“Bitch I Said Hi”: The Bye Felipe Campaign and Discursive Activism in Mobile Dating Apps

Abstract

This article examines the Instagram page for Bye Felipe, a feminist campaign where people submit screenshots of examples of harassment and sexual entitlement from men on online dating sites such as OKCupid and apps such as Tinder. I frame the campaign as an example of feminist discursive activism. The site owners collect contributions and aggregate examples of particular discursive patterns in hook up apps, in order to make collective political claims, a strategy that Tomlinson calls "intensification." I address the existing literature on cyber-misogyny and online harassment, and also research on previous similar campaigns such as Fedoras of OKCupid to discuss shaming as a political practice. I then draw out the patterns and concepts invoked in interventions and resultant discussions on Bye Felipe, examining the themes of rejection, silence and who has the right to silence, rape culture, and gendered sexual entitlement. I identify the political claims being made through the rhetorical strategies described in the first part of the article. Drawing on the work of McCosker on trolling as provocation, I discuss the role of repetition and rehearsal in the practice of discursive politics. Finally, through a discursive analysis of responses to the posts on Instagram and Facebook over time, I explore the ongoing and difficult boundary work around what constitutes appropriate examples for the site, and the articulation of feminist claims and discourses.

“I can be your Tinder nightmare”: Harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace

“…Women can -and many clearly do -discursively refute a marginalised position. As other research on Bye Felipe (Shaw, 2016) and Tinder Nightmares (Hess & Flores, 2016) has demonstrated, the Instagrams provide women with a resource to draw attention to sexism on dating apps and, indeed, counterdiscipline ''creepy'' men through witty takedowns and derisive laughter. According to Tweten (2015, p.206), ''Bye Felipe exposes absurd attempts and uses humour to take away some of the power the men's insults may carry''.…”

“…Most popular (and free) dating apps like Tinder, OkCupid and PlentyofFish present and are typically perceived as ''hookup apps'' (e.g. David & Cambre, 2016;Shaw, 2016). Although these platforms are not only used to seek casual sex (see Sumter, Vandenbosch, & Ligtenberg, 2017), they have garnered a reputation as ''meat markets'' and as the online equivalent of the ''seedy nightclub'' (Race, 2015).…”

“…In the analysis here, I do not explore the women's replies in the messages in depth, although it is clearly vital to theorise women's resistance as well. For those interested in reading further on this point, I point to Shaw's (2016) work on how posts on Bye Felipe are interpreted and discussed by Instagram communities and Hess and Flores (2016), who examine how women counter-discipline men's ''toxic masculine performances'' through Tinder Nightmares.…”

“…Thus, the joke here is that the phone's predictive text service keeps suggesting sex.) Their unsolicited sexual fantasies/demands convey a sense of sexual entitlement (Shaw, 2016) -framing it solely about what ''I want'', these men show little to no interest in what the woman's desires might be and whether she might even want to engage in such conversations. Yet in being unashamedly crude, the senders also demonstrate a kind of ironic knowingness that their messages are ''creepy'' or ''sleazy'' and may be met with reproach.…”

“…These Instagrams help expose the pressing and otherwise privately experienced issue of harassment and misogyny on online dating services (Hess & Flores, 2016;Shaw, 2016). With the introduction of apps like Tinder, online dating has soared in popularity in recent years and there are concerns that women and sexual minorities are exposed to sexually aggressive behaviour in these spaces, such as ''cyber flashing'' (Thompson, 2016) and even sexual assault committed with the aid of dating apps (Hopkins, 2016), at an unprecedented scale.…”