Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age (2018)

Author Nancy Jo Sales investigates the online dating industry's impact on gender issues, examining how it has changed the way people date, mate and think about the apps on their phones, and explores how the act of swiping affects the ability to find true and lasting connections.MS-DOCU

Written and directed by Nancy Jo Sales, who wrote the 2015 Vanity Fair story on which it’s based (“Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’”), “Swiped” is about a subject that simply can’t be wrangled—the current state of mating among young people born in the internet era and whose sexual negotiations now involve self-advertising on platforms like Tinder, contending with the warping influence of internet porn, and a courtship ritual (for lack of a better term) that borders on madness. Ms. Sales deserve credit for trying to make sense of it all, visiting locations across the country, interviewing representatives of different racial and sexual groups, and trying to capture a sense of the dating chaos in which her feverish crowd exists—some of them, at any rate. Which is a question you do have to ask: How many people are we talking about?

The introductory statistics say that 40 million Americans are registered on dating sites and that 18- to 30-year-olds spend 10 hours a week on dating apps. This doesn’t tell us how many dormant Match.com accounts exist, or how the people interviewed by Ms. Sales could spend only 10 hours a week cruising online, given their seemingly obsessive pursuit of a date. Or whatever. The overall impression is of a generation caught up in a hormonal frenzy, which isn’t helped by the fact that the experts interviewed by Ms. Sales are mostly older, giving their presence an unavoidably patronizing quality.

The people doing the dating in “Swiped” are remarkably candid and honest and unhappy: No one whom Ms. Sales talks to is satisfied with the Tinder box they’re playing in, but what’s perversely amusing is what hasn’t changed between the genders. Women and men still want the same things they always did—they’re just in a game for which the rules are still being written. And, at the same time, they’re being exploited: It’s touched on only in passing, but the information that people are happily giving away to companies like ICA and its Match Group (which controls, among others, Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid and BlackPeopleMeet.com) is being sold and aggregated. And despite the claims of Tinder execs that their email is “inundated” by happily married people who met on Tinder, is that what a company really wants? More likely they want to mismatch people and keep them on Tinder. Or Match.com. Or OurTime.com. The whole thing is a mess. And that is something Ms. Sales portrays quite well.

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