Skip navigation! It's happened to the best of us. You're innocently perusing the options on your dating app of choice, when you spot a friend, colleague or, worse depending on your current mindset , an ex.
It's an awkward scenario with the potential to change how you present yourself to eligible partners online. Who wants their boss seeing their latest thirst trap selfie? But one new app claims to have removed this problem. Pickable , which launched in the UK last week, lets women be totally anonymous β no name, no photo, no bio, and they don't even need to create a profile β while browsing through men's profiles. Men can't browse through women β all they have to do is wait for women to contact them, and it's only then that he sees a photo of the woman and can accept or deny her chat request.
If he accepts, either party can then initiate the conversation. There's no shortage of "female-friendly" apps and features that "give women more control" in the heterosexual dating arena. Hinge only enables matching with friends of friends, reducing the likelihood of matching with creepy men, Tinder lets women "throw" virtual drinks over inappropriate men, and Bumble, famously, only allows women to make the first move.
But Pickable claims to be the first to put women in control of who sees them in the online dating pool. The app has over k users worldwide, of whom more than 30k are in the UK. Removing the requirement for a profile or a picture on Pickable gives women, who were otherwise unable or unwilling to date online, a broader platform through which to meet someone. Goldstein describes the control conferred upon female users as important, "especially in the era of the MeToo movement, where women are finally speaking up about what makes them uncomfortable β and having an entire universe of men on other apps who are able to see their face, name, age and job, makes many women uncomfortable.
Indeed, anecdotally, the risk of having their profile spotted by people they know does put many women off using existing dating apps. Imogen, 26, who recently found a boyfriend after reluctantly using Tinder and previously using Bumble, was constantly embarrassed at the prospect of colleagues seeing her profile. Dating apps may be ubiquitous, but she believes there's still a stigma attached to them because of their association with "desperation" and casual hookups rather than relationships, and that the stigma is worse for women.
