“The guidelines helped me realize (what in hindsight sounds obvious) that if the guys you are talking to aren’t choosing to reciprocate the same effort as you in the beginning. It’s clear that Female Dating Strategy can have an appeal to women trying to find answers to the struggles in their relationships. Much of the basic advice in FDS can be helpful in learning one’s worth and relearning how to assert boundaries as an adult. One user said FDS helped them block a manipulative guy they’d been seeing for years another said the community helped her leave an abusive relationship. Many FDS members talk about how FDS changed their lives. For women who have dealt with trauma at the hands of men in their relationships, FDS’s guidelines (“A Man MUST Treat You Like a Queen from the Start” and “Don’t Settle for Less”) can serve as a practice in boundary-setting, and the forum can offer a supportive community for those who may not otherwise have one. On a base level, much of Female Dating Strategy’s advice makes sense. The guidelines can be useful for setting boundaries, but they can become oppressive to women, tooīut while FDS’s advice can seem appealing at first, underneath is a socially conservative approach that’s often deeply critical of women and their behaviors, placing limits on how they can act and what they ought to seek from a relationship.
