ABSTRACT
Branded as the world’s first feminist dating app, Bumble is the only heterosexual platform where women make the first move and male users must wait to be chosen. Does Bumble deliver on its promise to empower women and help them take charge of their romantic lives? I explore these compelling questions using autoethnographic insights from my experiences on the app alongside my insights as an ethnographer with expertise in the fields of sexuality and digital subjectivity. My findings reveal that using Bumble rarely garners successful dating experiences and it creates additional dating labours for women while emasculating men. Far from a recipe for female empowerment, the app exacerbates pre-existing dating inequities and fails as a feminist platform. Detailed excerpts of my dating encounters and observational data about the socio-material and technological factors that inform the marketing of the app are used to illuminate what I call the ‘Bumble paradox’. The ways in which these timely findings enrich current research into dating apps, sexuality, and gender in the 21st century are also discussed.
