It is very informative to make a an online dating profile of the opposite gender. I'm a man, but when I made an account on tinder with a female friend's pictures I was blown away by just how radically different the experience was.
Almost every person would match with me. Everyone would message me straight away. If I didn't reply most would message again in a few hours. I think Tinder is a real stroke of genius. All users, men and women, get given the same interface and the same choices. But of course things are not really equal. Men shotgun and women pick and choose. Tinder has essentially made Bumble, but they have plausible deniability.
No need to enforce any rules about women messaging first when that emerges naturally. The real genius of Tinder was giving women the power. We came to the same realization as well: that no matter how bad you make the user experience for men, they will use the app endlessly if real women are there. Online dating business models are exclusively based around enticing men with sex, and giving women the power to choose precisely who they want.
Why would they try to find a date in any other way? There were a few articles that came out a few years ago arguing that, no, dating apps were terrible for women because it makes men even more noncommittal with such easy access to dates.
My hypothesis was that the women they interviewed for those pieces were all going after the same small group of elite men. Makes me wonder if polygamy is the natural course of things. This says everything about power. Having said that, bear in mind that this kind of power is only a arguably small part of relationships between the sexes. It says a lot, but it's still a small part. Because the dating medium strongly correlates with the interest of the people involved.
