Since its founding in 2014, Bumble has billed its app as the more empowering dating service for women — one where women message matches first, and women are in control. But almost a decade on, Bumble can still feel as tired and broken as other dating apps. And it often seems like that feminist twist is more marketing fodder than meaningful change to how our apps run our love lives.
Gender-based terrorism — attacks meant to instill widespread fear, not just kill individuals — has a history beyond recent events like the attack in Toronto that resulted in the deaths of 10 people. Canada’s most deadly modern mass shooting, the 1989 massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, was aimed at keeping women away from science and engineering work.
“In the last year of Rosalind’s life, I remember visiting her in hospital on the day when she was excited by the news of the [Soviet Sputnik satellite].” Franklin’s sister, Jenifer Glynn, said. ”She could never have imagined that over 60 years later there would be a rover sent to Mars bearing her name, but somehow that makes this project even more special.”
Often considered a “pink-collar industry,” social media’s female-dominated workforce has naturally extended to the traditionally male-dominated sports industry, too. Women are not only excelling in these roles, but as the online voices of sports teams, they’re finding themselves insulated from the kind of harassment and abuse that plagues many of the more visible women in the sports industry (and outside of it).
I think it’s easy to feel locked into the way things are, but the more you get into the material and the messiness of the real lived experience of all these people, the more you realize that if things had unfolded even slightly differently, we could be living in a totally different world. There’s nothing inevitable about the way the internet is.