This ‘Dating Advice’ App Is Fuelling the Gender Wars

Imagine if there were an app where men, and only men, could anonymously and publicly shame the women they’ve dated. They could post these women’s names, faces, and other identifiable information while spreading rumours about their ex-partners’ sexual behaviour or emotional stability.

This would be deeply disturbing. Many AI platforms will actually refuse to help you build such an app. But you may be surprised to learn that something like this already exists—only it’s for women, not men. This week, a ‘dating advice’ app called Tea became the most popular download in the U.S. iPhone app store, with one million women downloading it in the past week alone. 

Tea (that’s Gen Z speak for ‘gossip’) is ostensibly about safety. It allows women to run a sort of background check on the men they intend to go on dates with, sifting through public records to see if they have a criminal past, are using a fake name, or are already married. Tea can even run a reverse image search on pictures of your date and tell you if his pictures have been used elsewhere—in case he’s catfishing you. Women are also encouraged to share experiences where men have been predatory or abusive so that other women can avoid them. 

If it were purely about staying safe and steering clear of actual abusers and criminals, this kind of information might sometimes be useful. But Tea doesn’t stop there. It has devolved into women sharing various bits of gossip, personal details, and criticisms of men with millions of random strangers. 

The app encourages this by design. Women can post the pictures and names of men they’ve been involved with and rate them based on their ‘red flags’—qualities they consider to be negative or concerning. Users list the undesirable traits of various men they’ve come across. One man is described as “abusive, pathological liar, manic and victim mentality. Loves drama.” Another is accused of being a “meth addict” who “will emotionally and physically abuse women” and has a “secret life with gay older men.” Other common charges include cheating, emotional manipulation, and ‘ghosting’ (not responding to messages) after a date. 

The glaring issue here is one of privacy. Attaching someone’s face, name, and personal information to unsubstantiated, potentially life-ruining accusations is unimaginably cruel. None of the men aired on this app are able to defend themselves against these claims and, in most cases, will never know they’ve been slandered in the first place. And while many of the women posting on Tea have been in actual relationships with the men they post about, many more will be passing judgement on a man’s character based on a handful of interactions, or even just one. In a world where a single bad first date can turn you into the internet’s enemy No. 1, it’s a miracle any men are still dating at all. 

It’s not just men being harmed by apps like Tea, either. It also feeds into a growing atmosphere of paranoia among young women. I’m sure most people—male and female alike—would prefer to know if the person they’re about to meet at a bar is a literal criminal. But there is a world of difference between someone not returning your calls and someone being on the sex offenders’ register. This level of vetting is simply not necessary for the vast majority of people. You’re going for dinner and drinks, not revealing state secrets. I struggle to believe that dating apps these days are really filled to the brim with criminal, abusive, and downright evil men. Or that women are really dancing with death every time they go for a first date.

There is a pervasive feeling among women these days that every man is a threat. Tea is by no means the first expression of this. The app grew out of the “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” Facebook pages that have been popping up for towns and cities all over the world in recent years. These groups function in a similar way to Tea, whereby women can post pictures, names, or other info about men they’re seeing, in order to check he’s not cheating or up to anything else nefarious. Like with Tea, there is often no way to verify if what’s being posted to these pages is true. Women are free to throw around accusations of infidelity, lying, abuse, and worse with little or no proof at all. Serious allegations can easily bleed out into the real world, and some men say they have been questioned at work, lost relationships, or been otherwise emotionally affected by what was written about them online. 

The catalyst for these vetting groups is thought to be the online witch hunt for a man now known to the internet as “West Elm Caleb,” back in 2022. Caleb, a very unfortunate furniture designer living in New York City, managed to draw the ire of TikTok after a former date of his made a video complaining that he ghosted her. Other women then came forward with similar experiences involving men named Caleb, also in New York. Online sleuths quickly figured out this was the same guy and went about hunting him down. A screenshot of his Hinge profile was posted publicly, and Caleb was effectively driven off the internet. 

This response was more than a little harsh. The worst thing Caleb was accused of was sending an unsolicited nude picture. Otherwise, women’s chief complaint about him was that he took them on what seemed to be incredible dates, only to ignore their texts afterwards. He was apparently also seeing multiple women at once, and had sent the same Spotify playlist to each of his dates, claiming it was made specially for her. Sure, Caleb doesn’t sound like a stand-up guy. But being kind of an asshole isn’t a crime. 

Groups like “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” and apps like Tea facilitate this on a much larger scale. Complaints abound these days about the state of modern dating, but is it really surprising, when men and women are encouraged to be terrified of one another? Women are taught to assume that every man they meet is out to get them—see the ‘man vs bear’ trend, where women claim they’d rather run into a savage wild animal in the woods than a human man. When they inevitably cross paths with a ‘Caleb’ who breaks their heart, they’re told not to let it go and learn from the experience, but to treat it like a trauma. At the same time, men live in fear of the dating app panopticon. In a post-MeToo world, one wrong move could see them cancelled, their name and face plastered across the internet. 

None of this is to say that women shouldn’t take sensible precautions when going out with people they meet on apps. But they shouldn’t feel the need to conduct FBI-esque background checks on these men, or think that an awkward first date is a source of genuine psychological harm. Similarly, men who lie, cheat, and ghost should get their comeuppance in private. But they don’t deserve to have their lives ruined, with the entire internet for an audience.  

The demonisation of men and victimisation of women isn’t healthy for either sex. It’s damaging for the fabric of society, too, when one half of the population has an innate distrust of the other. How are people supposed to build happy, loving, well-adjusted families if they’ve been taught to regard their partner with constant suspicion? How are people going to build any families at all if they’re too afraid to even interact with the opposite sex? 

The Tea app is unlikely to make dating safer, easier, or even more enjoyable for anyone. It is yet another example of how vicious the gender wars are becoming, and how insane online cancel culture still is. When everyone is cast as either a victim or a villain, no one stands a chance.