Female-oriented app Siren has pit itself against dating giant Tinder with a new campaign against objectification in the online dating industry.
Siren has teamed up with creative digital marketing agency Hello Velocity for the “More Than Meat” campaign, which wants to raise awarness about online objectification by challenging user perceptions and stamping out demeaning comments.
The #MoreThanMeat campaign aims to question the way people use online dating sites and the “shopping for humans” system it says currently exists, to say there is a more humane way of matching people together.
Siren CEO and co-founder, Susie Lee said: “Tinder feels like a crazy stupid frat party. That’s not honestly how you’d navigate your life most of the time.”
To do this, the collaborative team built a “meat face” filter, available on MeatFace.me, which lets users create an image of themselves with a piece of meat covering their face.
Siren then asked singles to post these images onto their Tinder accounts to turn the app into a “literal meat market”.
If people don’t have an account on Siren or Tinder, they can still take part by posting their “meat face” photograph on social media sites like Twitter.
And since the #MoreThanMeat campaign was launched in late June, over 1,200 MeatFace avatars have been downloaded.
In a blog post showing the results of the campaign, and the conversations it started, Siren said: “Once you’ve called attention to it, the Tinder dynamic is softened, leaving you with significantly more genuine human interaction. MeatFace effectively levels a skewed playing field, giving people a tool to “hack” Tinder to make it more conducive to real conversations, sans objectification.
“Of course ultimately, we believe that what we’re looking at is an argument for a different kind of dating interface altogether, one where people can connect over personality and humor in the first place instead of just mindlessly swiping through photos of potential matches.”
To read more about the #MoreThanMeat campaign and take part, please click here.