Tinder’s CEO Has Disappointing Victim-Blamey Dating Tips for Women

On Monday, HBO premiered Swiped, a documentary written and directed by the journalist Nancy Jo Sales, who published a 2015 article in Vanity Fair melodramatically (or perhaps euphemistically) titled, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.’” The piece was, for the most part, a sweeping indictment of Tinder and the entirety of the online dating market. (Tinder, predictably, gyrated with online disapproval. It responded with a 30-tweet rant where, according to TechCrunch, it said: “@VanityFair: Little know fact: sex was invented in 2012 when Tinder was launched.”)

Swiped is a progression of Sales’s Vanity Fair piece. It makes all the same pit stops she made in her original takedown: everyone hates Tinder, Tinder has disrupted love, Tinder has redefined intimacy, etcetera. It even tries (and, admittedly, fails) to address the unique experience of how queer people and people of colour navigate online dating spaces.

And most notably, Swiped advises women on how not to get sexually or physically assaulted while dating, with just six easy steps.

Near the end of the doc, we’re introduced to Mandy Ginsberg, the first female CEO, as of 2018, of IAC’s Match Group—the media and internet holding company which owns OkCupid, BlackPeopleMeet, Match, and Tinder, among other dating apps.

Here, the documentary moves to more serious topics: particularly, how dating apps have complicated the safety of dating, the responsibility they have in the #MeToo era, and the threat of physical danger that has expanded since their popularization. When asked how she plans on “protect[ing], listen[ing], and creat[ing] products that are relevant to women,” Ginsberg has a rather sad response.

“Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of things we need to do… We have safety tips. First of all, it’s really important that women don’t meet people… they never go to someone’s house, they meet in a public place, they don’t drink, they let someone know where they’re going… they take precaution, they let a person know that they’re on a date with someone else, they never go into someone’s car… so there’s a number of safety tips that we provide for people, and I just think that people have to just take real precaution,” Ginsberg says.

So here are the steps to not being attacked whilst on a Tinder date, courtesy of the Tinder CEO:

• Don’t meet people (Just don’t go out, ever. Stay home. It’s safer.)
• Don’t go to someone’s house (It’s probably booby trapped.)
• Meet in a public place (This one is probably fair.)
• Don’t drink (Find another way to get through your dreadful date.)
• Tell someone when you’re on a date (This one is also probably fine.)
• Never go into someone’s car (Walk! Burn those calories.)

Interestingly enough, nothing in Ginsberg’s makeshift guide to staying safe while dating directs any particular direction—not even a simple “Don’t hurt women”—to men on the other side of the date. The guidelines are all a sort of gentle contract for women (if you’re a woman using this app, just do all these things, or don’t do all these other things, and you’ll be just fine) that fail to really address the people they implicitly fear. Better tips will probably be found on Twitter, or on Tinder’s official “Dating Safely” webpage, which is a more carefully curated list.

But there’s always the safest alternative: just don’t meet anyone, ever.

Follow Connor Garel on Twitter.

Sign up for the VICE Canada Newsletter to get the best of VICE Canada delivered to your inbox.