Whitney Wolfe, an early employee at Tinder who recently sued the startup for sexual harassment and workplace discrimination, has joined up with two other early Tinder employees to launch a new dating app that’s not ‘full of creepy guys and pickup lines’. No prizes for spotting the not-so-subtle (but pretty sassy) dig at her former employers there.
Whitney, who settled the sexual harassment case outside of court for an undisclosed sum, has just launched Bumble, which promises to become the first female friendly dating app. Their Facebook page explains, ‘Other apps are full of creepy guys and cheesy pickup lines, but Bumble promotes a safe and respectful community.’
In other words, Bumble is marketing itself as an antidote to the now pretty dick-pic and douchebag-heavy world of Tinder dating. Basically, it works in the exact same way as Tinder does but with one key difference – men aren’t able to message women unless we’ve contacted them first. If the girl doesn’t chat, then the connection disappears forever (although men can extend one match per day for an extra 24 hours). As Bumble’s Facebook page explains, ‘You'll never get unwanted messages and Bumble suggests matches based on more relevant signals than other, more shallow apps. So stop wasting time finding tons of dead end matches on other apps and switch to Bumble.’
Well, we’re all awfully sick of finding dead-end matches, so we thought we better not wait another moment before checking out all these mysterious new ‘relevant signals’ and giving Bumble a go.
Well, the first thing to note is that you’re not invited to provide any ‘deeper’ information about yourself than you are on Tinder or Happen – it works by linking up with your Facebook account and gives you a non-compulsory option to write a small description of yourself – and then it’s all guns blazing going through other users near you and judging them solely on their looks, mutual friends and interests. The calibre of men, however, is marginally better than the types you’re likely to find on Tinder and there is a distinct lack of semi-erect penis-only profiles (good news) and men posing with tigers in their pictures (a bit of a disappointment).
But it’s after the liking process that the app really comes into its own, because it eliminates the whole ‘who should send the first text’ gender bias nonsense that – despite the fact that we’re living in the 21st century – still seems to take place on other dating apps. If you want any indication of how entrenched the ‘men message first’ rule has become, I actually spent the first half of the day utterly despondent that no one had messaged me before realising that they actually couldn’t and that was the whole point of the app. This is a silly state of affairs to find yourself in, so I’m grateful that someone’s put an app out there that’s at least attempting to challenge the current imbalanced status quo.
You have 24 hours to reach out to your potential new fuck/husband/date, but in case you were any doubt there is an ominous looking spinning clock around each profile that seems to shout QUICK! RESPOND! YOUR FUTURE HAPPINESS IS SLIPPING OUT OF YOUR GRASP!
Hurried along by the impending doom clocks, I chatted to my matches, and while I did receive one dick pic, the vast majority of men I spoke to weren’t leading by asking what I was wearing, if I was down to fuck or if I’d consider a threesome, and stuck to subjects like work, leisure time and how I was feeling today. In other words, almost exactly the same as my experience on any other dating app I’ve used.
That’s the thing – just because this app allows women to ‘make the first move’ and message first, it doesn’t have any other mechanism in place to filter out people looking for a fuck when all you want is a relationship or people who want a relationship when all you want to do is fuck. And who says that it’s only women who want something ‘deeper’ and only men who want no strings sex? I could just as easily send a ‘cheesy chat up line’ or ‘creepy’ tit picture (I’m not going to) as any guy out there and after using the app for a day all I’m left with is a sinking feeling that everyone is making assumptions about everyone else simply on the basis of their gender. And sorry, Bumble, I don’t really find that very sexy, so I’ll probably deleting the app. Plus, the clock thing really stressed me out.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.