A battle pitting feminists and media against online dating app behemoth Match Group flared up last week when one of Match’s properties, the app Tinder, admitted candidly there are registered sex offenders using their service.
Well, duh. Tinder, with 5.2 million active users, doesn’t perform background checks, nor should they. Of the 45 online dating brands owned by Match Group, including PlentyOfFish and OkCupid, only one, Match, a paid service, does. But activists screamed for the Dallas-based company to take action to better protect women. They demanded background checks on all users (they mean only men), instituting a verification system for people’s identities, flagging registered sex offenders, the right for victims to sue dating apps if they’re assaulted, and for federal regulation to implement all of this.
Most people would agree these apps must do everything in their power to purge convicted rapists from being able to meet and prey on women. But scratch just beneath the surface and the reality of the feminist demands reveal a more frightening objective — as they usually do — and the issue taps at the core of some of our greatest fears about the technological dystopian future we are careening towards and the age-old conflict of visions whether to empower the village or the individual.
The statement from Tinder appeared in a sprawling report published by ProPublica documenting 157 alleged sexual assaults over several years facilitated using online dating apps in which the perpetrator was already a registered sex offender. But even then, a team of reporters struggled to find cases that actually led to arrests and convictions, or even women who went to the police after their supposed assault instead of merely reporting the user to the app.
Already starting to sound suspicious? Put into perspective, of the tens of millions of real-life interactions born from meeting on a dating app, 157 over many years is an astonishingly small number. And ProPublica was only able to find one case of definitive rape by an already registered sex offender that ended in a prosecution and prison sentence. Perhaps there’s a simple explanation for this: why would a rapist hand his identity and photos over to authorities by selecting his victims on a dating app?
These tech companies certainly have far more information about their users than they’d like disclosed and most likely have infrastructure in place to identify registered sex offenders. Even hiring outside companies to do background checks on users would only make a small dent in the $1.7 billion of Match Group’s revenue. But Match Group is right to resist labeling sex offenders. Not only is the likelihood of negligence tremendous, with the wrong John Doe of Tucson being labeled a child rapist, but someone will always slip through the cracks or be able to create fake identities. If apps boasted about background checks, the false sense of security has the potential to lead women into more dangerous situations than they’d usually agree to.
Then there’s first time offenders. If there’s one thing we’ve learned as a society, it’s never bow to feminist demands, which are often irrational, insatiable, and preoccupied with dominance and destruction over safety and well-being. If Match Group cedes to the feminists, the next gripe from emboldened activists will, undoubtably, be demands that dating apps figure out algorithms to detect would-be rapists or those with a perceived capacity to commit sexual assault. And what might this involve? Scouring Twitter rants, misogynistic jokes on Facebook, credit card purchases, dating history, magazine subscriptions, and porn-viewing habits to create a Good Man Score? This is life in China already and exactly what all the great science fiction writers of the 20th century warned us about. It is the slippery slope of the collectivist mentality and present in battles as seemingly innocuous as what happens on online dating apps.
Never mind that with already registered sex offenders, a huge number of them are just guys who whipped their willies out in public to take a leak. Should they be banned from finding love? Feminists would probably say yes. But the ProPublica report, which was compiled by Columbia Journalism Investigations, spread across mainstream media — from GQ, MTV, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and People — with none of our nation’s intrepid journalists pausing to realize the investigation was nothing but fear-mongering nonsense and a push for federal regulations over an entire industry.
There are no national statistics on dating apps and sexual assault, so CJI journalists decided they’d take a whack at it and conducted their own survey of 1,200 dating app users. The results were so unbelievable as to be laugh-out-loud funny. According to the admittedly ‘unscientific’ poll, one third of respondents said they’d been sexually assaulted by someone they met on a dating app. CJI journalists were further scandalized to learn apps like Tinder took no action when some women reported another user for sexual assault. Good. Without a police report, Tinder shouldn’t take any action. Apparently at least someone at Match Group appears privy to a scorned woman’s capacity for lies and vengeance and that, depending on a person’s fragility, sexual assault can mean anything from a lewd look, aggressive posturing, or an unwanted slap on the ass, as the CJI survey, if accurate, so clearly indicates. Feminists activists would, of course, want all those behaviors flagged for eternity and seared onto a man’s datability score.
That’s the moment you realize this report has nothing to do with protecting women and everything to do with control freaks and busybodies seeking to implement systems management protocols into every aspect of our daily lives. While the rest of Silicon Valley plows ahead with election meddling, social engineering, and thought-policing, dating apps — the digital spaces where the risk of encountering real life violence is highest — may be trailblazers in enforcing the very conservative value of individual responsibility.
The dating app debate gets at the core of the absurd amount of infrastructure and potential for tyranny involved when people seek to build utopias through algorithms and dictate responsibility to outside forces. But users doing their own background checks, scanning sex offender registries, employing good judgment and, God forbid, purchasing a firearm and getting trained to use it, is the only solution. Match Group may be the only instance of a tech company, with its own survival at stake, being forced onto the side of conservative values.
A dating app called True, which folded in 2013, took a novel approach to weeding out sex offenders. ‘If you are a felon, sex offender, or married DO NOT use our website,’ the terms of service stated. If someone was caught lying about felon, sex offender, or marriage status the company took the user to court and sued them, usually settling. Instead of collecting more personal data and working hand-in-hand with the court system, as a feminist I debated on RT recently about this issue suggested, Match Group getting litigious against sex offenders who try to sneak on seems a much more reasonable and effective deterrent. After all, who wants to take the risk of being dragged into court by Love, Inc?
But, really, the best prescription is to get off these apps entirely. Put down the phone and go meet a nice man at church, ladies. Not only are dating apps increasingly morbid hellscapes reducing human beings to disposable bits of data, often bringing out the worst aspects in our reptilian brains, but the homosexual-style hook-up culture they’ve fostered in our womenfolk is doing irreparable damage to women’s psyches, sexual market value, and society at large. Find me one professional Tinderella who is remotely happy with her life, despite what she wants you to believe. And if the conversations I have with my guy friends are any indication, men, too, are increasingly dejected and disillusioned by the online dating world, which at first was a boon for getting the milk for free but now many are realizing the culture has turned women into nasty, flippant pigs. The behavior is genuinely perplexing to some of the nicest, most attractive guys I know who always confide in me the same observation: it seems like overnight, every woman in the world suddenly became a cold, distracted monster.
That’s because my guy friends have forgotten, or never learned, how to pick up women in real life and the sample they’re encountering on dating apps are often victims of feminist brainwashing and adherents to the lies of sexual liberation, especially if you live in a matriarchal society like Manhattan.
A current debate about banning porn is being waged online. While the Trump movement liberated the right from moral authoritarianism, I predicted it would eventually rear its ugly head again, albeit not this quickly. The Catholic morality of the groyper movement is another example of this. For an America First movement seeking to preserve the founding principles, cultures, and demographics of our nation, I wonder why no one ever reminds them that Catholics were late-coming interlopers, and this nation was founded by various Protestant sects. Still, banning is never the answer, as you’d hope conservatives would realize by now, but the sentiment behind anti-porn and anti-fap movements I certainly agree with — teaching men to get offline and out into the world to meet women in real life. Ban all the porn you want, but dating apps are the real reason they no longer have that skill or desire.
