Pigging - the cruel new dating trend you need to know about

It is one thing being rejected or ignored by your holiday romance. It is another thing entirely to fly out to see him in Amsterdam, after weeks of messaging, only to be stood up in the airport with nothing but a text saying the entire affair was a cruel joke and calling you a ‘fat ugly pig.’

But this horrific scenario is exactly what 24-year-old Sophie Stevenson says happened to her after she met Dutchman Jesse Mateman, 21, on holiday in Barcelona. She claims the pair slept together, had a “proper romance” and then spoke regularly when she was back home in Stoke. A month later Mateman convinced her to fly out to visit him in Amsterdam for the weekend.

“We were talking up until I got on the plane,” Stevenson told the Mail. “But when I arrived, he wasn't there to pick me up. I called him a bunch of times, and he didn't answer. I waited at the airport for two hours and I hadn't heard anything, I was really starting to panic about being abandoned.”

Six hours later, she says he messaged her saying ‘you were pigged, it was all a joke.'

‘Pulling a pig’ is a vile game that sees a man try to woo a woman they deem 'fat and ugly', solely because he and his deplorable friends think it is 'funny'.

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According to Urban Dictionary, the “winner” is the guy who attracts the “ugliest” one, and the awful phenomenon seems to have been around since 2014, when Big Brother contestant Josie Cunningham tried to launch a dating site called 'Pull the Pig', aimed at 'average-looking women' (seemingly, it is currently inactive).

It's part of a wider culture that increasingly relies on trickery, mocking and nastiness in dating. Recent terms like 'benching' refer to men keeping a woman they don't feel passionately about 'on the sidelines' - just in case. While 'kittenfishing' and 'catfishing' mean lying on your social media profile to trick someone into dating you.

A particularly appalling example is ‘chubby chasing’ - where men seek larger women 'as a laugh' to impress/shock/win a bet. It is heartless, sickening and, as Stevenson simply said, ‘cruel.’

Mateman has denied the claims, after facing a backlash, insisting he never had a holiday romance with Stevenson and that any texts between them are invented. “That is just fantasist rubbish and it is ruining my life,” he said.

A boy asked me out for a dare. I had put on a lot of weight and had acne. It was one of the most humiliating things that ever happened to me

We may never know the full story. But it still forces us to confront the horrific reality of pigging. This trend is not just cruel; it borders on emotional abuse. Men deliberately target women they find unattractive, purely to sleep with them and laugh about it afterwards, or in some cases, continue to humiliate them for several months before dramatically rejecting them: extra points for a particularly demeaning denouement. 

“I once found out that someone had tried to sleep with me as a joke,” says a 26-year-old female friend. “I didn’t know at the time, but it was an attempted pigging. When I found out, I felt disgusting and violated.

"Thankfully I didn’t do anything more than kiss him, but the fact that he didn’t even find me attractive - he just wanted to score points in a game - made me feel completely hideous. It affected my self-esteem and it took months for me to feel attractive again."

Everything about the trend is disgusting, but sadly not shocking. Anyone who watched American teen movies in the Nineties and Noughties will recognise pigging. It is a version of the story lines in films like She’s All That - which sees Freddie Prinze Jr date the ‘nerdy ugly’ girl as a joke - or 10 Things I Hate About You, where Heath Ledger dates Julia Stiles because he’s being paid.

Not enough of us noticed how disturbing these plots were at the time. But in retrospect, they were a symbol of growing sexism : the first wave of lad culture. And they helped normalise the idea that it was funny to date a woman as a bet. 

"I was a victim of that lad culture trend," one 30-year-old woman, who didn't want to be named, tells me. "A boy at school asked me out for a dare. At the time I had put on a lot of weight and had acne. It was one of the most humiliating things that ever happened to me. I feel disgusted that it's happening again - and that a new generation could end up victims of this pathetic misogyny."

It’s unclear exactly how often pigging is taking place - it takes a brave victim to stand up and admit to it - but it’s important that we all call it out and make sure everyone knows just how wrong it is. The only pig in this scenario? The man whose fragile ego is so threatened by women that he gets off on humiliating them.