Post-#Bumblegate Meditation

On boundary violations, hard choices, and William James

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

If the term “Bumblegate” isn’t familiar to you (which would make sense because this all just happened last week), you can get caught up here, here, here, and here (watch in that order—there’s a true narrative arc in this story).

The reactions to the outcome, at least in Burned Haystack communities, range from pure celebration to “trust but verify” to “Bumble is a gaslighting, abusive entity that violated my boundaries. NEVER again.”

I understand and respect all of these positions and every point along the spectrum in between. I personally fall somewhere in the middle.

If you fall at the hard-right end (“Never again, Bumble”), and you’re convicted in that decision, then, number one, this article probably won’t be helpful, and number two, I totally get it.

I want to be clear that I am NOT trying to change anyone’s mind here. That’s the last thing on earth I want to do. I understand through experience that it’s the accumulated effect of boundary violations that eventually coalesces into one hard line that becomes impossible to get back over. And that’s a HEALTHY thing. We’re supposed to recognize and honor those lines. If Bumble has become that for you (or simply contributed to a whole bunch of other boundary violations that add up to the same bright line), and you are DONE, then I believe this is a healthy and smart decision.

If you’re somewhere in the middle, unsure of how to proceed (this is where I’m currently sitting), then consider this article food for thought.

There is an option here to take a hardline ideological stance toward total abstinence from the apps, toward informed conscientious objection, and that’s an admirable and respectable decision. In a pragmatic sense, it might work against you, but you already know this. Again, if you’re at peace with this decision, then I would advise you to leave it right there. If you’re still looking for guidance, though, here is the best I have to offer you (and the best I have to offer to myself):

Every moral absolute exacts some kind of toll somewhere else. There is no total ethical purity. Let’s do an example to follow “total ethical purity” to its logical end: I could say, “You know what? American universities are increasingly corporate and capitalistic, and they are compromised by all the traps that characterize such systems.” That’s indisputably true. So, an ethically-pure position would be for me to refuse to serve it. And guess what that means: It means Burned Haystack doesn’t exist, because it grew out of my academic work. It means I don’t get to teach “The Rhetoric of Dating and Intimacy” anymore, which I know for sure has empowered and protected our students. We could do a million other examples like this.

Are the dating apps agents of capitalism? 100%. There are no non-profit dating apps. And the ones that aren’t taking money from people’s pockets—the “free” apps—are getting their money in some other way that’s potentially worse.

We are all already complicit. Unless you live entirely off the grid, which means you’re not reading this right now, you are participating in a capitalistic society.

Let’s ask a more precise, pointed, and disturbing question: Are the dating apps exploiting us? Are they literally brokering women’s bodies to bait men? Yup.

I’m going to suggest we exploit them right back. We do this by hijacking their shitty algorithms through blocking (which, because of our work last week, is hopefully going to be honored more now) and by simply refusing to engage with undatable men. We can do this strategically not only on an individual level, but on a societal one: There are too many undatable men in the dating pool anyway—all the apps have more men than women, and these men are frustrated and angry and becoming increasingly annoying and threatening; if women block and report enough of them, they’ll eventually either drop out of the pool or get kicked out. What I’m saying is not overly—idealistic: last week, in less than four days, a totally-unfunded grassroots group of women took to social media and got a substantive response from Bumble, one of the biggest and most powerful dating apps in the world. They’re listening to us, not because they care, but because they need money, and they need bodies.

I know that’s crass, and I know that what I’m writing right now seems cold and calculating. But I’ve never claimed to be a moral purist. I want to find a partner, and I know many of you reading this do too, and while a better person than me might refuse to participate in a systemic structure that I know for sure is greedy, dishonest, and corrupt, I also understand that it’s probably my best statistical shot, and so I’m going to take it.

Here’s where we pivot to me making a philosophical case for the very horrible-sounding suggestion I just made, and I’m going to use the American Pragmatist philosopher William James to do it (he’s my fave philosopher, and I have an intellectual crush on him, and I’m sure he’s toxic in some way, but I’m asking that everyone allow me to remain ignorant if that’s true, lol. I have turned to William James’ essays to help myself settle every major decision and moral dilemma in my adult life, and I don’t want to stop now).

So what exactly is American Pragmatism, and how does it apply to using a dating app?

Let’s use a quote from James’ essay “What Pragmatism Means.”

“The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences [emphasis mine].”

Interpretation to the dating apps: Are dating apps evil? Yes. Are they still where most single people can be found? Also yes. So, practically speaking, if your goal is to find a single person who wants to be partnered, at this point in time your absolute best shot is to be on the dating apps. That’s how we trace “practical consequences.” The practical consequences of not being on a dating app mean that you have access to a fraction of the people you would if you were on an app. This doesn’t mean you won’t meet someone; people meet “in the wild” all the time, but it sometimes takes a lot longer (which might be fine!).

Now let’s wrestle through another hard truth: “But we know the dating apps are terrible. We know they’re commodifying and exploitative and dishonest.”

Let’s answer that question using another James quote, this one from “The Sentiment of Rationality”:

“Not the absence of vice, but vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human state.”

Interpretation to the dating apps: Let’s hold the apps by the throat. We proved last week that we now have the collective power to do that. This is very much a “both things can be true” scenario: We can recognize the pure evil of Bumble AND use it to our advantage; we can see all of its vice through a stone-cold realistic lens AND we can serve as “virtue holding it by the throat”—we did that last week, too.

Making this kind of decision requires us to engage in a level of nuance that can be confusing and uncomfortable.

Two quotes to help us navigate, from “The Dilemma of Determinism”:

“The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire.”

Interpretation to dating apps:

The ideal here is refusing to use a dating app out of a compulsion to maintain some degree of ethical purity. The “imagined good” is finding the love of your life, or at least a good shot at it. In order to cleave to the ideal, one would have to sacrifice the imagined good.

This quote is a bit clearer, perhaps:

“The ethical philosopher’s demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part.”

Some of us will choose to butcher the ideal of finding a partner because we’re unwilling to feed a corporate-capitalist entity; some of us will butcher our commitment to ethical purity and stay on the apps because we know it’s the probable most-direct path to partnership.

There’s no intended “right” choice or even better choice here, at least not that I’m intending to imply. As a pragmatist myself, I’m simply laying out the options as I see them.

And I get that suggesting we meet exploitation with exploitation and manipulation with manipulation feels a little “a bunch of wrongs don’t make a right”; it feels a little ugly.

But the success stories—the stories of true love that women are realizing as a result of burning the haystack—are really beautiful, and that’s something too. That’s real too. 🔥🔥