Bumble’s ‘feminism’ is half-baked

In 1965, a trio of Harvard undergraduates launched Operation Match, a computer dating service for horny undergraduates at New England’s single-sex colleges. A journalist for Look Magazine came to cover the sensation. ‘Call it dating, call it mating, it flashed out of the minds of …Harvard undergraduates who plotted Operation Match, the dig-it dating system that ties up college couples with magnetic tape,’ he wrote. Dig-it, it may have been, but Operation Match didn’t last out the decade.

Dateline, Britain’s premier computer dating service, was soon launched using the same technology, feeding customer questionnaires into a large mainframe computer which would spit out half a dozen matches for a fee. It was, according to Dateline itself, ‘the most significant advance in modern relations between the sexes since the granting of the vote’. Perhaps, but by the 1990s Dateline would be dead, along with computer dating in general.

Haltingly, Internet dating services took over the market and, right through the 2000s and into the early 2010s insisted that – unlike their predecessors – they were now entirely stigma-free, totally ‘normal’.