Rosie: I would be very, very interested to see this experiment done in reverse.

A woman in the US has pulled off the most depressing experiment ever in the history of the universe and now I will cry under my doona and never come out.

Alli Reed, a columnist for US website Cracked, recently published a piece called “4 things I Learned from the Worst Online Dating Profile Ever.”

In it, she confirmed all my worst fears about men and now I am convinced I will be alone forever, doomed to watch Seinfeld repeats while drinking wine until I die alone with my face in a Lean Cuisine.

Here’s how the genius (but depressing) experiment went down:

Alli Reed set up an online dating profile on popular dating site OKCupid.

Oh, I’m sorry, let me rephrase that: Reed set up THE WORST online dating profile any person has ever seen on popular dating site OKCupid.

She purposefully created the worst kind of woman she could possible think of –  a woman who is racist, unemployed, has extremely low respect for the fundamentals of spelling and likes to fake being pregnant (spelled ‘pregnat’) in order to manipulate men and get what she wants.

Here’s the twist though: Reed then asked one of her very attractive model friends to pose for the profile picture.

Do I even need to tell you how the experiment turned out?

Reed was inundated with hundreds of offers of dates and romance from men. Literally – HUNDREDS.

“I figured any profile with photos of a beautiful woman would get a few messages from men whose boners were willing to overlook her personality,” Reed said. Clearly, she did not expect that hundreds of men would be interested in a woman whose profile name was ‘aaroncarterfan’, and profession is listed as “PArtyinggggggg lol my parents think I’m in law school so they pay all my bills LMAOOOOOOO its awesome.”

Basically, hundreds of men wanted to get to know this woman:

Because they thought she looked like this woman:

Sigh.

Reed was so shocked at the amount of male attention the profile got, she decided to take the experiment further. She started messaging the men who contacted her, and tried to be the most vile kind of person she could think of. For example: “ya lol i fake bein pregnant so much that im like amazing at it, i deserve a nobel prize for it lol. ppl will give u whatever u want if they think ur pregnat, SPECIALLY if they think there the dad, omg lol.”

The guy she said that to asked when she could meet up. Really.

And it was more of the same, for days. Reed eventually just starting talking crazy, seeing if there was ANYTHING she could say that would turn a guy off. She asked one guy if she could pull out some his teeth. He asked what time she was available for a date.

Excuse me while I give up on men forever and devote my life to a John Oliver poster.

Reed said she was “hoping to prove that there exists an online dating profile so loathsome that no man would message it” but she was sad to see that all she confirmed was “that men have been so deeply socialized to value women solely on their appearance that many of them seem unable to take any other aspect of who she is, such as intelligence or capacity for self-reflection or suffocating douchiness, into account.”

Look, it’s not all men, obviously. Not all men will base their interest in women solely on their looks, and its offensive to the many good quality guys out there to insist that that’s the case. But as someone who has seen male attention all but dry up since I’ve gained weight, I can tell you from experience that it’s a whole bloody lot of them and the results of this experiment do not surprise me in the slightest.

I originally set out to write something funny about this hilarious experiment gone bad, but to be honest, the whole thing has actually made me kind of depressed. It’s just another example of a woman’s worth being exclusively tied to her looks.

This experiment may have been on a dating site but it’s hard to deny that life is just like OKCupid most of the time – the profile picture is often all that matters.

I would be very interested to see this experiment done in reverse – to create the best profile anyone has ever seen on OKCupid, only to attach a photo of an overweight girl who is not conventionally attractive. I’m pretty sure I know how that would turn out.

Now excuse me while I go and see about the possibility of marrying that poster.