"Nudes of Nah?"
This is a message I received on Tinder a few days ago. I wasn't scandalized by this message, I simply replied, "Or nah," and went about my business. Unless you're my mom, who frequently asks me the question, "Did you see the news on AOL this morning?" You probably know of Tinder.
Tinder is a dating app that works off of a pretty basic concept. People’s profiles consist of a few photos of them and a short tagline. Based off of that information you must decide if you will swipe left or right. Swipe right to indicate that you’re interested, swipe left if you are not. If both parties involved have swiped right, viola! You have a match and you are now free to message each other and find out more about them, and then, “Will you be my Tinderella?”
So there isn’t really anything innately wrong with this set up. Yes it sucks that we judge books by their covers in this way but its human nature isn’t it? I mean if you’re in a crowded bar no one is going to approach you based on your charity work. Things unfortunately don’t work that way.
However, if someone does approach you in some bar, in person, nine times out of ten they won’t say, “I may not go down in history, but I’ll go down on you.” Again, this is a real message that a real person sent me via Tinder. Really, these messages are awkward to say the least. If a person walked up to me in real life and said something like this I would be understandably upset. What scares me more than anything is that these dudes sending me these daily proverbs of perversion is how desensitized we’ve all become, both the senders and receivers of these messages.
Is the semi-anonymity that Tinder, and other dating apps, provides making our already nonchalant generation even more “Eh?” I don’t want to be misunderstood; I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we live in a time where people are free to have sex with any consenting party that they choose. We are a generation where, for the most part, no- strings attached sex doesn’t make you social pariah. If that’s what you enjoy, by all means indulge yourself.
What worries me is this: How long before this type of communication starts becoming how we talk in real life? In a way hasn’t it already begun? There is a very popular video making the social media rounds put out by a non-profit group called Hollaback. The clip shows a girl in her 20’s walking around New York for a couple of hours. She is catcalled, followed and basically harassed all day long. The things the men shouted were typical. One man even followed the girl for a couple of blocks.
One man in particular gets angry when the girl does not respond. “Hey, someone is acknowledging you for being beautiful, maybe you should say thank you!” Which seems an awful lot like the Tinder equivalent of, “Why aren’t you responding? You aren’t even anything special.”
So I’m actually one of the lucky ones as far as my level of Tinder harassment goes. There are horror stories all over the Internet in which people get very angry when ignored on Tinder. Sending people they have never met before hateful message after hateful message. “Fine, don’t message me back. You’re ugly anyway,” followed by, “you should be happy that someone like me would even talk to someone who looks like you.”
I know that street harassment isn’t anything new. I understand that dating apps are just a new medium for jerks to spew their unwanted sexual advances. What I’m asking is do these things correlate?
Perhaps there isn’t a rise in street harassment, just a rise in awareness. It’s a hard statistic to pinpoint. However, there does seem to be a rise in this sort of entitlement to a response. As if by not responding to a casually shouted, “Hey beautiful,” the shouter then has the right to tell me that I’m unworthy.
Has it always been this way? Or are we becoming even more detached from people because of new technology? Are men getting some false sense of courage to talk this way to women because of dating apps? Or has this angry entitlement always been present and now they can just do it while hiding behind tiny screens?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. It’s just a theory to try to explain why it seems like the world has become an increasingly hostile place for women. It’s like a sexist, “What came first the chicken or the egg?” What I can say with some confidence is that the chicken was probably forced to cross the road because some ignorant man was calling her “Baby.”
