This woman is simply an idiot projecting her own prejudice onto men.

Stay away from her, guys.

Love? Affection? Companionship? Heaven forbid you should find it (or even notice it) with a man who is too old! And then she complains that THEY are only interested in her womb??

Again. Ugh. No wonder online dating has a bad rep with this kind of person on the hunt.

The initial screening phase in on-line dating is all about seeing whether the person matches your abstract needs -- age, height, looks, education, fertility, etc. It is obvious throughout the article that she is doing exactly this sort of screening of men. Yet she is "stunned" to find that they are doing it too -- how self-absorbed can you get? The only thing she's really upset about is that men are calling attention to her age, which is never fun for a woman.

The downside of online dating is this initial impersonal quality. Exactly this sort of screening also occurs in other on-line dating contexts, but one doesn't have to be as conscious of it. Often the setting or the method of meeting (such as having friends introduce, etc.) implicitly screens for education and status, and the sizing up for a physical spark occurs instantly and almost unconsciously in person.

A shame that this was such a weirdly un-self aware and unintelligent article, because the question of whether our over-educated, professional, extended-adolesence class is ever going to manage to have kids is an interesting one.

I might be a little unfair. The last few paragraphs of the piece are more thoughtful and show some awareness that a lot of the issues she's talking about are endemic to the nature of on-line dating, her included. It's a confused piece, though, she needed to step aside a bit from her own judgements about the men who pursued her and think harder about the deeper issues involved.

Would anyone consider it unreasonable if a woman filtered out potential internet dates who refused to consider having kids, or were unable to (due to injury or a vasectomy, for example)? Would this woman be guilty of "reducing men to their utility, specifically, their fertility"? This is, in effect, the argument that the author is putting forth, and it just doesn't make sense.

If you don't know a person at all, it's reasonable to filter for things you think are important: education, looks, willingness and ability to have kids, etc. You can make a set of more-or-less necessary conditions (but that of course doesn't guarantee that you'll find someone who's willing to be with you). The author thinks that having necessary conditions (specifically, the ability to have babies) is the same as having sufficient conditions, and she's dead wrong. These men want a woman who can have kids, but that doesn't mean they're reducing her to a baby-making-machine. They might also want love, a soulmate, etc. Maybe, just maybe, they would decide that, even though she can have babies, they wouldn't want to be with her because she tends to read the worst motives in others' behavior.

It's true that internet dating differs from real-world dating in that the filters are more rigid; they don't make exceptions for people with great personalities, for example. Maybe some of these guys would make an exception for an especially charming woman, but that's beyond what computers can do.

Having children is important enough to many people that being unable or unwilling to have kids is a dealbreaker in their search for a mate. I doubt anyone, male or female, would say this is totally unreasonable. Why does the author pick on men who want this, while she herself says she wants to have a family? It's not the men's fault that biology gives them a longer span of fertility than women. Maybe they want more than they can reasonably get -- but who doesn't?

I'm amazed at how harshly she judged the men she met online, and even more amazed at how rude she was in shaming them for wanting families. If they saw her as a womb, she was looking for a sperm donor--one that fell into her narrow and rigidly held criteria.

I began online dating on the left coast when I was 37 and suprise, met a lot of different and interesting men--some of them older, some of them a few years younger than me. While there were a few jerks, most of them were nice guys and I enjoyed meeting them even if it never became a love match. I think the reason for this is that I didn't go in with an agenda or a set of expectations. I tried to be as open-minded as possible and treat each man with respect, even if ultimately I wasn't interested in pursuing a relationship

My open-mindedness paid off--I eventually met my husband online and at 41 am happily married. He wasn't at all like any of the men I'd dated in the past, and that turned out to be a good thing.

The author says of her current boyfriend "Here was a whole person, not a profile." Well, guess what? All of those men you met online are whole people too. You just failed to see it.

the human mating game is obviously all about reproduction. simple as that.

I find it odd that you single out the age restriction as objectification, but ignore the fact that online dating (or, for that matter, any conception of 'dating' as a predetermined activity that you actively seek out) is in itself an objectifying process. What else would you call wading through bullet-point profiles and picking people based on their responses to certain questions?

You seem to have an older, more romanticized notion of finding love that I definitely sympathize with. But you're not going to get that from online dating. The way it works is precisely how you've described. You come up with a certain set of criteria to restrict the 'pool' and select from the people who match. You're not selecting a person, you're selecting a profile - a set of forced answers carefully crafted to achieve the most success and given in an artificial setting (how often in real life are you systematically quizzed on your interests, goals, etc?). A 'person' in the actual sense of the word consists of those qualities that you can't glean from any profile, like how well you communicate with each other, how they form their sentences, the tone with which they speak, or just the general aura they give off. In the end, those are the things that actually determine if a relationship is successful far more than any matching interests or career goals (though, of course, those things will sometimes match based on the deeper similarities).

Of course, online dating doesn't prevent you from eventually getting that 'real' sense of a person, but you'll never start off there, as you might have via a 'natural' encounter where both parties' intentions were not laid out on the table. It's always going to be a goal-oriented approach, and if that turns you off, then online dating is not for you. Given that you're already being reduced to a set of criteria and characteristics, why would you fault the men for making their choices based on that? I am sure that if some of those men were to meet someone in real life and fall in love with their personality, they would stand by them, childlessness and all. But if they are embarking on this systematic search, why would they specify criteria that are less preferrable to them, especially when there are so many people out there to narrow down? These men aren't precluding true love - they are just as likely to find it within their chosen pool as they are in any other because there will still be millions of profiles to sift through.

That, of course, is the whole problem of online dating. It destroys your soul by destroying your idea of your own uniqueness - a solipsistic lie, but a necessary one. The sad truth is that there are billions of people out there, many of them just as interesting as you are, and many more so. And at least some of these men will find whatever connection you could have had with them (or a better one) in someone else, someone who ALSO happens to fit into their life plan.

My advice would be to stay within the non-virtual world, where every chance at love has all the more tragic weight to it, because it seems like it may be the last. It may be limiting or self-deceptive, but at least it's more...human.

P.S. All of the above was purely theoretical and should not be interpreted as any sign of experience or life wisdom.