Tinder is not the straight Grindr and never will be – so why are there not more venues for straight people to arrange casual sex? Moira Weigel investigates

My friend – call him Henry – thinks that we should start at the Equinox gym. But I don’t have a membership and another friend is insisting that we have to check out the Whole Foods on East Houston in Manhattan.



I’m intrigued: it had never occurred to me that a grocery store would make a prime pick up spot at 6pm on a Friday. But the place is crowded. Who knows who’s in here? The checkout line snakes around the stacked 24-packs of organic beer almost to the door. I am 95% sure that the willowy blonde hiding under her poncho while waiting to pay for her vegetables is Taylor Schilling, the star of Orange is the New Black. I can’t resist following her out, so I am standing on the corner playing on Tinder when Henry calls my name from across Second Avenue.

By playing, I do mean playing: I have been happily married for a year and a half, and am not looking for dates, just subjects to chat with. My editor asked me to write a piece on what seems to be a perennial question: why isn’t there Grindr (a dating app for gay men with a reputation for facilitating quick hook-ups) for straight people? In other words, why, after decades of feminism and sexual revolution, at a time when new HIV infection rates aren’t rising in the United States and contraception and abortion are legally available – at least for now – are there not more venues for straight people to have no-strings-attached sex? Why don’t more straight couples want it?

Why are there not more venues for straight couples to have casual, anonymized, No Strings Attached, sex?

I’ve heard the question many times before and I’ve disliked every answer. Most of them seem to boil down to stereotypes. They go something like: gay men are promiscuous. Straight women are frigid. Heterosexuality always has been, and always will be, a sad compromise between men who want to get as much sex for as little affection as women can wheedle out of them, etc. I think these stereotypes are both unkind and untrue. I wanted to see whether I could come up with something better.

Henry arrives and we cook up an experiment to try to answer my editor’s question. I reactivate my Tinder account. He gets on Grindr. We spend a night hopping from bar to bar together and see what kinds of romantic or sexual prospects each of these apps presents us.

I tell anyone I match with that I am in this for research as soon as meeting IRL comes up. Hey we’re all on here for something, one 28-year-old replies without missing a beat. But I still fret about the ethics of it. Because Tinder simply draws photos from Facebook, my husband is in most of mine.

I’m gonna go ahead and assume that’s your brother you’re with, one 32-year-old messages me.



Na. That your cat? I joke about the caged tiger he is crouching over in one of his.



Radio silence.

•••

My initial hypothesis is that Tinder is the Grindr for straight people. Of the different apps that tried to corner the market circa 2010, Tinder certainly seems to have been the most successful. However, Henry – who uses both – is skeptical of the idea that the two apps are comparable.

“Grindr has an immediacy that Tinder doesn’t; Grindr shows you only people who have logged on in the past hour, and you can see whether they are online at the moment. That immediacy makes hookups much more possible than I think Tinder does.”

Both Grindr and Tinder are mobile dating apps that rely on geolocation technology: they propose prospective partners in some proximity to your physical location. Grindr, which is geared toward gay and bisexual men, came first; it launched in 2009. Tinder followed in 2012. They are similar in purpose but their designs are different. Tinder displays just one person at a time, while Grindr presents a grid of active users, listed in order of how close they are to you in space.

“Grindr is different in New York,” the friend who recommended Whole Foods pointed out. “Anywhere else, you’re dealing in miles. In New York, it’s feet.”



It’s true. By the time Henry and I settle in a bar, the app shows 179 active users who are less than 10 minutes away on foot. One especially cute one appears to be within 20 feet but Henry shakes his head.



“You’ll never find him. He could be anywhere. He could live in one of the apartments upstairs. He could be walking by on the street.”

By the time Henry and I settle in a bar, the app shows 179 active users who are less than ten minutes away by foot

Henry seems to be right about immediacy: my half-hearted Tinder efforts do not generate much data. So I let my app idle and start up Facebook chats with a dozen friends and friends of friends who have agreed to speak with me about the subject of apps that let men look for men. As I do, I start to understand the problem with the design of our little experiment.

