Colin Hodge does not look like a sex radical. With his perfectly symmetrical haircut, deep dimples, and casual cardigans, he seems like he’d be more comfortable on a golf course than at a swinger party. And yet, Colin’s company is one of the only dating apps that has committed itself to radical honesty and normalization of how and why we hook up.
Colin is a co-founder of Down, the app formerly known as Bang With Friends. BWF launched last year with a provocative logo picturing a hetero couple doing it doggy style, a how-to page that used pictorial condom instructions as the background, and the promise to hook you up with your Facebook friends who were DTF.
Despite an initial media storm that included some impressive viral action, no one really expected much from BWF. When I tried it out, the extremely rough app listed my grandpa and multiple gay besties as potential matches, and like many tech writers, I wrote it off a silly attempt by a few computer science geeks hoping to get laid.
The provocative name and explicit logo also meant that BWF caught a lot of flack for being too “fratty” and “bro-tastic” to ever succeed.
“We were never like that,” Colin told me over lunch in SOMA last week. “Every time we talked to press — obviously under the cover of anonymity at that time — it was very sex-positive. That is a huge part of our mission and the core of our company. We believe that if you’re interested in somebody, you should say your true intentions. Both genders should have the opportunity to really say what they want and not feel held back by the typical societal rules.”
Obviously this piqued my interest. Was the founder of Bang With Friends claiming a third wave feminist mission behind his hookup app? Could it be that Down is the respectful casual sex app we’ve all been looking for?
Colin said yes and I’m inclined to believe him. He pointed out that other popular hookup apps like Tinder and Grindr never explicitly state that they’re for hookups. There’s a certain wink wink, nudge nudge culture in the sex app scene, where euphemisms like “friend finder” are employed so that the founders don’t have to admit what is actually happening behind all of those matches. They’re the contemporary equivalent of those oddly shaped “personal massagers” women used to buy in department stores.
This sanitization of sex contributes to the wider culture of sex-negativity that Colin and his team at Down are trying to combat. Think about it: when our hookup apps can’t even admit that they’re facilitating sex between consensual adults, the bigger message is that we shouldn’t admit that we — those consensual adults — are having casual sex.
“We want this to be something that gets real world results and actually changes how people date,” Colin added. “We think dating itself should change and is already changing, for the younger generations. We want to be a part of that and we want to facilitate pushing the envelope in a more sex-positive direction.”
As the dating app scene gets increasingly crowded, it’s refreshing to find one that has a smart, thoughtful team that has spent hours upon hours figuring out how they can push us toward a more open and honest discussion about sex. I’d say even though Colin Hodge doesn’t look like a sex radical, his actions definitely speak louder than his button downs.
