Pranoo Deshraju
The Tinder ad campaign, titled ‘Stree Swipes’, contains a radical commandment. In a series of ads or ‘episodes’, a voiceover gives a short recount of the taboo against singlehood and, towards the end, invokes a line from the climax of a popular Hindi film from the 1990s, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge , ‘Jaa Simran jaa jee le apni Zindagi,’ encouraging single women to date, not to search for the ‘one’ (Tinder India, 2020). In the ad, potential dates are likened to flavours of ice cream which all women can and should try. The ad demonstrates the overabundance of options, choice, and variety coupled with compulsory enjoyment. At the same time, the ads carefully avoid the display of the body, showing the voiceover picturized on a disembodied hand, female by association with voice. The dating application prefigures itself as a space that is against other spaces. With the promise of sexual liberation, it is premised on a radical revision of the libidinal possibilities in urban spaces. Strangers on the street become potential partners; blind dates and short adventures into the lives of strangers become the norm. The hand symbolizes the anonymity and disembodied-ness of digital identities perfectly. The ads, together with the dating platform, present to us the libidinal possibilities of digital spaces and digital technology; singlehood defines choice and freedom and the single woman figures as an important consumer target. By declaring ‘dating in India is in a nascent stage’, it performs a pedagogy of dating, with Tinder being tasked with teaching the public how to date (Tinder India, 2020). As scholars on urban sexuality in India have noted, sexual liberation has emerged as an important theme in popular public discourse (Bose and Bhattacharya, 2007; Christy, 2017).