This Dating App's Open Letter Is Magnificent

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a finance bro in possession of a large fortune on a dating app is a misogynistic jerk, right? Well, not necessarily; most of us realize that judging someone by your own set of warped, narrow-minded ideas before you've even met them is perhaps not the best way to communicate. However, dating app Bumble wrote an open letter to a misogynistic user who clearly didn't get the memo about not being judgmental when messaging a potential date — and their response is absolutely perfect.

The full exchange is viewable on Bumble's blog, screenshots and all, but here's the gist of it: It all started innocently enough when user Ashley opened a chat with user Connor, leading with a completely normal, "How's it going?" (On Bumble, women have 24 hours to send the first message after being matched with someone; the people they message also subsequently have 24 hours to respond.) When she received the green light for further convo, Ashley mentioned that she was having a slow day at work and, in turn, asked what Connor what did for a living. It was here that things took a sinister turn.

Connor, you see, took the opportunity to on an unprovoked mega-rant. “Is that usually the first question you ask following the opener?” he raged. “1. I didn’t ask you about work. 2. I don’t see anything nice about you prying into my career without even getting to know me as a person first. 3. It appears your recklessly brought up work as a front to ask me what I do.”

After Ashley protested that she was just trying that thing called Getting To Know You, she then suggested that maybe Connor had been “played” in the past (because there must be a reason for being such a volatile and sensitive man-child, am I right?). Conor's diatribe continued: “I don't fall victim not prescribe to this neo-liberal, Beyonce, feminist cancer which plagues society and says a guy can't as so much as give constructive criticism to and call a girl out on her b*llsh*t [sic]."

I hate to break it to you, Connor, but behaving like that is never going to get you a first date. In fact, it might even get you called out. And where so many dating apps have failed before them, Bumble took a stand. The app — which was created by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe and is known as the Feminist Tinder because it prioritizes female experience — responded by penning an open letter to Conor, which subsequently went viral.

"[Ashley] mentioned her work day and asked about yours," the letter reads. "You assumed that she was prying into your financial status. We are going to venture a guess into the state of mind of Ashley here, given that we are all working women ourselves. Take a seat, because this concept may blow your mind. Women work nowadays. It's happened over time, we know, but a vast majority of women from our generation have jobs."

The letter continues:

And while you may view this as "neo-liberal, Beyonce, feminist cancer," and rant about the personal wounds you are trying to heal from classic "entitled gold-digging whores," we are going to keep working. ... We are going to expand our reach and make sure that women everywhere receive the message that they are just as empowered in their personal lives as they are in the workplace. We are going to continue to build a world that makes small-minded, misogynist boys like you feel outdated.

We are going to hope that one day, you come around But until that day comes, Connor, consider yourself blocked from Bumble.

Whoah.

Bustle has reached out to Bumble for comment and will update if and when we hear back — but either way, this open letter is all kinds of amazing. Although it’s sadly not uncommon for women to receive sexist abuse on dating apps and for misogynistic exchanges like this to go viral, it is practically unheard of for an app to respond in this way — even though it's exactly the way that apps should be responding. The internet in general and online dating in particular have become rife with sexism and trolling, but all too often, it’s down to the people suffering from this abusive or upsetting misconduct to highlight it. When the creators of a platform take a stand to say, "This behavior is not OK," it's a firm step towards making the world of online dating — and the world as a whole — a little better for everyone.

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