Are Hookup Apps Virtual Cruising Spaces?

On Social Media and Form (Pt 1)

If you’re one of the people I bother regularly with my rants in the meatworld, you probably know that I’ve long wanted to write some stuff using the tools of the academic humanities to think seriously about the formal choices of social media apps.  There’s lots of good quantitative social science research on the effects of social media (when Facebook isn’t banning the researchers from their platform for getting PR-nightmare results), but I haven’t encountered a lot of stuff thinking deeply about the qualitative design choices of apps.  One of the basic insights of the humanities as a branch of study is that cultural artifacts make stylistic choices in excess of their functions and that various cultural structures, assumptions, and meanings are embedded in those stylistic choices.  Or in other words, there are a lot of ways to tell a story.  Most of what literary scholars do is puzzle over how those ways of telling a story emerge from, participate in, and sometimes even shift the cultural context surrounding them.  If you study literature intensively for a living, it’s hard not to notice its steady decline from its place as the privileged site of bourgeois entertainment and aesthetic debate in the nineteenth century Western world to its current place more as an outmoded preoccupation of weird specialists, industry insiders, and lonely kids.  So I’ve long wanted to take some of the tools developed for the intensive scrutiny of this cultural form and turn them toward one more thoroughly involved in the construction of the day-to-day cultural context I live in.  Today we’re gonna talk about gay hookup apps!

One reason I care about these humanities tools is that they give us a way to describe what social possibilities are opened up and foreclosed by the stylistic choices that go into our cultural forms without simply arguing that they’re good or bad for achieving some desired end.  If you’ve ever been in a place to talk to some gay men about hookup apps, they’ve probably either told you some bad stuff the apps might be the cause of (a breakdown of in-person social skills and connectedness, a subjection to a humiliating economy of desire where you’re forced constantly to compare yourself to a grid of grimacing sexy bodies just to get laid) or some good stuff they’ve helped out with (a way for isolated young gay men to begin exploring the sexual world without having to rely on who they know in their hometown, a safer and more efficient means of getting needs met, a greater connectedness in areas with a lower population density of gays).  These sorts of claims are probably best addressed with those quantitative social science tools.  But I want to think about the design choices of gay apps—the one I’m most familiar with is Scruff—and what assumptions about desire, bodies, and communities are embedded in them with a little more specificity. 

A way into this question I think might be first to think of a claim about design that I often hear older gay men making: the apps aren’t (or sometimes, are) virtual cruising spaces, ones that act as a poor (or good) substitute for the gay bars of old.  The rise of apps coincides with the fall of gay bars.  I don’t think this correlation is entirely causative, as it also coincides with a whole lot of other cultural changes around gay legal rights and social acceptance, as well as shifts in population dynamics, labor costs, the income of the middle class, etc., but it’s clear that to some degree people have understood these “virtual spaces” to fulfill similar functions to the physical space of the bar.  I think the comparison between the form and experience of cruising in these two spaces is a great jumping off place to start thinking about my questions.

Embedded in the design of apps like Scruff is a theory of desire.  To sign up for Scruff, you make a profile.  Already, this is an assumption: the basic unit of Scruff is the profile, attached to a real, persistent individual who has a real-world identity.  Desire is assumed to attach to individual people and not particular places, scenes, or activities; it’d be rather difficult to use Scruff to arrange the kinds of anonymous orgies that once took place at late-night cruising spots in dense urban areas or even the kinds that you might facilitate by the former Craigslist personal section, where you could proposition people for a particular activity or a site while remaining anonymous as an individual.  This already aligns Scruff a lot more with the bar as a space for cruising, which tends to have a persistent group of users with particular identities, along with the occasional unknown or ingénu.

But what kind of individual does Scruff imagine compared to the bar?  You are encouraged by the app to fill in a particular set of discrete traits that distinguish you from other individuals: height, weight, degree of hairiness, HIV status, a self-identified category of gay slang that may or may not encompass these other ones (otter, bear, “boy-next-door,” whatever that is, etc.).  The existence of these categories in the app presents a theory that desire can be broken up into discrete qualities and, more obviously, that the qualities selected by the developers are the most salient ones in determining desire.  Most insidious of these salient categories, of course, is race/ethnicity—a category that, mercifully, can no longer be filtered on after a whole lot of PR pressure, but whose very presence in the app reflects and reinforces a social injunction that we desire in this particular way.  Combined with all of these categories is a single profile photograph.  While informal polling of friends suggests to me that most people start with the profile photo in winnowing down their potential partners, the design of the app in fact suggests that these categories are primary in our desire: users are given the option to filter what results they see by these categories.  It is possible to foreclose encountering a man above 5’ 8” entirely with the push of a few buttons.

