A PR girl at the London launch of Tinder (Photo by Tom Johnson)
According to a blog on Tinder’s website, the transient shagging app is rolling out a new feature: verification ticks for the profile pages of “notable public figures, celebrities and athletes”.
Getting verified is something that anyone who’s quasi-famous can do on most social media platforms now, but it seems weird to introduce it to one that exists to help strangers find no-strings-attached sex. Surely if there’s one thing that celebrities and persons of note do not need in their lives it’s a hastily screen-grabbed paper trail of their intimate chat-up techniques?
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Famous lovers have always left their own kinds of romantic paper trail. James Joyce’s strange and vivid paeans to his farting missus Nora and her “rank red cunt”, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Hollywood tearjerkers. It used to be the way that these correspondences were littered with powerful proclamations of deep feeling and longing; they were the sort of legacy you’d want to leave behind as a human being, an emotional epitaph, evidence of your sensitivity, proof of soul. What you probably wouldn’t want is emoji-spattered screenshots of you saying you want to plunge your knob into someone or suffocate them with something being uploaded to Tumblr by some indiscreet conquest.
Like sex? Like the internet? Watch our film, Digital Love Industry:You can see the benefits. A verification tick on Tinder is practically a license to fuck anyone you want. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last decade of lives scarred by sex tapes, fappening leaks and dodgy photoshops, it’s that people online do not want to see you succeed. They want to see you with a dick in your mouth. They want to laugh, to point, to pity. Having a verified Tinder account is basically saying, “Hey, you can exploit my animalistic desire for coitus by giving the public an unfiltered view of my private encounters! I’m fair game and now this cool blue tick means there’s no ambiguity as to who I am!”
If you’re a star or starlet, do yourself a favour: just get with one of your many, many fans. At least that way they might love you enough not to ruin your life after you escape with a headache and heartburn.
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