Published April 7, 2026
- ISBN:
- 978-0-06-344755-4
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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 group of men available to date. 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 people how to decode the hidden meanings in ordinary communication. Fascinated (and frustrated) by the rhetorical gambits she saw in men’s profiles when she first downloaded a dating app, she created Burned Haystack to help other women navigate the nonsense and find their needles. Her method has quickly spread to …
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 group of men available to date. 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 people how to decode the hidden meanings in ordinary communication. Fascinated (and frustrated) by the rhetorical gambits she saw in men’s profiles when she first downloaded a dating app, she created Burned Haystack to help other women navigate the nonsense and find their needles. Her method has quickly spread to more than 250,000 followers 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, preserving both time and sanity. And with its blend of scathing humor and academic rigor, 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.