“The game’s called Barbie, I’ll be Ken and you be the box I come in?”: Unwanted interactions on Tinder

Rosalie Gillett

·

Follow

·

Aug 7, 2017

4 min read

—

It’s Saturday afternoon and you’ve decided to check out the local singles. By this I mean, browse a bunch of profiles on Tinder. After swiping left to Tinder’s undesirable offerings, you find a good-looking man and decide to swipe right on his profile. You then eagerly wait for him to swipe right on your profile to create a ‘match’. Suddenly, a love heart appears on your screen to signify his interest in you. Soon after, you receive a message from the man. It reads, “The game’s called Barbie, I’ll be Ken and you be the box I come in?”

Unmatch.

Sadly, this experience is common for female Tinder users. A United States based survey has shed some light on the problem. Of the 2,252 adult women and men surveyed, 28 percent of online daters and dating app users had felt uncomfortable or harassed by someone who had contacted them through a dating website or app. While we don’t know a lot about this in Australia, we do know that between 48 and 87 percent of women have experienced a form of sexual harassment in their lifetime, and approximately 13–23 percent of women have experienced some form of violence by a current or former partner.

Social media pages have positioned men’s inappropriate behaviour on Tinder as harmless and humorous. For instance, the Tinder Nightmares Instagram page and accompanying book display over one thousand harassing and abusive messages sent between users on the app. One message reads, “[i]f I was a watermelon, would you spit or swallow my seed?” Although this message and many others on the page could be defined as sexual harassment, Tinder Nightmares founder Elan Gale claimed, “[i]f I don’t find something funny I won’t post it” (Parkinson 2015).

As well as men sending unwanted and intrusive messages via the app, female Tinder users continue to report that men have sent them ‘dick pics’ and sexually explicit or violent gifs and videos through the app (see, for example, Chen 2017; Ingram 2017). Posting these messages to a popular Instagram page boasting over 1.8 million followers and receiving thousands of ‘likes’ might suggest that the public don’t consider harassing and abusive messages sent on the app to be serious.

Men’s inappropriate messages on Tinder may also be considered a form of flattery. From a young age, girls are told that seemingly flirtatious yet harassing behaviour is desirable. These experiences are justified through the refrain, “he does it because he likes you”. This pervasive idea normalises the belief that boys and men’s hurtful behaviour is, in fact, a form of non-threatening and desirable communication. A lens of humour or flattery trivialises women’s experiences and normalises men’s inappropriate behaviour.

It is only when popular media focus on extreme forms of violence that men’s acts are disconnected from ‘normal’ male behaviour. For instance, in an act of serious physical violence, Paul Lambert stabbed Angela Jay after their brief relationship initiated via Tinder ended. While this incident depicts a serious form of violence, the media labeled Lambert as an ‘abnormal’ man. Journalists described Lambert as a ‘psychopath’ and ‘sadistic Tinder stalker’, which disconnected his behaviour from that of a ‘normal’ man.

With this characterisation, the men who engage in seemingly ‘less serious’ harassing and abusive behaviours are depicted as ordinary. This means that men’s aggression can easily affect and permeate their intimate relationships.

So why should you care?

Well, everyday experiences of abuse in the context of dating may contribute to a culture that supports abuse and ultimately violence against women. As Bye Felipe, founder Alexandra Tweten explains,

“[t]he cultural atmosphere that says it’s okay for hundreds of men to catcall any woman in a public space is part of a continuum of misogyny that drives men to brutally injure women…”

My PhD research seeks to better understand women’s unwanted interactions on Tinder. If you live in Brisbane and would like to share your experiences, I’ll be interviewing approximately 20 women who have experienced unwanted interactions on the app.

My research will help us understand the nature and impact of unwanted interactions and how to better prevent or respond to them. To keep up-to-date with my findings and to learn more about participating in an interview, watch this space.

So, instead of playing ‘Barbie’, Let’s swipe left to men’s inappropriate behaviour.