Grindr is warping perceptions of intimacy

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Grindr is like a bathhouse open 24-hours a day right on your phone. Although the gay dating and hookup app can be a convenient way for queer people to connect, unless you’re geared toward no strings attached interactions, it’s unlikely you’ll find lasting relationships.

Now central to gay male culture, Grindr may be promoting harmful norms for what young gay men perceive as intimacy within our community.

Meeting other gay people in real life is hard, and seeing your straight friends find people to talk to so easily can make you feel left out. Internalized homophobia causes many gay people to try to act ‘straight passing,’ which makes it harder for gay people to find and connect with each other.

It’s understandable why so many young gay people, including myself, have turned to Grindr. Depending on what you’re looking for, you can have some good experiences on the app, but its potential to damage our perception of intimacy is undeniable.

Attention sparks instant gratification, making the app addictive for those who use it as a form of escapism. The excitement from talking or meeting up with someone you find attractive can be validating. But this relief is an empty, temporary stimulant. It’s like gambling, you never know when you could score so you stick around and keep trying.

The app’s culture also upholds narrow beauty standards that contribute to lower body satisfaction and magnify the long-held image of what the desirable gay male body looks like: either very muscular or thin, fair skinned, able bodied and exerting a certain level of masculinity. It’s even common to see accounts list their racial preferences or include lines like “masc4masc” or “no fats, no fems.”

There have been plenty of Grindr horror stories. Some older men seek out young, barely legal boys for sex. Consent can be an issue, especially if it’s someone’s first sexual experience and the other person is eager. There are safety risks to meeting up with strangers that could lead to STDs, assault or outing if they’re still in the closet.

Recent Syracuse University student Miles Lamp reflected on his experience using Grindr on-campus before orienting himself towards long-term relationships. He found that changing his appearance to fit conventional norms led to more attention received from other users on the app, pointing to its discriminatory culture.

“As someone who has struggled in the past with self-image issues relating to weight, acne and other factors, I’ve found the community on Grindr focus heavily on the glorification of attributes such as whiteness, weight and conventional attractiveness,” said Lamp. “Growing up in a place as diverse and populous as Southern California, I had not experienced the same amount of discriminatory interactions as I did when I came to a smaller and less diverse community like the one in Syracuse, which was a massive culture shock for me.”

Many users don’t even have a profile picture, and the ones who do rarely display their face, often showing only their headless, shirtless torso. Because the app is designed for finding sexual partners, repeated rejection and objectification from others is common. The act of receiving lewd comments and unsolicited nude pictures from strangers becomes normalized, and you can even filter the people you see by their body type and sexual position.

“All of those kinds of exclusions and privileges of certain kinds of bodies that we see on Grindr absolutely are not new to Grindr,” said Erin Rand, an SU professor focused in queer theory and queer rhetoric. “Those are things that have been there all along and existed in physical spaces whether that be gay bars or the less formalized hook up spaces all the way through the start of the internet.”

Gay men have disproportionately higher rates of anxiety and depression compared to heterosexual men, and Grindr can be used to relieve negative emotions. Lamp remembered when he would struggle with his self-image or had a bad day, the instant gratification from taps and messages from people who wanted to hook up with him would provide a temporary satisfaction. But the attention eventually led to him feeling worse; men would only see him for his body, not who he is.

“Many times the fickleness of people leads to them bombarding you with texts one minute asking to meet up but immediately ghosting you once a better option makes themselves available, which is incredibly detrimental to the person on the other side of the equation,” said Lamp.

I myself have experienced rejections on Grindr where I’ve been flat out told I’m ugly. I’ve had multiple conversations that resulted in me getting blocked after sending a picture of my face. Although no one is entitled to anyone’s attraction, receiving that level of rejection on the basis of appearance from peers you’re trying to connect with is extremely hurtful. Especially since gay men already have lower body satisfaction on average compared to straight men.

“Weight stigma and related issues like eating disorders seem to emerge from the male gaze. You see people being concerned about weight who are concerned about attracting men, whether that be gay men or straight women. Those are the populations that seem to have this shared experience,” said Rand.

Rand wonders if Grindr’s centrality to what it means to be a gay man today is setting an unhealthy standard for young gay men when it comes to sexual desire.

“Like what it means to be gay male is to have Grindr on your phone and be in pursuit of sexual hooks up with other people with a certain kind of regularity,” said Rand. “If that’s what you see your friends and everyone in your community doing, then how would you go about imaging different forms of intimacy?”

Grindr is the newest incarnation in a long tradition of spaces designated for connecting queer people, but my experience with the app often left me feeling more lonely and comparing myself to others. I’ve shamefully deleted and redownloaded the app multiple times. I started basing my self-worth around the validation I would receive from other men, creating a vicious cycle through which people were to be consumed rather than understood.

There is nothing wrong with hooking up, if that’s what you want. But rather than accept a platform that promotes purely sexual interactions as our only option for connection, we should allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to intimately and emotionally connect with each other. We shouldn’t let the male gaze define our worth but love ourselves for exactly who we are right now.

Brian Joseph Cohen is a junior Magazine, News and Digital Journalism major with a Sociology minor. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at bcohen10@syr.edu.