Same Same But Different: Tinder And Spanx

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” — Albert Einstein

Technology is something fascinating. It is often complex, sometimes rather scary, something that makes our life easier and harder at the same time and puts us in a dialogue with future and past and constant change. Bottom line: the development of technologies provides us with personal “firsts” over and over again. I am an open-minded, yet often nostalgic character, who is obsessed with the topic of fashion emancipation and would today like to talk about two personal “firsts” I experienced recently in the context of technology:

Both of these firsts happened this year. The first occurred in January: Tinder. My friends got sick and tired of me constantly complaining about the fact that the male creatures in my adopted home up North seemed to have a rather hard time approaching me unless they had looked comfortingly deep into the wine bottle. They advised me to download this new dating app called Tinder. Well, I can’t say I was really thrilled or even really open to it. After preaching for years about how much I didn’t believe in online dating and how much worse it made our society, I had now just downloaded the climax of online dating: the most superficial dating app I had ever heard about. Sliding faces to the left or right judging whether I liked their guts or not seemed somehow so wrong that I began to think that a person who gives into such a lazy, superficial, yet somehow addictive way of dating should just get punished by karma and exclusively meet weirdos and idiots in return. So bottom line, I didn’t like the idea of Tinder, which artificially recreates a “hot or not”-situation like in an American High School Comedy or some entertainment show on MTV. Neither did I like the design, which looks surprisingly similar to the symbol of Sweden’s blood bank (Blodcentralen), not to mention the uneasy feeling I had when looking at some of the popping up pictures, for which the German language invented the great word “Fremdschämen”, which can roughly be translated to “feeling embarrassed for someone else”.

The second “first” that left me with quite similar feelings and thoughts when I first approached it, was an experience of apparel technology. More concrete: Spanx. It was a couple of months later, the weather was fantastic, which meant festivals and endless dancing and sweating in dresses and skirts. I actually once heard a joke about the fact that if your thighs touch each other as a women that’s the closest you can get to a mermaid, which, I have to admit, is a comparison that made me insanely happy — not only because I love all kinds of mermaid-jokes but also because yeah, I don’t really care about that thigh-situation. Well, I didn’t until this summer when I realized that touching thighs simply get sore if you sweat and dance in skirts like that for days. So I bought my first pair of Spanx. I had an uneasy feeling, no passion about the design (rather the opposite) and a feeling of “why do I force myself in another ‘hot or not’-situation” accompanied my shopping experience. Apart from that, wearing these panties under your dress doesn’t really make you feel any hotter.

The first time I left the house being wrapped in the technology of shape wear, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bridget Jones and was rather worried that sitting down or biking might reveal my new garment. Same thing with Tinder; getting messages in public with this ugly symbol popping up on my screen, I was concerned the people behind me on the bus might see it and judge me for it. After these first moments, I actually realised that about 90% of my single friends (and 10% of my not-single friends) use Tinder on a regular basis and that most of the girls I know own some sort of shaping panties or tights. To my surprise, these technologies are still such taboo topics to discuss, which explained to me why I had these uneasy feelings in the beginning. Seriously, I am almost fascinated how that is even possible in our striptease culture where I hear too much about the sexcapades, STDs and astringency problems of my friends.

Anyhow, what I wanted to say about these rather uncomfortable “firsts” that I experienced this year is that it was worth trying them. My first Tinder date was in fact a quite amazing guy, who (lucky him) never saw me in Spanx. But also the idea of shape wear seriously saved me from some rashes and since I know that Andre Agassi also wears tight shorts underneath his tennis shorts to avoid sore spots, I lost my strange embarrassment about it. The important thing with these two technologies (for whoever is going to have her/his first with them) is to not take any of it too seriously. It is a great development to have the options to boost our dating lives or body shapes with a little trick but it most likely won’t replace the real things. I am convinced that if you don’t have mermaid-genes, it feels much greater to just shape your thighs through running just as it also most likely feels more amazing to tell your grandchildren how you met the love of your life on a train ride through China instead of on a dating app.

So it’s all up to you what you do with technology, but I can certainly say it is a good thing to keep having “firsts”.