Hook-up culture gets to be a part of everyday life

Hitting up clubs and going home with strangers has never been easier than with Justin Mateen and Sean Rad’s 2012 creation: Tinder. With geolocation technology, you can now hook up with random people from the comfort of your own home—because meeting people in real life is for squares.

Basically, you sign in using Facebook (thereby exposing all your personal profile information, including photos) and are instantly matched with the thousands of people in your area using Tinder. It’s simple, or so I hear. If you think someone is good-looking enough to, put it delicately, meet for coffee and more (minus the meeting for coffee part), you “like” their photo by swiping to the right. If they’re deemed unworthy based on one photo, you swipe to the left. Pretty simple. Rejection has never been faster.

Over 2,000,000 people have signed up for Tinder; most of the app’s users are 25 and under. With so many young people signing up for the app, it’s obvious that Tinder has appealed to our generation’s “hookup culture”.

A good number of students on campus have the app and were all in favour of using it. Henry Yekta, a first-year business major, has used the app since last year. “I think it’s a great way to meet girls without having to deal with all the other stuff,” he said. “I’m too young to get a girlfriend right now, so having casual sex with girls who are okay with the idea is perfect for me right now.” When asked how many girls he’s met so far, he smiled and didn’t answer.

Bianca Abarnikov, a third-year women’s and gender studies major, said that the app is the best way to meet men when you don’t have the time to go out and look for them.

“I can’t always go to a club and find a man [who] wants to go with me,” she said. “So when I meet a man in the app, it’s easier for me. I don’t have to worry about any strings. We just hook up and go about our day.”

Regardless of the personal information being shared through your Facebook page, you can only meet someone through Tinder if there’s a mutual swipe to the right. “That’s what I like about it,” Abarnikov said. “At first, I worried that men would see all my information, but you don’t need to worry about meeting someone you don’t like if you’re not interested in them. It’s a different scene from the club scene. I like not having to tell a guy off to his face. This way, he knows I don’t want to meet him.”

Personally, I wouldn’t download it. I’m not knocking those who have it—with the stress of exams coming up, this is how some people take the edge off. But I couldn’t go through with it.

I once signed up for eHarmony or something similar, and this one guy who lived in my city, without a profile picture, said he wanted to meet me. I thought, “What if he’s crazy?” (He must have been, wanting to meet me.) So I just stopped going on the site, which meant that signing up was a colossal waste of time, given that it takes five years to fill out the interrogation form to create your profile.

I’m also not a fan of the geolocation aspect of the app. You know that guy you meet in a bar who says he’ll “treat you right, baby” after a five-minute conversation? Well, imagine millions of them being able to see where you are at all times. I’ll pass.