Tinder gets a ‘rizz-first redesign’
I met my wife the old-fashioned way: on a dating app. When our now-toddler is older we’ll tell her this story and she’ll look at us like we’re embarrassing dinosaurs and say ‘mums, what’s a dating app?’
Dating apps, you see, are dreadfully passé. According to a recent Axios/Generation Lab survey of college and graduate students nationwide 79% of respondents said they don’t use any dating apps, not even once a month. Instead they prefer to meet people in real life. Which makes sense since they are in college actually interacting with people all day and not stuck at home on interminable Zoom meetings with only a cactus to talk to.
When they’re not meeting people in the real world, some young singles have been eschewing traditional dating apps for so-called date-me-docs. What on earth are those? Basically just a digital update to ye olde personal ad or lonely hearts post. You write up a dating CV and what you’re looking for in a match then send the link around.
Tinder, the world’s most popular dating app, has been watching these trends with alarm. In an attempt to appeal to gen Z the app has added a bunch of new features, such as quizzes and prompts. Which is fairly standard stuff; what’s noteworthy, however, is its decision to proudly describe these updates as a “rizz-first redesign”. For readers who are over the age of 25 and/or don’t spend every waking moment online, “rizz” is teen slang for “charisma”. And a “rizz-first redesign” is cringeworthy corporate slang for “we’re desperate not to become obsolete”.
Births have increased in US states with abortion bans
When you pass laws that force people to give birth then … wait for it … more people are forced to give birth. According to a depressingly predictable new study “nearly a quarter of people seeking an abortion in the United States were unable to get one due to bans that took effect after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision”. In the first half of 2023, states with abortion bans had an average fertility rate that was 2.3% higher than states without abortion restrictions.
Only 0.5% of neuroscience studies specifically look at women’s health
“Representation is not the problem,” Emily Jacobs writes in Nature, “about 50% of people enrolled in neuroimaging studies listed on OpenNeuro.org are women. Researchers are simply not choosing to study (and funders to invest in the study of) health factors specific to women, which is perhaps not surprising when 80% of tenured neuroscientists are men.”
Dior is now trying to sell luxury skincare products to newborns
What do you get the baby that has everything? Dior’s Bonne Étoile: $230 “scented water” that has “whiffs of pear, wild rose, and white musk”. Meanwhile, over 330 million children worldwide live in extreme poverty.
Holly Maguigan, trailblazing feminist lawyer, dies at 78
Maguigan helped to legitimize the self-defense defense in domestic violence cases. “Respect for the dignity and humanity of women guided her work, always,” said the Center for Constitutional Rights. “She urged lawyers and advocates to move beyond the reductive confines of so-called battered women’s syndrome ‘to explain the impact of intimate violence without appearing to pathologize women and deny their reason and capacity’.” (For transparency’s sake I should note that I knew Holly personally – she was an inspiring person.)
Japan ordered to compensate wartime sex slaves
Lee Yong-soo, a 95-year-old activist and victim, thanked the court for the ruling and said she wished she could tell all the victims who died before this small sliver of justice was served about the verdict.
67% of the more than 14,000 people killed in Gaza are estimated to be women and children
“That is two mothers killed every hour and seven women every two hours,” the head of UN Women said. “We mourn them all.” It’s also important to mourn all the innocent men who have been killed. Palestinians as a whole face constant dehumanization but Palestinian men and teenage boys bear the brunt of this.
New York City mayor Eric Adams accused of sexual assault in 1993
This is just the latest controversy the mayor is facing.
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs accused of sexual assault and revenge porn
Isn’t this old news, you might be asking? Nope, these are two new lawsuits, which follow another he settled last week with former girlfriend Casandra Ventura.
Hollywood gives Napoleon a younger wife
In Ridley Scott’s new historical epic Napoleon, the actor playing Joséphine Bonaparte, Vanessa Kirby, is 14 years younger than Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the emperor. As a Guardian reader points out, however: “Napoleon Bonaparte was six years younger than Joséphine, and that contributed to the power dynamic in their relationship. Yet again, Hollywood has obeyed sexist norms and cast a much younger female lead, even to the detriment of the narrative.”
Third-gender ‘muxe’ festival held in southern Mexico
“In Indigenous Zapotec cultures in this region, muxes are people born biologically male and mix gay and feminine identity,” Reuters reports. “In the Zapotec language, there is no [grammatical] gender,” Felina Santiago, sometimes described as the matriarch of Juchitán’s muxe community, said. “We have always existed and we have always resisted.”
The week in pawtriarchy
The Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a nuclear research hub, suffered a large data breach this week. The culprits? Sieged Security AKA SiegedSec: a group which describes itself as “gay furry hackers”. Normally hackers want gazillions of bitcoin, but this group’s demands were slightly more … unusual. “We’re willing to make a deal with INL,” SiegedSec wrote in their announcement of the breach. “If they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post [with a link to the leak].” Yeah, I’m not quite sure what that means either.
