Being a Gen-Zer, I’ve grown up perpetually on the Internet.
Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube,Tumblr, BeReal. Distant connections and mediated screens are about the only thing I know. Most people call social media vapid and self-satisfying, and I think part of that’s probably true. But also, social media socializes you.
It teaches you. It reflects, It connects you. That last point is something I want to linger on.
As a queer kid growing up in the South in predominantly White Christian schools, I felt constantly isolated. Bullied, beaten, harassed, and heckled. I always knew at the end of the day though I could escape into my own personal cyberspace, my own neatly curated queer utopia. — Until it wasn’t.
When I turned 17, I was jealous of my classmates. Everyone’s experiencing their first kiss, first time, homecoming and prom dances. All of the straights feed off each other. Boys flirting with girls. Girls loving boys. It was their heterosexual utopia, and I knew I was disturbance being a “sexual deviant.” I wanted my own dream, my own fairy tale romance. I deserved that. Just like they did.
Then, one day, I clicked the app and plunged into a nightmare.
Techno-Dystopia
“Who’s that …. on your back?
“Well, actually, I’m that …:
A distant, fading memory in mind, but one where the feelings still rise. One of my first encounters on that dreaded app was with a White man, who ended up calling my the equivalent of a “nigger” in German before going on a long ass rant about why Black people and White people should never be together.
It was textbook racism straight out of the 60s. I’d always been trained to expect the whip of the master at any moment as a Black person growing up in the Deep South, but this was jarring. I felt like a distortion, a glitch. Like I didn’t belong. And honestly, that assumption isn’t too far off.
Encounters like this are fairly common for minority users of Grindr but especially Black folks. So much so that whole hashtags exist such as #grindrwhileblack to detail the abusive, gruesome, and eerie encounters Black people experience with racism. Anti-blackness has become a structural feature of Grindr.
Are these issues unique to Grindr? Hardly
Researchers in the social sciences have studied the effect of what they call “sexual racism.” Social Work professor Ryan M. Wade(no relation) defines sexual racism as “website users expressing preferences for partners of certain races, ethnicities, physical attributes, or stereotypical behavior.” Sexual racism destroys the possibilities of technology utopia. It breaks down lines of communication; it straight up halts some forms. It distorts personalities and turns people into commodities.
Oftentimes, the response is simply that preference is different from straight up racism. While I don’t doubt that, humans are social creatures that are constantly being socialized and inoculated with different values, norms, and ideals of what constitutes desirable or not. No one is free from bias, which is why we need to be doing everything in our power to interrogate what shapes our desires in the first place. According to Dr.Wade and his research partner Matthew Pear, sexual racism can have devastating effects on marginalized populations, but especially Black men as it can range on a spectrum of behaviors from exclusion from community-building opportunities to direct hate speech such as my own lived experience details.Sexual racism alone doesn’t account for the technological dystopia that hook-up apps have created.
Social scientists and some Grindr users themselves have detailed the level of toxic masculinity and cissexism that runs rampant especially on queer apps. This is most noticeable in the cultural phenomena of “masc for masc.” Gay men, just like straight men, are not immune to American culture’s hyperfixation on masculinity. Psychologist Justin LehMiller stated that because gay culture places such a heavy premium on masculinity “Feminine-acting men are seen as less desirable sexual partners.” Lehmillers and other esteemed company such as the American Psychological Association even agree that wholesale masculinity is not the issue. They argue that by constructing rigid and inflexible gender roles for men, men are more likely to suffer in the long run because of the expectations that masculinity comes with.
Stoicism, sexual aggressiveness, bravado–all traits that are uniquely gendered as masculine. When boys are socialized to cut off their emotions or only channel their negative ones like rage, men are going to be more likely to engage in interpersonal violence like bullying and hazing. If hetereosexuality– and aggressive hetereosexuality at that– is constantly pushed down boys’s throats, they’re going to be more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behavior like catcalling and not taking no for an answer. Masculine bravado is the engine that gets a man to mansplain something you already know about feminism or abortion laws. Or gets them to somehow think they have a far more complex understanding of another person’s reproductive system.
These gendered dynamics also leave trans men by the wayside. More than a few trans people that identify as either gay or bisexual have also detailed their unsavory experiences dealing with awkward moments, harassment, or violence, on the app. Black trans writer Jackson King talks about how cis-normativity and cissexism shows up in the digital hook-up space. He states that the behaviors range from getting a “swift block” despite explicitly stating he was trans before a conversation started, having to become an emotional coach and therapist for potential cis partners, to being on the receiving end of a “chaser,”’s attention( a colloquial term for someone who fetishes trans people). These dynamics create an environment that can often be toxic for trans and non-binary people. Because being trans or non-binary throws a wrench in the usual logics of how binary gender operates, cisgender people, but especially cisgender men, tend to respond in ways that can be deadly and unfavorable for all trans people.
Don’t believe me?
Cruising for Hope
Thankfully for me, I’m out of the digital cruising game. However, these issues are still prevalent, and speak to larger structural problems that will not go away with a simple flick of the hands. We can’t just think away years of oppression and domination. The path to stopping it lies in how we engage going forward.
Grindr, for all its fault, is looking for ways to address these issues. Methods the business has engaged to change these include removing the ethnicity filter and starting their Kindr initiative. Grindr’s Kindr program looks to discourage these problematic behaviors. Users are still allowed to have their preferences if that’s what they desire. However, profiles will be subject to moderation if they choose to participate in behavior that Kindr is trying to block against. This system isn’t full proof, and still leaves a lot to be desired.
In terms of our own interpersonal interactions, challenging anti-blackness , toxic masculinity, and cissexism is going to be crucial. We must constantly be interrogating and asking ourselves how we come to define people’s value, especially in a world where these structural problems persist. The road to utopia is long and winding. It may never come, or it may be on the horizon. Either way, we must march forward and work towards the world we want to live in.
