WHEN VANITY FAIR’s Nancy Jo Sales took a look at the Tinder generation for the magazine’s September issue, she didn’t pull any punches.
The article – titled: Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse – painted a picture of millennials more into hook-ups than relationships, with explicit messages sent to total strangers.
That might not come as a surprise, but the experiences recounted by the interviewees made Tinder look like the app’s design enabled people to act like jerks.
One man, Alex, told Sales:
With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”
Sales detailed how intimacy is barely an afterthought for the twenty-somethings who she grilled on their sex lives.
She questioned whether the hookup culture was good for women, showing how some feel it gives females confidence, while others think it leaves women feeling de-valued.
“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt—well, not on the surface.”
So, what did Tinder the company think?
It wasn’t happy. In a series of tweets sent out overnight, the company – or an employee from the company using its verified account – showed how much it rejected what Sales had to say:
The tweets emphasised that Tinder – which is at the forefront of modern dating – wants to do more than just, well, help people hook up:
It also had this exchange with Sales:
Tinder said that its data “tells us the vast majority of Tinder users are looking for meaningful connections” and that “a minority” of its users want to hook up via the app.
It also left this message for the magazine:
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