Hinge can neatly compartmentalise our dating lives, to a mere swipe and shop, where we market ourselves as commodities to others; whether we smoke, how educated we are, and most importantly our height. Dating apps have risen within the last decade to become central to how many young people envision, manage, and explore their dating and sex life, and have capitalised on the expansion of the sexual revolution to a new digitalised generation.
While we should celebrate the evolution of sexual freedom and sexual choice which we now all take for granted, the means by which our digitalised generation express this freedom, through dating apps, is far from truly championing sexual liberation.
Hinge relies on the commodification of the individual. We list our attributes like labels of vitamins on fruit juice, reducing ourselves down to unrecognisable versions of ourselves in an attempt to mimic superficial standards we would never knowingly implement in reality. In playing the game of dating apps, we enter a sexual marketplace, not propped up by genuine human connection, but by murky algorithms. Apps like Hinge operate in following and capitalising upon the worst urges and desires among us, where we soullessly only judge on looks, use people only for their bodies and pursue self-validation, almost completely forgetting why we wanted to date in the first place.
In engaging with these dating apps in such a way, already strong social divides are exaggerated. Increasingly dating is conducted through the online marketplace rather than friendship groups which would facilitate relationships themselves. The living legacy of misogyny at Cambridge. I am not calling back for my father to become a matchmaker for a future husband or wife, or for the re-establishment of shame in having premarital sex, rather we should look deeper at the means of liberation. In using dating apps, we completely bypass the true joys of sexual liberation, of exploration.
We restrict ourselves to a practice of sifting and sorting through individuals, and not engaging in communities and spaces which champion true love, freedom, and human connection.
