.

You down? OK, cool. Now that you know what to expect, let me answer your next question: How the heck did this all start?

In August 2014, I woke up one day and discovered that my friend Miranda had added me to a secret Los Angeles–based Facebook group called “Girls Night In” (later to be known as GRLCVLT—because we were basically a feminist cult). It was like a giant online sleepover with fifteen hundred ambitious, successful women and non-binary identifying people who talked about anything and everything, from career problems to relationship issues. The group was diverse and included lesbian, bisexual, and trans women; immigrants; women of color; sex workers; CEOs; models—everyone. However, it was kind of similar to Fight Club: what happens in GNI, stays in GNI. Anyone caught leaking info is kicked out. Hence, there was a sense of freedom, openness, and frankness that you don’t find on your regular Facebook feed with everyone’s grandparents. It was like a whole new world, a paradise where no man could butt in and derail or explain anything. I’m not exaggerating when I say that being added to GNI changed my life.

One day, a member of GNI posted a screenshot of a message she had received on the dating site OkCupid. It was a dude’s dopey, long-winded, boring message, like any of the hundreds you typically receive if you’re a woman on a dating site. She didn’t respond, and then twelve hours later, he just said “asshole.” I thought it was hilarious.

It just so happened that I had received a message a couple of days before that on OkCupid, where the guy had been sending me the same message over and over. When I finally responded and said I wasn’t interested, he lashed out. He had sent me multiple messages, starting like this:

Seems nice, but when you get as many messages as women do on OkCupid (hundreds), you start to develop a spidey sense for generic copy-and-pasted messages that guys send to hundreds of women without reading their profiles. Still, I looked at his profile, and none of his pictures actually showed his face. (Red flag!) Sorry, I’m not trying to date a torso. I ignored the message. However, he kept trying.

I continued ignoring them, hoping he would get the hint and go away.

A few weeks later, he tried yet again, and I finally said, “No.” And then this happened.

At the time, I was kind of freaked out. This guy seemed unstable. Was he going to keep messaging me? Would he try to find me? I didn’t want to deal with it. So I blocked him. This wasn’t the first time a guy had insulted me when I wasn’t interested, but it was the first time I actually felt queasy from the unprovoked anger and rage of a man on a dating site. As I would later learn, this sort of thing is not rare. I posted the disturbing screenshot from the lawyer in the GNI conversation.

As the thread got going, more women added examples of increasingly offensive messages they’d received on dating sites. They all seemed to have something in common: we’d ignore a guy’s messages or politely decline his advances and then get a shitstorm of abuse. We agreed that online dating was often as frightening as it was entertaining.

We talked about the double bind of being a single (straight) woman: You get a message from a guy, and if you answer no, the guy gets angry. But if you ignore it, the guy gets angry anyway. There’s no winning! The only way to avoid making an entitled man hostile is to agree with him. Do these men expect us to go on dates with everyone who’s interested in us? We also talked about how we hated declining men, because we expect this aggressive reaction. And we normally don’t even acknowledge it; it’s just an everyday thing that we accept.

We had already come up with our own lingo for dismissing dudes: “Bye, Felipe,” a riff on “Bye Felicia,” the classic quote from the movie Friday. (If you’ve survived this long without hearing that slang phrase, it’s basically a dude’s way of dismissing a woman who’s an irrelevant whiner.)

It had been our inside joke for a few weeks. Someone’s boyfriend is being shady? Bye, Felipe! Someone went on a date and he ghosted her? Bye, Felipe! A dude got caught cheating? Girl, you need to Bye Felipe him. Some asshole sent you a rude message on Tinder because you didn’t respond fast enough? BYE FELIPE.

This is one of the first screenshots someone added to the original Facebook thread:

“Someone should make an Instagram with these!” one member said after what seemed like the eight millionth horrible screenshot went up. Making a split-second decision, I did. I created the @ByeFelipe Instagram account as a protest against assholes who insult and even threaten women online and to publicize that abuse like this was common and widespread. I wanted to take the therapeutic experience of GNI and give more women an open forum in which they could post nightmare text exchanges and bond over the horrors of online dating. With the blessing of my fellow GNI members, I uploaded the first few posts.

Exactly two weeks after I created the Instagram account I awoke to a nonstop stream of push notifications blowing up my phone. I watched, astounded, as likes and comments scrolled across the screen, sometimes too fast to even read. That morning, The Atlantic had published an article about online harassment, featuring @ByeFelipe and calling me a “Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante.” I went into my Instagram settings and turned off notifications. I had no idea the concept would touch a nerve with so many people. I didn’t think anyone outside of GNI would even get the joke. But as it turned out, a lot of people got it. The followers of @ByeFelipe grew from about six hundred, just among GNI members, to thirty thousand the following week, and they continued to grow with every news story.

