Women in New York have begun charging what they call the "asshole tax" to men who cancel their dates at the last minute or who have engaged in infidelity or other emotional damage with them.
One of them is Sara, who preferred to keep her last name anonymous.
As she told the local newspaper The New York Post,
she asked a man for $50 for Venmo
(an application to make transfers) who canceled the meeting an hour before.
That was the condition that this social worker, who had had the same problem before with other boys, put on her suitor to meet again.
"I'm sick of them wasting my time and energy. In almost every other scenario, when someone books a time out of their day for you, they have a no-show policy or a security deposit," she added.
Many women say they are tired of men wasting their time.
Elizabeth Fernandez/Getty Images
The man paid the money, they both went out again and Sara's friends, admired,
began to follow her example.
Martha Duke, 38, told the Post that she has requested up to six Venmo transfers, ranging from $1,500 to $3,000, to different men with what she has left or left over the years.
"To me this is like a way of saying, 'You're a jerk, this is the price to pay for the time you made me waste,'" Duke said.
Among the reasons he mentioned for collecting it are infidelities, secret marriages and not having said that they had different sexual partners.
[A woman was looking for a partner on a dating app. A serial killer replied]
Duke added that this is a way to make men understand their mistakes and said that every time he asks for a transfer he does so by indicating that it is "
the cretin's tax".
Men "are not going to understand: 'What you did really hurt my feelings,' because they don't get the feelings; they get the money," she said.
Hazel Everett, 34, said she collected the tax from a man she dated for several months, but he stopped responding (known as
ghosting
) and also
sent her
nude photos of another woman.
[This man went on Tinder to find romance. Instead he was swindled out of almost $300,000]
"I asked him for $100 for Venmo and in the message I told him: for wasting my time,'" Everett said.
The man, he said, paid them, but was never heard from again.
"It doesn't matter," she assured, "because I kept the money."
