Gay Dating App HER Launches New Feature for Pride Month
Contributed by: kellyseal on Monday, June 26 2023 @ 09:38 am
Last modified on Monday, June 26 2023 @ 09:47 am
Dating app HER has launched “Thirst Mode,” a new feature in time for Pride Month.
Thirst Mode[*1] offers HER users 60 minutes per day of unlimited likes, the ability to see who has liked them, and a chance to move their profiles to the top of the heap for more visibility, according to Cosmopolitan. This feature is intended to showcase that the dating app is prioritizing hookups as well as relationships, especially during Pride. The company found in a recent survey that 40 percent of its users were hoping to hook up with a friend this month.
HER was launched primarily for the lesbian singles community, but has now expanded to include “FLINTAS” (female, lesbian, intersex, trans, and agender singles).
The feature will be free during Pride month for all users, according to Cosmopolitan[*2] . After that, it will be a premium feature that costs $5.99 per month for those willing to pay.
HER said of the new feature to Cosmopolitan: “Companies are out here ‘celebrating’ queerness by charging an arm and a leg for mass-produced merch and lame events. It’s giving gatekeep, it’s giving tacky, it’s giving not-our-style.”
The company’s survey also found that Gen X singles were among the app’s horniest users, with 50 percent saying that their “ideal Pride hookup is a threesome or group sex,” according to Cosmopolitan. Thirty percent of those surveyed said they would prefer to hook up with someone regularly, while Gen Z were the least interested in hookups, according to the survey results.
HER has also been publicly advocating for more inclusion on its dating app. In recent weeks, the company issued a notification to all its users, encouraging any transphobic people on the app to delete HER from their phones.
“We have a very big thriving lesbian community on HER, and so we want to make that message really clear,” Robyn Exton, who founded the platform in 2015, told NBC News[*3] . “All lesbians are welcome and celebrated on HER — trans lesbians, nonbinary lesbians.” She added that she and her colleagues were pushing against the narrative that lesbian identity is “owned by cis[gender] lesbians,” or lesbians who do not identify as transgender or non-binary, according to NBC.
Some users took to Twitter to complain about the move, and HER’s account was suspended for 24 hours after people on the platform reported it as hateful. Twitter has been loosening its language that protected transgender people online, which contributed to the problem.
Exton added that 12.5 percent of their 20 million users all over the world identify as transgender or non-binary, and she hopes to make the platform feel more inclusionary.