Can We Talk About How Dating Apps Rely On Women’s Labor?
Bumble recently came under fire for its tone-deaf ads mocking celibacy. “Celibacy is not the answer” billboards cheekily announced…a move that managed to anger conservatives who choose to be celibate for religious reasons, and liberals who see abstaining from sex as a way to exercise reproductive freedom in a post Roe v. Wade world.
Bumble is going to take the ads down. But the controversy got me thinking: What features would make me go back to online dating?
I first thought of filtering through Likes. A lot of cishet women on dating apps have a Likes list that is very long, and there’s usually not a way to filter through them. I can’t filter for a man five miles away from me who has already Liked my profile, for example. I can only filter generally for men five miles away.
But then I thought: that’s not really a feature that would make the experience more fun. It’s a feature that would help me with a JOB.
Dating apps are not fun. They’re not. You’re attempting to wade through men you know just swiped right…
