You would think that the advent of dating apps — So modern! So new! So egalitarian! — would have changed something in modern dating. You would hope it would have levelled the playing field, undone years of sexist stereotypes, addressed the unfair precedent in heterosexual relationships which prioritises extreme female youth and inexperience to a problematic degree. But, my friends! It hasn’t! Officially!
In fact, it’s worse than ever. When it comes to straight dating at least, men’s popularity on dating apps peaks at 50, while women experience the same popularity peak at just 18, according to a new report from The New York Times. Researchers tracked 200,000 users on an anonymous, popular dating app for a month and tracked the amount of messages they received, using this data to determine when the peaks of sexual desirability hit. For women, it was when they were barely out of childhood — the study found that the peak of their sexual desirability came at 18 and “falls from there”. Buzzing, gals.
“The age gradient for women definitely surprised us”, says study author Elizabeth Bruch from the University of Michigan, who has clearly never plunged the depths of south London Tinder on a Sunday night. “Both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was.”
The study attributed the steep decline in the attractiveness of adult women down to a persisting ‘caveman mentality’ on dating apps, wherein extreme youth suggests fertility, and in turn attractiveness. But whether it has evolutionary backing or not, the findings are depressing to say the least. Especially when coupled with the finding that straight men on Tinder, Bumble and the like are less interested in highly-educated women. The study found that anything more than an undergraduate degree made women “less attractive” to straight men on the apps, while for well-educated men, the inverse was in fact true.
It’s true that, slowly but surely, the companies behind our most popular dating apps are adjusting to a changing world and a new, modern way of finding love. In 2016, Tinder finally aligned itself with a generation that increasingly lives outside of traditional, binary gender norms, adding 37 new gender identity options to the app, while Grindr have planned an upcoming rebrand to Kindr in an attempt to tackle discrimination on the app, especially against queer POC. But clearly heterosexual dating has a long way to go before the people using these apps drag themselves out of the 1950s.
Love to be a woman online!