Burn the Haystack

It’s time for a feminist dating revolution! The eagerly awaited first book by the creator of the Burned Haystack Dating Method who’s transforming the dating world by helping you ditch the duds, preserve your peace, and find your needle.

How do you find a needle in a haystack? You burn the haystack to the ground.

Among Dr. Jennie Young’s legion of fans, the “needle” is a long-term, committed partner and the “haystack” is the dating apps. So often women are advised to “give the guy a chance”—even if the guy is a lazy communicator or looking for someone “fluent in sarcasm.” Young’s refreshing approach to online dating turns this advice on its head: Give almost no one a chance.

A professor of rhetoric and women’s and gender studies, Young has built a career teaching how to decode the hidden meanings in ordinary communication. Fascinated by the rhetorical gambits she saw in men’s profiles when she began dating again at fifty, she created the Burned Haystack Dating Method Facebook group to help other women in the same position. Her group has quickly grown to more than 200,000 members and become the smart woman’s guide to online dating sanity.

Young has revolutionized the dating lexicon, calling out rhetorical patterns to watch for in men’s communication:

• “I’m a very busy man!”: Leading with this language establishes him at the top of the hierarchy and frames him as a reward for a worthy woman.
• Test and Apologize: He texts something sexual, then apologizes before she can respond, pretending it was an “accident.” He’s testing if she’ll be okay with immediate objectification. The test is real; the apology isn’t.
• “My kids come first”: Taken literally, this sounds like a good dad. But if you examine the subtext and the context, he’s in effect saying, “Don’t expect too much from me.”

Young’s engaging system empowers readers to sort through profiles quickly and effectively—and preserve their sanity. And with its blend of scathing humour and academic rigour, Burn the Haystack is so much more than a dating tool—it gives women the skills to break down communication from the classroom to the boardroom and everywhere in between, and the confidence to approach life with a deeper, more powerful level of understanding.