Women rule online dating. They post pithy ads, cute pictures, and just sit back and weigh the offers that come flooding in. Men, on the other hand, must perform a complicated, proactive mating dance just to get a nibble — so to speak.

Ever willing to seek out firsthand hard data, The Prague Post jumped in with two of its own brave volunteers: Business Editor Adam Cardais and Sales Manager Alice Kubitová, who each placed two ads and two photos apiece on www.seznamka.cz and www.rande.cz.

For each site, one of their ads was in Czech and the other in English.

Within four days, Kubitová received 34 responses, including two invitations to join men on upcoming vacations and a few more explicit offers.

Cardais' tally? One response — from a Czech girl trying to set up a friend.

"That's awful," Cardais said when told how he fared.

Sixty-five percent of Czech Internet daters are men, and only the truly determined of those succeed in distancing themselves from the pack.

Of course, you need determination just to get started: The sheer process of setting up an ad — involving e-mail accounts, codes and SMSes — would have the timid flustered fast. If you persist, you're registered and billed a nominal fee via SMS of 15 to 50 Kč.

Kubitová and Cardais tapped out short outlines about themselves and who they were looking for, each trying to be a bit playful — though perhaps Kubitová raised the bar too far by describing herself as a "dark hair devil."

Seznamka provides check boxes to describe body type, education and how much you smoke and drink, while Rande lists scores of other preferences.

Volunteers didn't update their ads, contact members of the opposite sex or do anything else to boost their profiles. They just waited.

Within 20 minutes of her ad going live, Kubitová had a dozen hits and a handful of responses. Cardais had one hit.

The number of Kubitová's responses piled up in the following days, and were still coming in at press time.

"I was really surprised," she says.

It's hard to tell how many of her suitors were serious, though: Many made references to her devil description ("As the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, I get along pretty well with devils," wrote one) while others pledged their total devotion to her every whim. Some asked to meet in person. Others asked specifically for sex.

Kubitová says the responses were educational, if not encouraging.