Adventures in Online Dating II
There’s been both good and bad developments since my last update on the whole Tinder malarkey, but first…
… some unsolicited advice! The best kind. My favourite kind in fact. I am clearly in no position to lecture people on what they should and should not put on their Tinder profiles, but I cannot help myself from commenting on a snippet of one young lady’s biography that I came across the other day:
If you don’t like the Big Band Theory don’t even bother swiping right.
This sentence physically hurt me to read. I pinched myself, worried that I was thrashing around in my bed, caught in the throes of a nightmare, but alas I was not - the dystopia surrounding me was very real. I wanted to scream but all that came out of my mouth was a canned laugh track.
Okay, now I’ve made my point, let’s get into it.
Firstly, and I am aware that this not exactly a hot take, but the Big Bang is far from the peak of comedy. My (teenage) brother has been a fan for years and as such I have had to sit through pretty much the entirety of the show, and the only joke that has elicited genuine amusement from me is “I don’t care for perchloroethylene, and I don’t like glycol ether”, and frankly if you have the above slogan splashed across your dating profile then I suspect you do not understand it. It’s comedy for the masses, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the equivalent of writing that you love dogs, wine and travelling. Except, rather than just casting the widest net possible, you are cutting off anyone not in the bell of the curve; what kind of generic experiences are you hoping for? How narrow is your vision, how near are your horizons? The incredible thing about people is that they’re all weird and wonderful and unique, not that they all love garbage TV. Why are you so fervent about culling Big Bang naysayers from your romantic prospects anyway? I can understand not wishing to entertain the thought of dating someone with different religious or political views, but if Mr Perfect’s favourite series is Brooklyn Nine Nine, are you really going to throw him in the trash?
This is all talking about the principle, and wholly ignoring that the show is unrepentently misogynistic throughout, to the extent I don’t believe it should have a place in modern television, let alone the praise, viewership and money that it has brought in. The writing is cheap, has no integrity, and perpetuates a multitude of harmful stereotypes about pretty much everyone it portrays in the show, especially women. I may be reluctant to call myself a feminist but if you are going to fight for gender equality by only aligning yourself with people who think portrayals of long-term sexual harrassment are the zenith of our culture, then I’m Emily Davison.
Anyway. The bad news is that it’s pretty easy to blitz through the entirety of Guernsey’s Tinder population, and I have done so with little success. I think the plan is to come back in 6 months time, try to lose some weight, get better pictures, yadda yadda yadda.
The good news, is that little success != zero success. But maybe more on that another time.
Happy swiping, friends.