Don’t Date Him, Girl! Check Him Out First Online

By Linda Orlando

Millions of women around the country have had at least one experience of being jilted or cheated on by a no-good man. Usually there’s no way to know in advance whether or not a man you’ve met is a good risk when it comes to matters of the heart. But now, thanks to DontDateHimGirl.com, the answer may be just a click away.

DontDateHimGirl.com is an online resource for women who have shared the experience of dating a no-good man, and lived to tell about it. The site has roused all kinds of controversy recently, mostly among men and privacy rights advocates, and the media has had a field day debating the pros and cons of such a service. But the benefits of such a service are all too clear. There is finally a place where a woman can run a background check on a man in the romance department before dating, marrying, or otherwise committing to him.

The mission of DontDateHimGirl.com is a clear one, stated on the site: "Each day, thousands of women around the world are cheated on by their boyfriends, fiancés and husbands. A man’s infidelity causes the destruction of thousands of marriages, engagements and relationships every year. What’s a woman to do? Hire expensive private detectives? Pay for costly background checks? Now, women have a new cost-effective weapon in the war on cheating men!" Founded by women, for other women, DontDateHimGirl.com is a free service that provides women with a forum to share their experiences with cheating men by posting pictures and other information about them in an easy-to-use, searchable database.

Tasha Joseph is the brains behind the brawn of DontDateHimGirl.com. Although Joseph has been the recipient of praise and appreciation handed out by many women, she has also been the target of many critics, even being threatened with a civil suit against the site for invasion of privacy. But Joseph remains undaunted. Speaking to CNN, she compared the site to the FBI’s most-wanted criminals database. "I wanted to put all of the cheating men of the world in a database," she said. "And that’s how it started." Joseph wrote Class Action, a column for the Miami Herald, for over seven years. After watching her girlfriends continually going through the pain of infidelity, she had the brilliant idea of creating an online database of registered love offenders. Joseph has appeared on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News and Entertainment Tonight to talk about the site.

The site has nearly 1,200 alleged cheaters, with warnings like "Ladies, watch out; there’s a dog on the loose," or "I caught him on my computer looking up other chicks," as well as no-bones-about-it imperatives such as "Run—run as fast as you can!" Site proponents say that the Constitution protects the freedom of speech of the women providing information to this online dating credit report. Women feel that the caution provided by the site is similar to laws requiring people with communicable diseases to contact all their partners who may be at risk of contracting the same disease. If the truth is out there for women to find before putting themselves in harm’s way, then they can be prevented from getting their heart broken.

Using DontDateHimGirl.com is easy and free. To warn women about a cheating man, all a woman has to do is log on and follow the instructions for posting. Postings cannot be done anonymously, and rigorous protocols are followed by the staff of the site to ensure that postings are legitimate. Whenever possible, the men are notified of being profiled on the site so that they can log in and post their own rebuttal if they want to.

So far the controversy and media attention has only served to heat things up at the site. As one recent poster exclaimed, "I just sent in a posting for your site. I’m so glad you started this service. Had I been forewarned about the last cheater I dated, it would have saved me months of heartache. Thanks so much for giving women a way to protect themselves!"