Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
As an aside, Mateen exhibits the textbook Madonna-whore dichotomy. To him, women are either someone he can see being a wife (Wolfe pre-breakup), or a whore/bimbo/slut (the women on his Instagram feed). When she rejected him, in classic fashion she went from the former bucket to the latter. This is a case study for a gender-studies paper.
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tinderslut
Isn't the point of the app to enable promiscuity. "Slut" is a word for a promiscuous woman, sometimes used for a prostitute, sometimes used of men (in UK at least). Surely they viewed the women who use the app as wanting to have free and easy sexual encounters, ie behave like sluts?
When the slang that associated their app with the actions of those using it, viz "tinderslut", was popularised were they not justified to consider that an achievement - the app was clearly notorious for enabling promiscuous behaviour, exactly the behaviour it was designed for.
There seems little controversial in them calling active users of their app sluts (men or women).
For me there is much to hate about the app morally but it seems rather silly to get upset that the designers of the app that people use to seek out promiscuous sex consider their users to be in to promiscuous sex?!
Calling Tinder user "sluts" is no more appropriate than calling my Chinese users "chinks", or my gay users "faggots".
It seems intentionally obtuse to pretend that the term doesn't have a gigantic truckload of derogatory connotations behind it.
I can't speak for the whole world, but in North America at least I've never seen the word "slut" used in everyday speech that wasn't intended to be derogatory.
Side note: "purely because it was considered bad 60 years ago for a woman to be promiscuous"
I don't think that's 60 years ago, I'm pretty sure that's still today. Maybe not as bad, but the general perception of promiscuous women is still deeply negative.
And why do you think that is? Maybe because it is intrinsically a bad thing to do. For civilization as we know it at least.
Better outcomes for children from 2 parent households have been established through scientific investigation.[1]
Why do you think a virgin bride is such a prized thing throughout cultures and ages?
Greater numbers of premarital sexual partners are associated with higher rates of divorce.[2]
It is kind of crazy how in a certain segment of the population's rush to rectify past wrongs they overlook the fact that maybe some things were as they were for sound reasons. You can even surmise that if there is any genetic component to the typical monogamous relationships of human societies then men have a genetically encoded aversion to sluts when seeking a mother for their children.
The normalization of sluttiness is always going to be a losing battle if our civilization is to survive and thrive.
What exactly is the improvement feminists think they are after by trying to normalize sluttiness?
So we've seen, on average two parent households produce "better" children, better children produce better societies, and a higher sexual partner count for a woman prior to marriage produces a higher incidence of divorce.
Anyone care to articulate any reasons why promoting sluttiness is beneficial for the future of humanity?
[1] "Children from two-parent families are better off emotionally, socially and economically"
http://archive.azcentral.com/families/articles/0913marriageh...
"divorce tends to double a child’s risk of a serious negative outcome."
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/singl...
[2] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_R-WhB9g9eYk/TJDSr8V_ShI/AAAAAAAAAO...
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-d...
And two articles from a site with 'hooking up' in the url.
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2013/01/22/hookinguprealities/...
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2010/01/29/hookinguprealities/...
I await the opportunity to learn something new.
Imagine you wanted to discuss, as objectively as possible, the role of clothing in relation to sexuality, and the different perspectives people have on that. It's quite possible that people would not downvote you for expressing that you think that, generally speaking, there's something to be said for modesty in clothing (unless of course it'd be just about women dressing down). Even if they disagreed.
But imagine posting that opinion in the context of a post on rape and sexual abuse. It would immediately be linked to the surprisingly and unfortunately wide-spread view that 'those women were asking for it by dressing like a slut'. Regardless of whether your points have merit or should be accepted, the context makes it unacceptable and, quite frankly, a bit suspect.
How is being promiscuous bad? You've just talked about how it's bad for children to go through a divorce. Or are we talking about slutty children? What about male sluts? In fact who is talking about marriage at all?
Sounds like you have a preconceived notion and then try and justify it.
Shame ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/search/query?keys=shame&x=0&y...
I don't see what that has to do with anything, but _I_ would call a promiscuous person "promiscuous". AFAIK not all users of Tinder are using it to be promiscuous.
In slang terms I'd imagine "tinderslut" being applied to men and women. Certainly as many women (more?) use it as a hashtag on twitter, https://twitter.com/hashtag/tinderslut, but I think they're using it for women - didn't analyse the results beyond noting as many women appeared to be using it in the results returned to me. The usage seems to be more liberal than referring to promiscuity, rather there's a general sense of unacceptable flirting being indicated in the term, I'd say. Others will have far more knowledge of it I'm sure.
The blogspot user who titles herself "tinderwhore" refers to male users as "tinderbros".
I think it is sometimes, maybe, possible to use this kind of term in a way that communicates a positive "no apologies" attitude. However, I think a speaker has to go to some lengths if this use is going to be convincing. Especially, it's a lot easier for people denigrated by a term to convincingly use it in a way that show non-derogatory attitude - contrast a ghetto black person using the N word versus a middle class Southern white person using the same word.
