Jamie F
What’s more important when it comes to dating: your height, salary, or the temperament of your Labrador?
Niche dating apps for pet-obsessed singles have bounded into action recently, as has a new food-based dating app that lets you suggest your perfect dinner date, right down to deciding who pays the bill.
There’s been less fun news in the form of an Indian dating app that took a turn for the illegal, and US right wing media clocking on to dating apps being covered in Harvard courses.
OK, let’s get into all this now.
Pet-based dating apps unleashed
There’s a dating app for every niche, and pet ownership is a heck of a large niche, so expectations are high for a new app where you check out potential matches’ furry friends before checking out their human assets.
Petmeet may sound like the name of a dog food wholesaler, but it is in fact a Tinder-like app allowing you to check out people “through the lens of their relationship with their fur baby”. That means looking at photos of their dog or cat, reading stories about the pets’ lives, and swiping right if the information gets your tail wagging.
From there, you can get tips about pet-friendly dates for your ‘real life’ meet-up.
It’s basically Tinder for pet obsessives, but considering how obsessive people can indeed get over their furry companions, it has potential.
Others seem to agree. Offleash’d, another pet-based dating app, is currently seeking funding to open offices in Seattle and Los Angeles. An earlier forerunner in this niche, TabbyDates, has since closed down.
Let’s go for dinner! You’re paying
If you’re more into sausages than sausage dogs, new dating app DineMe will probably be more your bag. It launched this month, based around the concept of constructing the perfect food date then putting it out there to see who likes the sound of it.
You can choose a location, date and time, food and drink, topics to discuss, and who should pay the bill or whether you split it. People you’ve connected with on the app can show interest in joining the date, which can then be set up and is described by the app as a ‘dine’.
It’s a quirky idea, and might come with the added bonus of cracking down on freeloaders trawling dating apps to get free expensive meals from people they have no intention of seeing more than once.
The app not letting you list your sexuality, dating intentions, work and physical attributes like height, so there is a risk that some dates might be more exploratorary than they would be through other dating apps. But if both matches agree that they really really love sushi or whatnot, maybe that’s enough to kick things off.
Dateability co-founder reveals discrimination inspiration
The co-founder of Dateability, a dating app for disabled people launched in 2022, has spoken about the discrimination she received as a disabled person in the dating pool before the launch of her own app.
Jacqueline Child told Business Insider that she had been disabled since she was 14, and by the age of 29 had over 40 surgeries. She said that on one date her match told her it would be “selfish” for her to have children before finding out if her disability was genetic.
“We need to get more comfortable talking about the disabled experience as a whole, but particularly when it comes to dating and romance,” she said. “People with disabilities want to date and have casual sex, and they deserve access to those needs like everyone else.”
Dateability has over 11,000 users so far, which is pretty good going for an indie niche dating app that only launched in 2022.
Bangalore dating app takes dark turn
Individual sex workers using dating apps to try and drum up business, in violation of app rules, is nothing new. A dating app becoming a platform designed to facilitate sex work is a less common occurrence.
That’s essentially the story of Bangalore Dating Club: an Indian dating app that, according to The Economic Times, “evolved into a hub for illegal activities”. Police have reportedly arrested two of the developers and engineers behind the app, and rescued several women from alleged sex trafficking situations in Bangalore, in relation to the app.
The two arrested app workers allegedly met as users on the app, then turned it into a digital den of vice. They launched a ‘VIP room’ service that allowed users to be linked to sex workers in the city.
It seems that one of the app-makers, a software testing engineer, had allegedly been involved in prostitution rackets before getting involved in Bangalore Dating Club, which will presumably be processing more thorough checks on incoming business proposals from such individuals (or, more likely, will be shut down completely).
Fox News goes for Harvard’s sextech-related courses
Fox News has taken a critical look at the content of various Harvard University courses, picking out content related to LGBTQ+ issues, queerness in video games and online dating.
The right wing media outlet suggested that rather than focusing on issues like these, American patriotism should be more prominent. It’s the usual ‘manufactured outrage at modern progressive topics young people are actually engaging with’ stuff, but it’s interesting to see which sextech-related topics the outlet pulled out for scrutiny.
A Harvard course named Online Dating and the Transformation of Intimacy, that discusses “gay men that like beards”, was highlighted. As was a course called Video Game Storytelling, that looked at “an explicitly queer video game with an explicitly queer narrative”.
Fox News went on to carefully explain that courses like these were not necessarily dominating syllabuses, and that when looked at in context actually… sorry, no, it didn’t, it just made a load of bluster about how students should be metaphorically saluting the US flag more often instead of swotting up on this stuff.
