Tinder marketing and transnational postfeminist media cultures: “modern” women as single, not sorry?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how Tinder marketing responds to gender politics and discourses within contemporary postfeminist media cultures transnationally. We provide a comparative semiotic analysis of the prominent Tinder advertising campaign Single, Not Sorry, which runs across several European countries, as well as the UK and USA, with marketing material from Tinder India’s YouTube page. Challenging sexist cultural stereotypes and norms of feminine sexual passivity and modesty has a clear economic rationale as a marketing strategy for Tinder. The Tinder marketing media analysed appears to be largely aimed at young women and speaks to postfeminist notions of women’s new sexual freedom in global neoliberal modernity, with Tinder positioning itself as a tool enabling such. Yet, as we illustrate, some key differences emerge across these marketing messages about women’s empowerment and the kind of gender roles and “modern” heterosexual relations made available through Tinder in the European and Indian contexts. The analysis we offer contributes to scholarship on transnational postfeminist media cultures and discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Tinder
• dating apps
• postfeminist
• transnational
• marketing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Curtin Summer Research Scholarships grant.

Notes on contributors

Samuel Morris

Samuel Morris (he/him) completed a Master of Digital and Social Media at Curtin University’s School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry in 2021. His thesis examines the way Tinder’s technology and marketing shapes and contributes to ideals of intimate relationships in the contemporary dating landscape.

Amy Shields Dobson

Amy Shields Dobson (they/them) convenes the Digital and Social Media program at Curtin University, on Whadjuk Boodjar. They are an expert across gender politics, youth, and social media. They lead the Digital Intimacies research stream within Curtin’s Centre for Culture and Technology, and are a Gender Research Champion for Curtin’s Gender Research Network. Amy has published widely on youth sexting, gendered representations in contemporary popular media and digital cultures, and contemporary feminine subjectivities. They are the author of Postfeminist Digital Cultures, and editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media.