Dr. Jennie Young’s New Book on the Rhetoric of Dating Apps
Dr. Jennie Young has turned a simple yet powerful idea into a phenomenon. The idea, which was inspired by a public scholarship/social media project she had started in 2023, has now evolved into a cultural movement, gaining traction across social media, earning high-profile recognition, and securing a major publishing deal.
By using applied rhetoric, writing or speaking as a means of communication and persuasion, and feminist theories, Dr. Young has developed a system that protects women’s physical and mental well-being and time as they navigate through the world of dating apps. Her Burned Haystack Method follows ten simple rules to curate the online dating pool to help find matches that are an actual fit for you. For example, instead of swiping left, she suggests blocking incompatible matches to prevent them from showing back up in the pool of potential dates. Instead of wasting your energy on toxic behaviors, these rules make dating apps incinerate the haystack to reveal the needle. Dr. Young’s methods led to Rolling Stone featuring her in an October issue, cementing her place in conversations about societal expectations and feminist ideals. Burn the Haystack: Decode Dating, Torch the Duds, and Make Room for Men Who Matter is forthcoming from HarperCollins in early 2026.
Her book deal came about after an agent found her through the Burned Haystack social media platforms. After entering a representational contract, Dr. Young’s agent did an amazing job handling the book proposal process. “The first week the proposal went out, we had four meetings scheduled with Big Five publishing houses, and I ended up signing with HarperCollins in a preempt deal,” she says. A preempt deal is when a company makes a strong offer to prevent bidding wars with other publishers later.
The most difficult aspect of the book writing journey has been finding the time to write while juggling her full-time job. Once she gets going, Dr. Young “can usually fall into a rhythm and crank out text fairly quickly; it’s getting the time, space, and energy to do it that’s been the challenge.”
HarperCollins has provided Dr. Young with an editorial, marketing, and publishing team that shares an understanding of the work that she developed. “It was important to me to work with a team that was okay with and supportive of my unapologetically feminist positioning; I didn’t want any pressure to ‘water down’ the method or to appease men,” she says. This team has supported Dr. Young as she navigates and learns the process of bringing her work to fruition.
Young’s other notable works include her essay, “Burned Haystack Dating Method,” which is set to be published by Bloomsbury Press in Feminism and Feminist Movements in America: An Encyclopedia of Ideals and Activism, edited by Sarah Kornfield, and “We’re All Christina Applegate,” which was featured in the fall 2024 issue of Spark: Celebrities and Our Decisive Moments, an anthology of creative nonfiction edited by Lee Fearnside.
Her favorite among her essays is one titled “Words with Friends,” which was originally published in the Bacopa Literary Review in the fall of 2016. This essay “was formed around an actual game of Words with Friends that my son and I were playing when he was in high school. It was an experimental (and challenging) format, and it’s different than anything else I’ve written.” This essay uses the words played to reflect on life and parenthood when your child is grown.
Dr. Young hopes that readers walk away from her work with a feeling that it was worth their time. In the future, she may extend her research to connect how Burned Haystack methodology can be applied to other aspects of life beyond dating.
The best piece of advice Dr. Young has for students just starting out in their literary endeavors is to act. “Just do the work. I know that sounds cliched, and it is, but it’s really true that ‘thinking about the work,’ ‘agonizing over the work,’ ‘talking about the work’ — none of that is actually ‘the work.’ Those things might happen too, but if you really want to be a writer, then you need to focus most of your energy toward the work of writing.”