In May, the dating app Bumble, launched as the feminist in 2014, ran what it called an anti-celibacy advertising campaign. It featured a woman attempting to “swear off dating” and become a nun – only to find herself lusting after a hunky convent gardener. The backlash to the “Bumble fumble” was swift.
Lainey Molnar, a celibacy-forward Instagram personality, the company was “gaslighting women who refuse to participate in hook-up culture”. “It seems like women’s boundaries over our bodily autonomy are so threatening to the entire concept of dating that they need to put up billboards to stop us,” she said. The ads came down and the company apologized.
But the episode outlined a deeper issue: dating apps – those social media businesses that were supposed to improve, preview or supplant all manner of personal human interactions – are in crisis. Shares in Bumble crashed 30% this month after a bad earnings report. Match Group, the Dallas-based owner of Tinder, Match.
com, OkCupid, Hinge and others, has reported a decline in its total number of paying users, for seven straight quarters. , nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative. The same study found that 52% of online daters said they had come across someone they thought was trying to scam them; 57% of women said online dating is not too or not at all safe; and 85% said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interest.