Jennie Young is a professor of rhetoric and women-and-gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. I thought I knew what to expect when I downloaded my first dating app. I was 50, had been divorced for 10 years, and had just gotten out of a long-term relationship. As someone who's generally tuned in to pop culture and social media, I thought I was prepared for what I would encounter.
And, in some ways, I was. What I wasn't prepared for was the size or extent of the problem women were facing while looking for love online. There weren't just a few men acting badly whom I could quickly dispatch. It was the magnitude of the toxicity. There were a lot of bad actors, and the behavior wasn't just annoying; it was deeply problematic. It seemed that swiping left didn't make a difference; they'd just show up in my matches again a few days later. My frustration wasn't unique. I went from Match to Bumble to Tinder to Hinge and encountered the same problems ad infinitum.
I felt frustrated and quickly realized it wasn't just me. After a few months, I decided to make it an academic project. I'm a professor of rhetoric and women-and-gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
An understanding of rhetoric allows me to quickly parse text and read between the lines to determine what people are revealing without intending to, and a solid grounding in feminism helps me recognize the sometimes subtle flags of sexism and aggression that women encounter frequently on dating apps.
My method encourages daters to filter out time wasters and red flags as soon as possible. As of November 13, there were more than , women and nonbinary people in my private Facebook group and 60, followers on Instagram. I chose to share the method on social media because it's free. Accessibility was important to me from the beginning; I didn't want to monetize the information by keeping it behind a paywall, and I didn't want to charge women for consultation or "coaching.
