One day recently, Alexandra Tweten was browsing Facebook when a woman she knew posted a screenshot of a recent exchange she’d had on OkCupid.

“I want to message you, but I’m afraid,” the man said. The woman didn't respond for 12 hours, after which the man followed up with one word:

"Asshole."

As these things often do, the missive prompted a piling on of similar tales of inscrutably weird or profoundly rude dating messages. Tweten posted an aggressive note she had recently received from a man who had sent her the same OkCupid line three times in the course of a month, asking her if she’d like to chat. After ignoring it repeatedly, Tweten finally wrote back, “No.”

His response: “WHY THE FUCK NOT? If you weren’t interested, you shouldn’t have fucking replied at all! WTF!”

“We can't win,” Tweten told me recently. “If we don't respond, they come back and say, ‘you're a whore.’ If we do respond, we get yelled at and called names. I hate that men think they can talk to women like that. They should be publicly shamed.”

Other women on the Facebook thread agreed, saying they had similar experiences and wanted to see the perpetrators punished in some way, like through a public Instagram account.

Tweten said, “I’ll do it!”

That Instagram account became Bye Felipe, Tweten’s crowdsourced menagerie of mankind’s worst specimens. The name is a play on “Bye Felicia,” a meme used to signify that someone has left a party, and they won’t be missed. Since creating it Monday of last week, Tweten has received more than two dozen submissions.

Tweten, who is 27 and works for an entertainment company in Los Angeles, has been on and off OkCupid since 2010. She acknowledges that these types of messages come from a relatively small number of users. She’s had mostly good experiences with online dating, and she met her last serious boyfriend on OkCupid.

Still, the crude, unsolicited messages are a kind of a bitter aftertaste to what is usually a fun, if sometimes fatiguing, process. “What in society makes them think that it's okay to message someone like that?” she said. “At the same time, it's funny. You can see the desperation.”

Tweten is part of an growing contingent of women who are dedicated to exposing the shady, hostile, and crass entreaties they get from their digital suitors. There’s Straight White Boys Texting, which is exactly what it sounds like: (“You should come eat this dick for desert.” [sic]) Minority women seem to have it especially rough; there are a number of sites devoted to exposing the uniquely disgusting bile that seems to spew forth when certain white men attempt to woo Asian women.

Or, for more run-of-the-mill indignities, check out Dudes of Tinder, a Tumblr collecting a combination of outlandish profile photos and gross messages (“Wanna meet up for some chicken? Maybe some sex?”).

In the words of Elizabeth Bennet, "You are too hasty, sir."

* * *

Online dating is just like regular dating—if it had been sprinkled with radioactive dust and left out in the sun to get bigger, louder, and warped.

Traditional courting norms, in which men usually do the asking and women usually do the selecting, are escalated online. Rather than ask out the one cute girl laying out on the quad, however, the man can ask 50.

And why bother to ask them out in all different ways? One “hey cutie what you doin?” fits all.

Bombarded by all these "admirers," many women feel overwhelmed and leave scores of messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and five fake female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection, day after day, can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters.

“They're trying to make us feel bad about making them feel bad,” Tweten said. “They're just trying to strike at whatever our insecurities are. You were just interested a second ago, and now you're saying, ‘you have a fat ugly nose.’”

To this, add the anonymity of online communication and the ambiguity that results when two strangers try to kindle a romantic connection through a medium that can't convey sarcasm, body language, or even a smile.

One friend recently relayed her own online-dating saga to me:

I was messaging with a guy recently and he was kind of aggressive—messaging frequently and whatnot. Eventually we exchanged numbers and he started texting incessantly. If I didn't answer him within an hour, he would text more: “Why haven't you answered me? What are you doing?" It put me off quite a bit, but as I hadn't even met him yet, I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Then on the day we set a date, he got really strange. We had made plans to go to one of my favorite spots downtown at 6 p.m. I never promised dates before then because it's so hard to get away from my job. Then he texted and said, "See you tonight at 5:30." I corrected him by saying that I thought we'd set the time for 6. He said,“are you really giving me a hard time about this? I have a flight tonight at 9:15.” I said, “Well I didn't say I could meet before 6 for a reason, but I will do my best to get there early.”

He then said, "Bring black man hair dye when you come."

I had no idea what he meant by that! Number one, it felt a little racist, and number two, why on earth would I run errands for someone I haven't even met yet? So I sent him, "This just got too weird for me, so I'm calling it off. Hope you have a safe flight." At which point he texted me five times about how it was just a stupid joke about how I was turning his hair white because I was giving him such a hard time. He texted again yesterday to see if he "had permission" to continue texting me.

Men, too, have grumbled online about the fact that all their hours spent browsing photos, writing love notes, and hitting send aren’t “paying off.” Maybe some think they have to send outlandish messages in order to get noticed at all.