Women who online date and try to draw boundaries get sneered at for being choosy or just find that those boundaries are ignored
Dating app Tinder has a new feature,
Tinder Plus, that addresses some user complaints about the service – notably, Tinder Plus will let you undo a mistaken “swipe left” that accidentally deposits a desirable profile in your “never show me this again” pile. But be warned: if you’re 30 or over, subscribing to Tinder Plus will cost you
twice as much
as it does for the under-30 set.
Tinder’s explanation is, essentially, that twentysomethings won’t pay as much because they don’t have as much money. That’s plausible enough – but I can’t help thinking that there’s an element of “this is no country for old men” at work. Even if there is, as an over-30 I am not especially worked up about this; having seen how older men
talk to young women
on OkCupid, I can see why there might be an argument for limiting their participation.
But what we really need isn’t a dating site with fewer (richer) olds. What we need is a dating site with more user control over who we see, and who sees us.
I probably wouldn’t pay $19.99 a month (the senior anti-discount for Tinder Plus) just for the privilege of getting take-backs on my mistaken swipes. But I’d pay extra to be an over-30 on
Tinder
if it meant I had an option where under-30s couldn’t interact with me. (No offense, under-30s, but right now I do not want to date you; let’s not waste our time.) Indeed, there’s a whole range of people I’d like to screen from ever seeing my profile in the first place. If you identify as queer, OkCupid has an option to prevent straight people from seeing your profile; why not be able to shield yourself from pro-lifers, or Libertarians or cat-lovers, if that’s the thing you can’t stand?
If there’s one thing we learned from last week’s
battle over dress color, it’s that many people react with anger and fear when faced with genuine epistemic differences – even over something trivial. Often, it’s worth facing down that fear, in order to understand the richness of human experience. But you don’t want to challenge yourself at every moment, in every aspect of your life; if we all did that, we’d spend our days walking around on spikes, pouring hot wax on our sensitive parts and voluntarily trying to build relationships with people who think we’re idiots.
And, when it comes to dating, straight women have to do that already.
If there’s one aspect of your life in which you’d want to shield yourself from unneeded suffering, it’s your love life. Yet women are supposed to accept that looking for dates (online or off) means being exposed to hostility and slime from people you didn’t seek out, and accepting it with a smile because you have to “put yourself out there”. In online dating – and in being online in general – women are supposed to accept harassment as the cost of doing business. But online or off, and
certainly
when we’re looking to get partnered or laid, we should be able to demand finer control over who can seek us out.
What we perhaps need is an online dating site that we can customize to match our intentional communities. Call it EchoChambr.
Away from the keyboard, people are often urged to find soulmates by going to lectures and classes and events that line up with their interests; even the most dedicated bar cruiser would probably choose a joint that attracted like-minded types – a place where she wasn’t likely to feel out of place or awkward or threatened. But online daters who try to draw similar boundaries get sneered at for being choosy or just find that those boundaries are ignored. (Tinder is at least a step up in that you have to evince a tiny amount of interest before people can talk to you, and also in that you can
throw their faces away.) You’re supposed to stay open to everything, and if you’re a woman, you’re supposed to accept that this openness means weathering abuse. But frankly, women take enough crap, and dating is already a tender subject; we should be able to limit stress where we can.
Using pricing to subtly discourage older people from using Tinder (or subtly encourage young ones) is one way to go, if you’re trying to create a particular kind of space. But what online dating really needs is the ability to set up opaque walls. And once we’ve got that ability in place, I wouldn’t mind if we expanded it to the rest of the internet too. Yes, being surrounded by contrarians on the internet can expand our minds, but some people – like women on online dating sites, like people from marginalized groups everywhere every day – have plenty of conflict come looking for them. Sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes) you want to shield yourself from struggle.
We’ve done a great job making use of the internet as a place to build connections and expand awareness. Now it’s time to start using that processing power to build ourselves some flexible, protective cocoons. If we have the power to screen out the olds, there’s no reason we can’t build it to screen out the creeps.