A friend, in his mid-20s, who currently works at the University of Michigan, put it this way in a Facebook message:

There’s a sort of sexualized hierarchy that is well understood among the different applications. I don’t know any gay people who cruise digitally on OkCupid. But it’s not at all uncommon on Grindr or Jack’d or Scruff. The ‘straighter’ an application’s user base, the more likely someone is to be either: 1) presenting as super mainstream or 2) looking for a LTR rather than casual sex.

By “LTR” the University of Michigan friend means “long-term relationship”. For the first-time Grindr user, browsing through other users – whose profile photos are arranged, like tiles, in a grid according to proximity (with filters by eg, age, if you like), and can be tapped to reveal a short profile – there is an entire lexicon to learn. Regulars, FWB, role, now, looking, POZ, hung, BB.

From the beginning, as I said, I was skeptical of my editor’s question: why isn’t there a Grindr for straight people? Why is there no quorum of heteros who want truly casual, convenient sex? In the research that I conducted for my book Labor of Love, I found that there were countless varieties not only of apps but of ways of using apps, of mobile phone enabled sexual communities and cultures. For instance, last November, I interviewed a group of trans women. They talked about using Facebook to meet and screen dates, for who might be dangerous – or simply promiscuous, serial daters in their community, fetishists, fantasists

“Sometimes you go out with a cis guy,” one African American woman in her late 30s guffawed, “and you think, ‘This is great. This guy is holding his head up high, walking with me, walking his truth.’ Then you find out he lived his truth with the last hundred trans women! You have a hundred mutual friends and every single one is a member of the community. You find out he’s been with all of them”

•••

In casual conversations about dating apps, I have often heard friends refer to how men are or women are. How gays are or straights are. Specifically, they often rely on stereotypes – for instance, that gay men are universally promiscuous or that women, gay or straight, do not really like sex.



We are accustomed to think of sex and love as eternal and unchanging. Tech entrepreneurs are therefore inclined to believe that if they could simply create the right widget to plug into eternal human desires and behaviors they could make untold fortunes. However, these are fantasies. The history of love, sex and dating show that our beliefs about romance and its rituals change much more dramatically over time than we tend to remember. As recently as 1905, advice columnists told straight young men and women that romantic interest ALWAYS had to be initiated by the female party – and her parents. More recently than that, LGBT folks were told that their desires were dangerous, deviant and would make them sick.

But dating apps that work well don’t work well because they capture any such essence of gender or sexuality. There is no one way all men or women desire; every person has his or her own sexuality. All successful dating apps succeed because they recreate versions of older dating institutions and experiences in a new, digitally networked form. And what Grindr seeks to approximate are specifically sites of LGBT liberation and community: gay bars, bathhouses, gyms and so on.

Successful dating apps succeed because they recreate versions of dating institutions in a new, digitally networked form

You can see it in the way they emphasize strangers mingling in space. You can see it in how many of the profile pictures literally depict muscled bodies with lockers in the background. Some friends I chat with lament the fact that these apps have replaced the significance of the brick and mortar bar, which was such an important institution of the gay liberation actions of the 1960s and 1970s. Henry emphasizes that today, in gay bars, the app lays a new kind of social network onto an old one; virtual and real space interact.

“Today, most men who go into gay bars alone, whether locals or tourists with mobile data plans, are on Grindr while at the bar, instead of interacting directly with new people around them,” Henry says. He demurs as to whether this is good or bad.

App users are building on these preexisting institutions, which were themselves created through decades if not centuries of development, tradition and political struggle – and not because they tap directly into something about universal “gay” nature. There is no such thing.

Those places had particular protocols, and they were different from the protocols of the straight singles bar.

There is a long history of entrepreneurs who saw the commercial potential of sexual subcultures that developed organically, and tried to make them “mainstream”– ie to make a “straight” version, as a way of scaling it. For instance, the founder of TGI Friday’s, the first singles bar in America, was inspired by the thriving gay bars he saw in the West Village in the 1960s. His gay bar for straight people made a splash for a while before being franchised into the internationally ubiquitous chain restaurant that has to be the least sexy place on earth.

This is why I was wrong: Tinder is not the straight Grindr and never will be. It more closely approximates the institution that its founders came out of, and the kinds of behaviors associated with it: not the bathhouse but the frat house, not political liberation but the college campus free-for-all.

This article was amended on 23 May 2016. An earlier version said the rate of new HIV cases in the US had fallen; in fact the rate has remained steady.

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