For the past few months I’ve been seeing these ads for the dating app Hinge in the subway; perhaps you have also been seeing them during your own public transportation trips, or on billboards when you drive to and from wherever it is you go. I don’t know how widespread the campaign is, or how many people have viewed it, but what I do know is:
It is a Q&A series titled “Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions”
and
Literally every question has to do with some experience related to being LGBTQIA+.
It took me a while to piece together that last bit. I mean, by definition I had to see at least three of these ads before it started to feel like a trend. (I could have figured it out more quickly if I had gone to the website advertised in the ad campaign and seen all the questions at once, but let’s be serious, I didn’t care that much about these questions or Hinge itself.) But first I saw a question about femme for femme queers not knowing when they’re being hit on, and then today I saw one about a bi man who’s unsure when he should tell a female date that he’s bi (which, yes, is what made me decide to take on this topic for this newsletter), and then I saw one about whether you should just they/them someone if they don’t list their pronouns in their profile. And then I was like, “Oh. Wait. These are all about being queer?”
So first off I just have to say that it feels kind of… like a microaggression (are we still talking about micro aggressions or did that stop when Obama left office?) to call a Q&A series about dating while queer “Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions.” Like, hello, what the fuck. If you are queer, these are questions you ask very frequently!! When I first saw the ad about femmes not knowing how to hit on other femmes I was just… this is a convo I am constantly having with other femme for femme queers, this is basically the most frequently asked question you get from femmes who want to date femmes.
And on the one hand, yes, these are probably questions that aren’t asked super frequently among Hinge’s predominantly straight user base, but if the goal of this ad campaign is to encourage LGBTQIA+ to use Hinge — and truly, what else would be the purpose of running this ad campaign — then why on earth is it leading with, “Hello, you are a freakish minority and normals don’t ask these questions”? Like truly, what the fuck.
Anyway all I can think now is, “Well Hinge is clearly for straight people so no thank you,” which… is the exact opposite intent of the ad campaign, I’m pretty sure?
But. Okay. This is not actually a newsletter about dating apps doing a bad job at marketing to me, a potential queer user. I mean, not entirely. And as I gestured to above, the actual reason why I wanted to talk about Hinge and this bizarre ad campaign today was because of the question I saw while waiting for the subway home from my pre-Pesach trip to buy super strong chrain for my seder on Wednesday. The question about the bi male dater.
(Okay one more complaint: I fucking hate the website for this campaign; it can’t be a Flash site because no one uses Flash anymore, but it has the feel of a Flash site from twenty years ago, which is to say there are no individual pages so you can’t link directly to any pages and you also can’t copy any of the text? It’s so bad, it’s killing me, we have escalated from microaggression to macroaggression, this campaign is an actual hate crime as far as I’m concerned.)
The question — which I would recreate here in full, or link to, if the website let me copy-paste or link to a question directly like a normal fucking website — asks for tips as to when, as a man, you should disclose to a woman you’ve just started dating that you’re bi. There are a couple of interesting things that jump out right from the get go to me, I have to say: the fact that this is not simply “when do I tell a potential partner of any gender that I am bi?” but specifically “when do I tell a woman who might think that I am straight that I am bi?” is fascinating to me. As a bi woman, there is a certain fraughtness to telling any potential partner of any gender that I am bi — with men, there is the fear that I might be immediately pushed into the slut silo; with women, the fear that I will be viewed as a disgusting vector of heterosexuality. Non-binary people are always harder to generalize about by virtue of being non-binary and thus inherently uncategorizable but still, there is just always a fear that people will decide that the fact that I’m bi means that I am bad.
But I guess for men there is a bigger fear on the straight side than the queer side? I suppose the biggest issue that comes up when you tell a man you’re interested in that you’re bi, not gay, is that he will assume you’re just anxious about fully coming out of the closet; a different situation than the presumed outright rejection you might get from a straight woman who can only hear “bi” as “gay,” regardless of how into her you clearly are.
Hinge, for the record, does not open that crate of worms. It punts the question to Grant Knoche, a person I have never heard of but automatically hate by virtue of the fact that he has released an album titled Intrusive Thoughts (as a person with OCD, this is basically like seeing that someone released an album called Suicidal Ideation. My pain is not your edgy joke, assholes.).
I keep digressing.
Anyway, horribly titled album aside: Grant’s answer is… fine? He opens with a paragraph about how people have a lot of misconceptions about being bi, and then tosses in this confounding line which would maybe make more sense if I knew anything about Grant aside from that he gave a terrible title to his album:
Even casual questions like which girl I think is the hottest on a show remind me being bisexual isn’t something everyone “gets” right away.
(Does Grant’s bisexuality not include attraction to women? Are bisexuals not allowed to choose which girl they think is hottest? I don’t understand what he’s saying!)
From there it… just sort of refuses to give any real advice, just kinda noting that if you’re not okay with being upfront you can probably wait a few dates, but not longer than that, because then you’re making too big a deal of it, I guess. Grant, himself, notes that he prefers to be upfront and just put his bisexuality on his profile from the jump, which, honestly, I assumed we all did because like, isn’t that the whole point of being on a site like Hinge? Leading with your potential dealbreakers?
But here’s the absolute weirdest part of the answer, friends. It ends with:
I’m still fairly new to dating, and I’m still figuring things out. But one thing I do know? Everyone has their own journey and knows what works best for them. Trust your gut!
What is happening. Why is the question about dating as a bisexual being punted to someone who, by his own admission, does not have much experience doing that very thing? Someone who, as far as I can tell, isn’t even professionally qualified to be answering questions about dating?
This whole email has been a little frenetic and roundabout, I know, but I think the real point of all of this is, holy hell, what a missed opportunity. There was an actual opportunity to make an ad campaign for queer daters that substantively wrestled with questions we deal with, that made a real attempt to make queers and, in this case, bisexuals feel seen and like their questions — our questions — are worth grappling with in a real and thoughtful way. But instead we get… a really bad website and a random dude offering a half-baked analysis of dating as a bi man.
In conclusion, Hinge is an app for straight people.
Hi Lux...I read through the Hinge/when does a bi male tell a straight woman that he is dating that he's bi article and shit, had a few thoughts. First, most discussions about dating while bi, male or female, are almost exclusively focused on the under-50 demo. I'm 63, single and would LOVE to be sexually active. Not happening. Which leads me to my Second point: Since I was about 30, listing on most any dating platform that I am a bi male was an absolute KISS OF DEATH. If I had even a modicum of interested women when I designated my sexuality as heterosexual, when I listed that I was bi (because sometimes it felt important for MYSELF as well as potential partners to let people know I was bi), NOT ONE HIT from a woman. NOT ONE. EVER. I had several long-term relationships with women who knew I was bi well after we had been dating a bit, but the main problem with dating this way is that it's very risky. You think women dislike finding out that a man is married or lied about his age is creates a bit of animosity, try revealing that you're bi after one or two dates. And so, in trying to honest with myself—and others—about who I am, I have been up front in my profile about my sexuality. And again, NOT ONE INTERESTED woman. So, unless I give up this pursuit altogether, which I have done for periods of time, I think I'm going back to listing as hetero and deciding when the right time is to reveal "the truth". Ugh. Thanks Lux, for allowing me to whine...again! I hope someone else gets something out of this messy business of being a fluid, changing human with desires.
I guess Hinge thinks it can one-up OkCupid?
Anywho. I've been seeing these ads *everywhere* now and something about them rubbed me the wrong way, and I think this may be why.