The Tinder Experiment: When Red Flags Still Get Swipes
It read:
> “I have a criminal record because I was abusive to women.”
No sugar-coating. No excuses. Just a blunt confession — the kind of thing you’d expect to end a dating profile instantly.
But instead, within 48 hours, that fake account had racked up over 800 matches.
When I first saw it, I wasn’t shocked — just curious. I questioned how real it was, sure. Maybe it was a social experiment. Maybe the numbers were exaggerated. But even if it wasn’t real, I had no trouble believing it could be. Because everything we know about human behavior — and dating apps — says it’s completely possible.
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Looks First, Logic Later
If the image used in that article is the same one from the Tinder profile, I get it.
You could easily see 10–15% of women swiping right immediately — without even reading the bio. That’s not an insult; that’s just how Tinder works. It’s swipe-first, think-later. Most people don’t even glance at the text before matching. They see a face, make a snap judgment, and move on.
And once that initial wave of swipes starts, Tinder’s algorithm does the rest.
Every like, match, or message boosts a profile’s visibility. So once the first 100 or so women engaged, the app started pushing that face to even more users. By the second day, those 800 matches in 48 hours make perfect sense — especially for a guy who looks like he walked off a movie set.
So before we even get to moral questions, we have to admit the obvious: a man’s looks can override the content of his character — and the system rewards it.
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The Bundy Effect
We’ve seen this behavior before. It’s not new, and it’s not rare.
When Ted Bundy was on trial, women showed up to the courtroom smiling, waving, and even flirting with him. Some sent love letters. A few proposed marriage.
Richard Ramirez — the Night Stalker — got married while on death row.
Charles Manson had groupies.
Chris Watts, who murdered his wife and daughters, still gets messages and marriage proposals from women to this day.
This is what psychologists call hybristophilia — a documented phenomenon where people, primarily women, are sexually attracted to men who have committed violent crimes.
And it’s not some niche anomaly; it’s part of a wider pattern where danger and dominance blur into desirability.
The uncomfortable truth is that some people are drawn to control, power, or perceived danger. It’s not that they want to be hurt — it’s that they conflate intensity with passion, and dominance with confidence. The line between charisma and cruelty is thinner than people want to admit.
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The Fixer Fantasy
Then there’s the emotional side — the “I can fix him” fantasy.
It’s everywhere in culture: the broken man, the misunderstood bad boy, the one woman who can change him. From romance novels to Netflix dramas, that narrative gets recycled endlessly.
It gives people a sense of purpose.
“He’s not bad, he’s just been hurt.”
“I can show him what real love feels like.”
But that mindset often turns into a trap — because instead of falling in love with the person, people fall in love with the potential.
And when you mix that with the biological and social forces of hypergamy — the tendency to pursue partners who appear dominant, successful, or high-status — it’s easy to see how these patterns keep repeating. The same traits that define narcissists and abusers — confidence, assertiveness, emotional detachment — are often the same traits people label as “leadership” or “alpha energy.”
That overlap isn’t theoretical; it’s measurable.
In one study published in Frontiers in Psychology, women rated narcissistic men as more attractive, charismatic, and desirable for short-term relationships. They were less likely to recognize the manipulative traits beneath the surface, especially when those traits were paired with physical attractiveness.
So when people say “no woman would ever swipe right on that,” the data — and history — say otherwise.
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The Numbers Don’t Lie
Let’s do the math.
Let’s assume 15% of the total matches were bots.
Let’s remove another 10% for accidental swipes, and maybe another 10% who unmatched after actually reading the bio.
That still leaves roughly 300 to 400 real women who matched with a man whose profile literally said he was abusive to women.
Even if we’re conservative and call it 200 — that’s still a statistical flood, not an anomaly.
And that’s before accounting for Tinder’s visibility bias. Once a profile starts getting attention — likes, messages, engagement — the algorithm boosts it even higher. So by day two, the app itself is feeding more people into the cycle.
Which means the post didn’t have to be real to be believable — it’s believable because this kind of behavior already happens. The numbers make sense. The psychology makes sense. The history makes sense.
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If Men Could Get Pregnant, We’d Call It What It Is
Whenever conversations like this come up — ones about responsibility, attraction, or hypocrisy — somebody always throws out that familiar line:
“Well, if men could get pregnant, things would be different.”
Maybe they’re right. But not for the reason they think.
Because what that statement really does is highlight the same selective accountability that shows up everywhere else. It’s the idea that consequences only matter when they apply to someone else.
We live in a culture where women can joke about “toxic men” while still matching with them, just like men can joke about “crazy exes” they chased anyway. Everyone wants equality until it comes time to share the blame.
So let’s flip the question around.
If men could get pregnant, would they still risk it for people they knew weren’t good for them?
Would they still choose impulse over consequence and call it empowerment after the fact?
Probably not — and that’s the point.
Because if you strip away the gender labels and just look at the behavior, it’s the same story: people chasing what they want and then acting shocked by the results. The “if men could get pregnant” argument isn’t a feminist mic drop — it’s a mirror showing how inconsistent we all are about responsibility depending on who’s holding it.
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When Consequences Become a Strategy
And that’s the point no one wants to touch.
At some point, some of these behaviors stop being mistakes and start becoming strategies.
We act like everything’s accidental, like people are just ignorant or uneducated. But at a certain point, pattern equals intent.
If a woman keeps choosing men she admits are bad for her, that’s not bad luck — that’s a preference.
If a man keeps knocking up women he doesn’t want to be with, that’s not fate — that’s a choice.
The Tinder experiment just puts a mirror up to that reality. It’s not about dating apps. It’s about how we reward dysfunction when it comes in the right packaging.
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The Infantilization of Adults
That’s what this all comes down to — the modern habit of excusing grown adults from the consequences of their own decisions. We keep pretending people don’t know better. But they do.
They just don’t like what “better” requires.
It’s easier to swipe right and say, “Maybe he’s changed.”
Easier to ignore the red flag and call it a pink one.
Easier to say, “It’s society’s fault,” than to admit you made a bad choice.
We’ve created a culture where everyone’s a victim and no one’s responsible.
Where “I didn’t know” is the go-to defense for things everyone already knows.
Where people treat experience like education, but never learn anything from it.
We’re not getting dumber.
We’re just getting better at lying to ourselves about why we do what we do.
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Closing Thought
So no — I don’t care whether that Tinder post was 100% real or not.
Because the truth is, it didn’t need to be.
It was believable — and that’s the part that matters.
We’ve seen the data. We’ve seen the documentaries. We’ve seen the DMs and the comment sections.
If a man with a bio that says “I have a criminal record because I was abusive to women” can still get hundreds of matches in 48 hours, maybe the problem isn’t whether people read —
Maybe it’s whether they care.
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