NYT – [S]tarting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.

“Almost 20 percent of all Grindr messages” already use emoji, its creative director, Landis Smithers, said. “There’s this shift going on culturally and we need to follow the users where they’re taking us.”

That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols. An additional 400 are there for the unlocking by those willing to pay $3.99 to own digital icons arranged in categories like Mood, Objects, Body, and Dating and Sex.

“The core of what’s happening with emojis, or Gaymojis, is that they take some of the pressure off coming up with something to say in the windowless box that is an online conversation,” Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who is writing a book about how the internet is changing language, said this week from the South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Tex. “It’s, ‘Here’s some clever images so I don’t have to come up with a witty pick up line.’ You’re not trying to communicate anything in particular so much as signaling your desire to continue the conversation.”

Last week on Swipe Drunk Love, Robbie Fox mentioned how he didn’t feel like he could use an eggplant emoji on social media because it’s not an accurate representation of his dick. He wanted equal representation for equal emoji genitals. And now a few days later, here we are, swimming in a cornucopia of personalized dick emojis, a truly bountiful blessing of all sorts of sexual implications for whatever fits the mood. And more interestingly, apparently this whole Gaymoji thing was a big part of the reason a Chinese gaming company bought a 60% stake in Grindr last year:

Some were perplexed by the sale last year of a 60 percent stake in Grindr to a Chinese investment conglomerate specializing in online gaming. And yet to those who saw in an app that describes itself as the world’s largest all-male social media network an eroticized version of Candy Crush, the move seemed all but inevitable.

As if hooking up via an app wasn’t already easy enough, particularly for dudes on Grindr, now they can send an emoji that says just about anything imaginable. Want a dude with no armpit hair? Emoji. An unclipped chocolate eggplant dick? Got you there too. Looking for a nice peach ass served up on a platter for you? Day one Gaymoji design. It’s a little something for everybody trying to fuck a random person over app with a minimal amount of effort. You’ve got to admire the commitment to making internet hookups as emotionless and low friction as possible, sounds like a billion dollar idea to me.

But it’s not all sunshine and cum and rainbows. Some people are a little perplexed by how aggressive some of the drug emojis are:

Who among us hasn’t used a dating app to barter sexual favors for meth? Growing up, that’s what we used to call Thursdays around my house. Pair that with the simplicity and expressiveness of an emoji and frankly you’d be a fool not to be rolling with some Gaymoji as part of your arsenal. Drugs, butt stuff, shameful memories and unconventional usage of a hemorrhoid pillow, it’s all at your fingertips.

(h/t ED)