As the account received more and more media coverage (Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, Good Morning America, The New York Times), I received thousands of sub-missions. They were all examples of truly horrific messages women were dealing with. There were submissions with deluges of insults, from “fat whale” to “cunt” to “whore.” There were text messages running multiple pages, describing why they thought these women were awful and unworthy of respect. Occasionally, women would send me the rape threats or physical threats they’d received. This is when I realized the truly incredible magnitude of the hatred women face online on a regular basis.

It became clear that there were certain types of harassers, and there was a distinct pattern of a very large problem. People were constantly asking me, “What causes these responses? Why are men like this?” Maybe if I could find a pattern to the harassment, I could learn the warning signs and make women more aware. Or maybe I could somehow come up with specific defenses to each type. I started putting the submissions into categorized folders when I received them: “Dick Pics,” “Nice Guys,” “Racists,” “Weirdos,” etc.

The examples people sent me from dating apps like Tinder were wild. Some of the men’s profiles practically screamed “I’m a bigot and I hate women!” Their Tinder taglines were littered with “No fat chicks” and “Too many skanks looking for attention on here.” But some men seemed fine at first glance, yet, as soon as you took a shower or accidentally fell asleep while messaging them, their impatient, entitled side would come out. These awful reactions to rejection came from everywhere. Most were from dating sites like OkCupid, Tinder, and Plenty of Fish, but there were also submissions from Facebook, gaming apps, and real-life interactions that the submitters described. The issue is larger than just dating sites, but it is especially pronounced there and it’s easier to document.

Four years later, Bye Felipe has more than 400,000 followers on Instagram. I host a popular podcast and have watched Bye Felipe become young women’s destination of choice as they ask the age-old questions: What the fuck is wrong with these men? What is it that makes some of them think it’s okay and perfectly acceptable to catcall and harass women? To send them dick pics? To turn hostile when we shut them down? To treat us like inanimate objects?

We know that online dating harassment is primarily a woman’s problem because a whopping 57 percent¹ of women report feeling harassed on dating apps, compared to 21 percent of men. Our patriarchal society, rife with misogyny, and the male-dominated culture we all grow up and live in, call on men to be sexually aggressive, unemotional, and violent. This is toxic masculinity, and it is at the root of the interactions I see on Bye Felipe.

Toxic masculinity is responsible for the same general attitude that ended up electing a known and admitted “pussy-grabber” as president of the United States. Evidenced by how the 2016 election turned out, apparently a lot of Americans are VERY okay with misogyny. And make no mistake: Donald Trump is a textbook Felipe. The quotes from the notorious bus video read exactly like a submission I’d get: “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden, I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything.” Translation: “I hit on her, but she wasn’t interested. Well, she’s ugly anyway.”

Under President Felipe-in-Chief, the dating landscape feels shittier than ever—and the work of Bye Felipe has never felt more important. The day after the 2016 election, a friend of mine was walking into a Los Angeles 7-Eleven, having just stepped out of her Bernie Sanders–stickered car, when a man in a Make America Great Again hat grabbed her between her legs and said, “Are you scared now, you liberal cunt?” I have heard many stories like this since.

I’m not saying that Bye Felipe alone can solve our culture’s perennial problem with misogyny or harassment—or even the more recent problems of online hate and abuse. Women, especially women of color, knew that the world was like this long before the 2016 election. We had the evidence not only in our personal experiences from walking down the street in public, but also in our online inboxes. The ideologies that enabled Donald Trump to take power are the same beliefs that reinforce the notion that women are lesser. From the institutional sexism in pretty much every industry, to the micro-aggressions we deal with on a daily basis, it’s a wonder every woman hasn’t gone postal at some point.

What I am saying is that drawing together to share our collective experiences feels like survival work now. And laughing about it feels like one of the best ways to cope, because what the hell else are we going to do in the short term? Real long-term solutions involve a comprehensive plan of attack, from demanding safety and security from app makers to changing social norms and public policy. I’ll talk about some of this kind of big-picture advocacy work a little later on, but, in the meantime, this book is going to help you laugh and find your people so that your life as a woman online becomes a little more fucking bearable.

For now, there’s little you can do to avoid these maniac men if you want to live a normal functioning life in public as a woman in the digital arena. They’re everywhere: Tinder, Bumble, Facebook, Twitter, the bar down the street, the White House. So you might as well learn to anticipate them, be prepared with strategies to deflect their insults and threats, and commiserate in knowing that you’re not alone.

If you are just dipping your toes into online dating—for the first time, or the first time in a while—this book is for you. This is the book I wish I had had when I was first starting out as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Tinder noob. I’ll take you through many of the tribulations you’ll undoubtedly face in this strange internet dating world, and we’ll learn how to get through them together.