It’s Time for a Feminist Dating Revolution

“Am I overthinking it?” “Am I just too picky?” “Should I just give him a chance?”

No. No. Hell no.

Here's what I discovered after my own post-divorce dating app disaster: The words people choose reveal exactly who they are. The problem is that the red flags are often so subtle that you blame yourself for overthinking when something feels off.

When I first tried dating apps, I was shocked by the bizarre communication habits that had become normal in online dating. As a rhetoric professor specializing in critical discourse analysis, I realized I could use my training to decode patterns and protect myself from offensive messages and terrible dates. I started cataloging what I saw and began to experiment with my own profile. The results were immediate: the messages coming in may have slowed to a crawl, but the ones that got through were solid matches.

So I opened it up. In February 2023, I started a free Facebook group to teach other women this new approach to dating apps. Within 18 months, over 147,000 women joined. Today, the community is 250,000+ strong. It turns out a lot of us are done with playing games and apologizing for having standards.

What started as a dating app survival skill has expanded into something bigger. Once you learn to spot problematic rhetoric in dating, you see it everywhere: at work, in your family, in the world. Psychologists, therapists, and domestic abuse educators now use this methodology in their professional practices—which means more to me than anything else.

My Work Gives You:

My professional pride is watching women reclaim their agency and power and stop blaming themselves for other people's bad behavior. That's what all this is for: to gain the clarity and confidence to trust yourself again.

The analytical tools to decode what people are actually communicating—what their word choices, patterns, and rhetorical strategies reveal about their intentions and character.

The permission to trust your instincts instead of second-guessing them. If something feels off, it probably is (and now you'll know exactly why).

The vocabulary to name what you're seeing, so you can stop blaming yourself for "overthinking" or being “too picky.”

The confidence to set firm boundaries, walk away faster, and stop apologizing for having standards.

My Motto

Everyone should be invested in finding healthier, safer, and more effective ways to broker human partnership.

My Core Values

Rhetoric only matters if it connects to the masses.

Making the academic accessible.

I deeply believe that this work must be accessible. If this work is going to help anyone, I wanted to ensure it was free, easy to find, and understandable without a PhD. 

Using humor as resistance.

Humor connects in ways that serious scholarship alone never will. I’m a humor writer, partly because I believe humor is a necessary component of surviving the dating apps, and mostly because I believe humor and satire are effective tools of combating toxic patriarchy. I believe that toxic behavior deserves to be mocked. Mocking the manipulation strips it of its power. In a world that would rather we stay quiet, satire is a megaphone. It draws attention and exposes what people want to ignore.

Focusing on romantic partnership as a starting point.

Dating apps are where many women first encounter the gap between what someone says and what they mean, and where learning to trust that instinct can change everything that comes after. Every single element of society is predicated upon the conditions of women's romantic relationships. Healthy long-term relationships are linked to positive economic outcomes and better physical and mental health. Unhealthy ones result in poverty, poor health, abuse, violence, and death. Viewed through this lens, it becomes difficult to discount the quest for love as something trifling or "extra." Everyone should be invested in finding healthier, safer, and more effective ways to broker human partnership. 

Select Publications

 want more?

Let’s Stay Connected

Join tens of thousands of women learning the superpower of applied rhetoric, in dating and beyond. Each month, I’ll teach you to decode the messages beneath people’s words and images and how to navigate everyday interactions with clarity and confidence. (We’ll roll our eyes at some truly terrible dating profiles along the way.)