A Vermont woman says hunting photos to her profile got her banned from the dating app Tinder, but says nothing is said to men who post similar photos.
Does Tinder hold a double standard when it comes to who can post hunting photos?
One Vermont woman suggests the dating app might. She says she found herself locked out of her account while vacationing in Northern California.
San Francisco Chronicle sister site SFGate reported the woman opened the app while she visited the San Francisco area. She said within hours of opening the app, she found she’d been banned.
Tinder, the site reported, claims her profile had been reported multiple times.
She says the photos were cropped so that neither weapons nor blood was visible. Still, the photos apparently received enough complaints that Tinder shut down her profile.
Multiple media sites reported that she also said someone called her employer to complain about the hunting photos. She says she grew up in a family where hunting is accepted and that her family hunts for food, not trophies.
While she said the photos may have been considered offensive to those in the Bay Area of California, she told KGO-TV there’s a double standard because of her gender:
“It’s a discrimination I have experience with as a female in a male-dominated sport for a long time, which is why it’s so important to me to bring light and speak out against this.”
Tinder says the matter has been reviewed and the woman is now able to use her account again.
So is there a double standard?
I wouldn’t be surprised, although it’s virtually impossible for an outsider to make that judgment call.
It wouldn’t shock me to learn that people might have a problem with a woman posting photos of a type of sport that is typically male-dominated. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that people take “offense” to such things, as ridiculous as that would be.
It’s also difficult to argue that her gender isn’t an important part of the equation since, presumably, gender is an important factor in the profiles those who complained would have seen. After all, if the complaints came from men who were looking for a woman, they wouldn’t have seen profiles of other men who might have hunting photos of their own.
But if we assume that all who complained were men, it’s just as possible that the group of men who complained don’t support hunting — regardless of the gender of the hunter. It might be that fewer (if any) men are reported for hunting photos because fewer women find them objectionable enough to report them; instead, they just “swipe” on to the next profile without flagging the photo as inappropriate.
The fact that the complaints about specific photos caused the platform to shut down her entire account, even temporarily, suggests a bigger issue: if individual photos were receiving complaints, the service should have blocked those photos, not her entire account.
Of course, I’ve written before about a blogging-related incident that served as the first spark for me to eventually self-host this site. This blog originated on AOL Journals 15 years ago. A fellow blogger received a complaint about a single image on his blog and rather than blocking that image, AOL’s editors at the time simply erased his entire graphics file. Not just the image that earned complaints: every image he had uploaded.
The responsible thing for a platform to do is to first notify the user of the problem and block only the offending image.
Still, not everyone wants to see hunting photos.
From time to time, I’ll be scanning my Facebook feed and I’ll see a few friends of mine post hunting photos of their own. I’ve seen my friends post photos of themselves posing next to carcasses of animals they killed. I’ve seen them post pictures of their children doing the same.
In one instance, I saw a photo depicting what the uploader claimed was some sort of “tradition:” the youth who’d shot his first deer had the animal’s blood smeared all over his face and clothes.
In a word, it was disgusting.
I didn’t report the image, but there have been a few friends of mine I’ve unfollowed (not unfriended, however) because I just don’t want to look at that.
I realize that hunting serves a valuable purpose in certain circumstances. I respect the fact that particular types of hunting help control overpopulation.
And I’m no fool when it comes to using animals for food: I am not, by any means, a vegetarian. I understand, of course, that animals have to be killed for me to be able to eat my dinner.
That does not mean, however, that I would want to see that happen. And there’s no rule or law that requires that I be subjected to such a sight.
I wish sites like Instagram and Facebook would add a cover over such images to give people the option to view them or not before they just displayed for all to see.
Personally, I don’t care who’s doing the hunting — male or female. I’d just rather not see the results of such an excursion.
And if I were ever to use a dating app, I’d definitely swipe to the next profile if I encountered such a photo. I figure those who are that enthusiastic about that particular sport wouldn’t be a match for me,
