Is Tinder Eugenic? A Yale Student’s Perspective
Mayah*, a junior at Yale, writes about how current dating practices, often tied up with conceptions of elitism, connect back to histories of eugenic matchmaking.
*Mayah Monthrope ‘25 (she/her) is a junior at Yale University, majoring in History of Science and Medicine.
Illustration by Sorah Park
Ellsworth Huntington, president of the American Eugenics Society (AES) from 1934 to 1938, was concerned about declining birth rates among people with ideal characteristics relative to those in “other classes of society.” In a 1936 letter to Yale University Department of the Social Sciences, Huntington proposed a collaboration with AES to study the opinions of Yale students regarding mate selection, marriage, and reproduction at Yale. The survey included questions such as “how many children would you have?” and “would you consider the hereditary background in the choice of a mate?” Any insights would then be used to shape future eugenic policies. One idea he came up with was a tiered monetary incentive system, encouraging educated people to have children. These ideas perforate into media consumed by university students, encouraging them to seek out ‘equally matched’ mates to create good, eugenic families.
A snippet from Ellsworth Huntington’s Letter to the Yale Department of Social Sciences
The legacies of eugenic matchmaking live on today. There are a handful of social media platforms and dating services aimed at creating eugenic partnerships between elite individuals. For example, Keeper is a matchmaking service that aims to match ‘high quality’ individuals with one another, with marriage and children being the end goal. They are attempting to solve the birth rate ‘crisis’ by using artificial intelligence to create marriages that produce children. They are a pronatalist service that believes the world needs more astronauts and inventors, thus people need to have more children. Furthermore, Keeper CEO, who goes by the pseudonym Indian Bronson, recently spoke at the Natal Conference on December 1st, 2023 alongside controversial figures like Razib Khan and Simone and Michael Collins. Keeper does not explicitly say that they only want a specific type of child born, they hint at what they mean throughout their website. The world population is predicted to plateau, not drop off dramatically. Framing the higher birth rates of Black and Hispanic populations relative to the declining birth rates of White and Asian populations in the United States and globally as a crisis shows where their priorities lie. Furthermore, in their mating standards calculator, the default options are set to finding a white male with a salary of at least $250,000. Keeper’s mission echoes many of the goals of Huntington’s eugenic project.
A less intense legacy is found in dating apps like “The League” – perhaps a play on the Ivy League – screen users ‘desirable’ traits like elite schooling which developers take to mean intelligent potential partners. Users must verify their identities by connecting their LinkedIn accounts, automatically including education and career information in one’s dating profile. While founder Amanda Bradford insists that her app is not catered towards the elite, instead is for ambitious people who prioritize education. Despite her morally-neutral descriptors, the users accepted onto the platform skew wealthy. Bradford stated in a 2015 LinkedIn post, “the women in The League have consciously prioritized their education and career trajectory: 98% have college degrees, 8% are PhDs, 30% have advanced degrees, 14% are director-level or higher, 21% are managers, 13% are CEOs and 39% are estimated to be making six figure salaries. This is compared to the overall United States female population, of which only 33% hold college degrees, 13% have advanced degrees, and 18% earn six figures or more. It is hard to deny that this dating service ends up matching elite couples. Fostering relationships between similarly ‘desirable’ individuals was the explicit goal of leaders of the eugenics movement like Ellsworth Huntington. These courtship guidelines live on today, in much softer forms. Dating apps are frequented by Yale students when other elite students come to town for sporting events. For example, Harvard and Yale students set their locations to the same school prior to The Game to find possible mates at the opposing team. Current Yale students joke about having to peruse dating apps to secure a bed for their stays in Cambridge.
I am certainly not trying to say that every Yale student looking for a date is a eugenicist, however it is good practice to consider the origins of our dating preferences. Eugenic practices cast their long shadows over even meaningless jokes.