And there is a double standard in the US, where only a promiscuous woman gets called a slut. Someone might turn that around but that person would to do a lot of work to show they were sincere.
If Rad had just forced his friend Mateen to resign earlier on for "creative differences" before his behavior got out of hand, everyone -- including Mateen! -- would have been strictly better off.
And this definitely isn't the first time that this has happened (Rap Genius, and I'm sure there are others too...)
TL;DR: Do your sexist, racist friends a favor by getting them out of your workplace.
(By the way, to be clear, I don't feel bad for any of these guys. They deserved what happened. But this sort of thing really shouldn't be happening again, and again, and again...)
While the dude's clearly a jerk, his first startup sounds like it died a death that was out of his hands, not a result of his being a predator.
You could replace "Tinder" with any company and find that the above statement holds true. Twitter isn't Jack or Ev or Biz, it's the combination of the three. Facebook was mostly Zuck, but not all. Apple was indeed [very] heavily influenced by Steve Jobs, but Apple wasn't Steve Jobs.
I've found the idea of a single genius founder being behind anything is largely a myth; they're just the public face of a company that is doing great things in the background.
Also, NSFW Instagram images.
Also, great article, I thought.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forg...
"Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths"
My title fu is failing me, though. Is this one really better?
EDIT: The generic "women" in the current title is certainly more misleading and may be contributing to the penalty being assessed by those who haven't read the piece. The article only discusses one woman.
I am adding "anti-fraternization" policy to my employee handbook today.
Seriously, does anybody know how to handle the hr on discovering a supervisor / direct report are dating?
I've been told that best practices is to immediately suggest one or the other resign, and if they don't, fire both for violating policy.
How does one handle this situation?
You can make all the policies you want but human nature does not care much for policies.
The best cure is an immediate transfer to another department of either of the two. That way you avoid all the claims of favoritism and possible fall-out in case the relationship goes sour. Also make sure that managers know that such relationships should immediately be reported to upper management. (Hard if the 'upper management' is in fact one of the parties). Any evidence of pressure from the higher-up should result in immediate termination. Again, that's pretty tough but it is much better than the possible alternatives.
That said, in all three of those cases they were dating an indirect report. That's still a bit of a no-no, but nowhere near as problematic as dating a direct report. Your manager has a huge influence on your career; the company CEO dating someone who works for the company is a little dodgy and will cause morale problems elsewhere, but it's much harder to argue direct influence when they don't directly interact in the course of the workday.
(On the flipside, if you hire decent human beings then nobody's going to be looking in the HR handbook to determine how far they can push harassment without being fired anyway.)
That's not even remotely true. No court has ever held that merely dating a subordinate is ipso facto sexual harassment. Accordingly, many companies do not have an official policy against it.
I have the opposite opinion in that I think that sexual harassment cases involving exes in the work place should almost always be thrown out, but alas...
It's nearly impossibly to date someone and not sexually harass them in some way. It's doubly hard to break up with someone and not sexually harass them in some way.
Considering most of her allegations are words/phrases that he called her, and considering many people call significant others very bad things when they are breaking up, it's almost impossible to draw the line between sexual harassment and break-up banter.
I've been around the block a few times and had a few past relationships go sour; but I've never felt the need to call an ex-lover a slut or suggest that she was a whore for sleeping with someone other than me. If someone does that, I'm going to judge them; and not in a good light.
You have horrible relationships if you think this is even remotely true.
> It's doubly hard to break up with someone and not sexually harass them in some way.
And even worse break ups.
That or you don't know what sexual harassment is which I'm thinking is far more likely.
>it's almost impossible to draw the line between sexual harassment and break-up banter.
No its not.
In this situation the real problem is a you have sexist fuckwad of a partner who is basically a loose cannon and going to get you in trouble eventually. If you really want to build a company with someone like that you need to start telling them to tone it down early and often, but of course that's easier said than done.
But the problem is that most seem unable to assemble the right people, and give them the right autonomy, to really enable them to behave in a startup-like manner. Instead it just becomes recruitment joke where recruiters say "it's like a startup in a big company!" while the candidate rolls their eyes.
In a way I think it's the opposite story of skunkworks. Those try to replicate a startup-like independence while also emphasizing the parent brand's ultimate credit for any output (e.g. ZFS was developed by a Sun skunkworks and proudly claimed by Sun). Here it looks like IAC wanted exactly the opposite: a fake startup that didn't really have independence and instead just implemented IAC's strategy for this vertical, but which emphasized its own brand and kept quiet about the parent brand.
One other area I can think of where that's fairly common recently is in fake microbrews launched by the big brewing companies. The recipes and market positioning are entirely dictated by the parent company, but there's a kind of microbrewing identity that is presented to the public.
So why wouldn't that approach work for something like online dating?
The article describes quite well how successful this approach can be if you do it right. A company like Microsoft has such a massive amount of talent and resources, that even allowing a sliver of that to work on a project in isolation and freedom can lead to huge success.
I've personally experienced a 'startup in a big company' situation, and that also seemed to work quite well at first. Sadly, the whole thing fell apart once the big company started trying to take control back. In fact, I think the resulting situation was worse than if the 'startup' had never had a taste of independence.
