ABSTRACT
Tinder is a 'location-based real-time dating' smartphone application that 'facilitates local, immediate social or sexual encounters'. Tinder represents itself as dating application, promoting its ability to match users who are seeking romantic/longer-term relationships, as opposed to casual sexual encounters. This chapter demonstrates casual sex between heterosexuals is not a recent innovation, nor is the 'gamification' of dating a purely digital phenomenon. It outlines sexual interactions between unmarried heterosexuals can be variously defined as 'promiscuity', 'free love', 'casual sex' or 'hook-up culture', depending on the ideological and/or disciplinary environment. As the rise of the women's liberation and gay liberation movements provided a political impetus for these shifts, the technological innovation of the contraceptive pill also facilitated a mainstreaming of heterosexual experimentation with sexual pleasure with multiple partners. Given that heterosexual practices have been described via game-playing metaphors for many decades prior to the popular uptake of smartphones, it seems shortsighted to view Tinder's gaming quality as a uniquely modern 'problem'.
