The problem with Tinder is right here

in this quote from Dean Kissick, a 20-something male Tinder user. His thoughts -- excerpted from a Guardian article on the app's reputation as a sexual cattle call for a herd of empty-hearted young consumers -- are among the most poignant I have seen on how intimacy is lived and how it isn't:

"Vanity Fair’s article [a recent investigative piece on Tinder's hookup culture] begins inside an upmarket bar in Manhattan’s financial district in which everyone is Tindering; their rapt, aroused faces illuminated by the lights of their phones. Why would anyone do this, on an evening out drinking in New York? That’s just crackers! What is wrong with us?! If we weren’t staring into our phones constantly we might fall for a stranger walking past in the street, suddenly imagining what that other person might be like, what life we might lead together – maybe she’s a cellist in the orchestra! – but all this magical speculation is rather undermined when you read a Tinder biography that says something like (an example from just this afternoon): “Travel, treehouses, festivals, food, sun, skiing, sausage dogs, steel drums, bike rides, canal boats, desert islands.” How tiresome, and underwhelming. Because the whole point of falling in love is that you cannot choose who you fall in love with. Your sweet, sweet fantasy might be utterly impractical, pie-in-the-sky, totally unapproachable, but that’s what’s exciting; and Tinder just sucks all the joy and romance out of this.

So there's that.

 

But what both Kissick and fellow Guardian quotee Scarlett Russell seem to miss, in their shared insistence that Tinder offers a gender-level playing field, is that even when seeking instant sex, women and men tend to carry the same clashing attitudes that come with unequal societal footing.

 

Russell, in claiming to be equally empowered with men on Tinder, contradicts herself: she says that horny women are at no disadvantage on Tinder, but she grants that “most of my single, female friends use Tinder in the hope of meeting 'a nice guy who won’t just send me pictures of lubricant.'” And she acknowledges, as does Kissick, that virtually all guys on Tinder want nothing more than effortless throwaway sex. Not exactly a recipe for equal satisfaction. Kissick claims that women on Tinder actually have the upper hand because they get to choose among all the men hitting on them. But that's like saying a female attorney has the upper hand in the job marketplace by receiving abundant offers to be an office assistant. Empowerment? I don't think so.

 

It is true that Tinder did not create unequal power for women and men. Nor did it create a consumer culture of increasingly disposable experience. But let's not pretend it's not part of both.