Not cool for companies to lie about their history, even if a lot of them do it.
From talking to IAC people, they don't care what the founder say -- to a point -- as long as people are using the app. As this article made clear however, if you get too far off the messaging and start to oversell the "independent" angle, you will be smacked back into reality.
And then thing is, it isn't cool for a lot of companies to lie about their history -- but if you don't create this false narrative (and let's be clear, 90% of the startup narratives you hear are altered to make the story more attractive. The same is true for any other aspect of business (see also: Hollywood)), people won't pay attention. To a certain extent, as a society, we wall want to have that great Cindarella story.
We want to believe Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team (even though that's not really what happened [1]) and then went on to be one of the greatest players of all time, because it helps create hope within ourselves that we too can overcome the odds and be that successful.
A successful startup born out of an incubator that is funded by a multi-billion dollar company with direct reports to the incumbent in an industry it is trying to "disrupt" is far less compelling for everyone than "we had this idea for this app and it spread like wildfire and now the VCs are coming knocking at our door."
That said, as icky and gross as I find every single person in this entire Tinder saga (to be clear, I think Wolfe was absolutely a victim but that doesn't mean I'd want to hang out with her), the truly notable aspect of the company (to me at least), which was its astonishing growth, was legit. That didn't happen because of IAC or Match (at least, not directly, meaning b/c of those employees or that branding). And that's still laudable. The service might be run by total jerks, but it's growth rate is still laudable and is still an interesting narrative into itself, even if we accept that the whole rags to riches, came out of nowhere aspect, is bullshit (which it is).
[1]: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/2012/01/16/106149626/...
EDIT: Referencing top comments.
It's likely that current events help explain some oddities in Tinder's past.
It seems like the reporter was aware that something was off, but only discovered the new details through Munoz (who might not be entirely objective as a source either?).
I can't tell whether it was shoddy journalism or just something that, at the point of the first article, wasn't too relevant.
Either way it reminds me once again of how factually incorrect many articles I read might actually be.
Founder or nothing these days, eh?
I wish I could believe this isn't the actual reason that Mateen is gone.
Tinder isn't a real startup, but a manufactured success for a couple of well-connected douchebags (who behave as if they're above the law). It's the Disneypreneur phenomenon (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/silicon-valle...). If you look into it, both of these guys are invaders from the MBA culture.
These phony startups, that are actually pre-arranged by powerful players in the mainstream corporate/McKinsey world, are becoming a lot more common and they're often difficult for genuine, old-style startups to compete with. (They blow up big, suck up a lot of talent and attention, then fail and lose credibility, so their inferior capability still leads to a both-lose outcome.)
This is going to blow up big in a couple of years: this massive proliferation of propped-up junk businesses and pseudo-startups run by incompetents. We're already seeing the embarrassing-but-not-yet-devastating fuckups. We haven't seen an Enron yet. But that's going to come, and it's going to have massive effects (and probably negative ones, on good and bad players) on the startup scene.
Evan Spiegel should have been fired after the frat emails surfaced. As for Clinkle, that's been around for years and hasn't produced jack shit because it's not even a real company-- just a scam.
However, I'd say that all these examples basically disprove your theory about them making it harder for "real" startups to compete. Webvan flamed out miserably, but that didn't stop Peapod (and now Instacart, Google Shopping Express, and Amazon Prime) from taking off. SnapChat didn't exactly hurt WhatsApp's chances. Cuil has had a negligible impact on DuckDuckGo - it just flamed out, pivoted beyond recognition, died, and the founder went back to her job at Google. Digg's death throes proved a huge boon for Reddit, and their audience started increasing massively.
As a startup founder, you are best off just ignoring the well-funded competitor who's doing everything wrong. Let them pave the path, legitimize the marketplace, pump millions of dollars in ad spending into the noosphere - and then quietly save your cash, talk to real customers, build the product that people actually want, and provide a breath of fresh air for the people that were burned by your celebrity dunce competitor.
Edit: As usual, anything not supporting the usual response gains downvotes.
You are still free to say whatever you want, and people are free to call you an asshole and distance themselves from you.
While it's likely that Mateen's conduct was influenced for the worse by their relationship and break-up(s), it went pretty far into 'misogyny' terrority, and can't really be justified.
I mean, I've said some nasty things in the heat of the moment through and after a break-up, but nothing like that.
That said, I agree the author could've done better. I was very confused by the introduction of 'Munoz' without describing who he was, for example. I get the impression the article was written in haste for maximum 'relevancy'.
Their actions aren't right, but they are not surprising based on age and level of success.
It's unfortunate that it takes a case like this for people to question if slutshaming is accetable behavior.
It's very brave of her to file the lawsuit. Whatever shitparade the other founders and dealing with, I'm sure hers is ten times worse.
...and now I have no reason to believe either her allegations or his defenses. People are simply unreliable witnesses in matters concerning former romantic partners that they are not on good terms with.
It seems in worrying about wifi, you missed the point of the exhibits submitted, though. You can read the rest of those here: http://www.rezlaw.com/News-Events/06-30-14_Complaint_with_Ex...