(U-WIRE) AUSTIN, Texas — A survey taken at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston suggests that women using Internet dating services often engage in risky sexual behavior they would not normally partake in offline.
“About 500 women all over the U.S. who actually posted ads online were self-surveyed,” said Paige Padgett, author of the study and research associate at the School of Public Health. “The main idea of the study was to look at how the Internet affects women’s sexuality.”
The majority of the women in the survey were between the ages of 20 and 49, with about 26 percent between the ages of 20 and 29.
“When you’re communicating online, you are drawn to expressing yourself more personally than when you meet a guy in person,” Padgett said. “I mean, when you’re at work you can be at your desk e-mail or instant messaging this person all day, so when you meet in person you feel like you have a connection with the person.”
Padgett calls this feeling “accelerated intimacy.”
“You feel like you know the person before you met them because you had the power to screen them and have talked to them very intensely,” she said.
Meeting people online is OK for some people, UT biology senior Julie Chou said, but she wouldn’t feel comfortable when meeting the guy in person.
“There’s always a difference between meeting someone in person than meeting them online,” Chou said. “Online people can put on a facade and portray themselves as someone completely different.”
Public relations junior Amber Terry was also skeptical about how well online dating works.
“I’m sure guys don’t include things like their criminal history on Match.com,” she said.
Most women use safety measures for the first meeting, such as meeting in a public place or carrying pepper spray. The problem, Padgett said, comes in the heat of the moment, when women end up having sex with these men. In the survey, 30 percent of the women had sex upon their first meeting with online partners.
“Most of the women didn’t use condoms. They have sex in situations they may not have had if they had met the guy in person first, because they had this sense of intimacy with the men they had been talking to,” Padgett said.
Math senior Meredith Power agrees that it is easier to open up to someone online.
“On a personal level it’s easier, but it’s not necessarily realistic. They could just be saying what you want to hear,” Power said.
Seventy-seven percent of the women participating in the survey did not use condoms during their first sexual encounter with the men they met via Internet.
“I think it’s important that women see they’re in a position of power in the relationship online because they can screen potential partners. It puts women in a position of negotiation before they meet men,” Padgett said. “They can find out if they’ll use a condom or if they’re bisexual or how many times they’ve been married before and make an informed decision.”
Padgett said women need to use this information to make smart decisions in order to make meeting people online a positive experience.