In comparing this to the individual encountered at the bar, it is important to say that bars have their own foreclosures.  While I don’t think I know of a bar that forbids entry to men below a certain weight, one’s cruising options at a bar are, of course, limited to patrons of the bar, which are themselves determined by specific design choices and emergent social networking effects.  Apps are, in a certain way, more inclusive than this: while some of them have more niche userbases, generally those userbases are far larger than the patronage of the local leatherbar.  And, likewise, doing your cruising at a leatherbar or a sweaterbar or whatever makes certain assumptions about what kinds of things are salient to your desire; it does so, however, with a much more ambiguous kind of grouping than the rather discrete and data-driven categories of height and weight.  Indeed, this extends to the way that one encounters individuals at a bar: if the individual Scruff holds up for your inspection is a pile of data points in pre-chosen categories, attached to a photo and some user-inputted text, the individual one encounters at a bar is messier, less pre-categorized, more dynamic.  One encounters not a photo but a body, in its three-dimensionality, in its movement through the world, in its mannerisms and gestures, in its micro-interactions with service staff and friends.  (Just to re-emphasize, I am not arguing that it is necessarily juster or unjuster to desire someone’s character based on what you can observe of their ability to move fluently through the social scene of a bar versus what you can glean of how they choose to input text into a few fields on an app; it merely allows for some possibilities and closes down others.)  I will, however, pretty emphatically say that I think the filtering feature on apps is insidious.  With a few clicks, a user can exclude all profiles that don’t fit a certain pre-chosen category from his field of vision.  At least at a bar, whatever pre-existing categorizations go into who chooses to patronize that bar, one must still encounter the full corporeal presence of bodies that one would not have expected in advance to desire.  And perhaps, in the presence of those bodies, with their whole Gestalt of mannerisms and charm and gestures and features, we can be convinced that the categories along which we thought we desired are not so fixed as we thought.

This ability of the individual to foreclose certain encounters on apps brings me into another point where the design of apps departs from the encounters of the bar.  Once you have your grid of faces and DM’d pickup lines on an app, all the work of figuring out whether the initial thrill of desire is worth following through is put onto you, as one individual.  Apps are, as I said, oriented around the individual profile as a unit.  The only form that interactions can take once you have felt that initial spark of mutual desire is the one-on-one DM.  The labor of vetting a potential partner that is potentially communal at a bar is thrown onto the individual.  At a bar, one can turn to a friend and ask whether the guy you’ve eyed is a good fuck, whether he’s racist, whether he treats people with kindness, whether he knows what he’s doing when he says he can do a scene.  All of that, in an app, must be assessed through DMs (you of course have the option of talking about people outside the app, but again, we’re talking about design choices here).  Like any style choices, this opens up some possibilities and forecloses others; while this means a re-imagining of sexual encounters as purely individualistic, it also means a decentralization of those encounters and their removal from larger social context.  The communal labor of vetting sexual encounters at bars can also become a concentration of social capital.  The bar space partly assumes that sexual encounters take place in a larger social context: our desires may be shaped by those of the in-group, by status seeking, by looking at whom all the other guys are looking at.  On the apps, encounters are removed from that immediate social context (though of course they still take place within the larger political forces that shape what we desire); there’s no public to impress by going after that particular guy.  (Scruff does, however, reintroduce this aspect of desire to some degree in the form of its global grid of “most woofed” guys, which, similarly to the filtering function, I’m going to be less even-handed and say seems to serve no function other than trying to emphasize sex as a competition of social capital with winners and losers, exploiting people’s social anxieties to drive engagement metrics.)

While some of this may seem rather critical of apps as a form of cruising space in comparison to bars, I do want to emphasize that I think they open up many social possibilities, too.  In addition to allowing people to explore connections outside a larger social gaze (however limited that may be, as DMs also enable kinds of harassment that would be less likely to happen at a bar), I think there’s social possibility inherent in just how connected they make all of us.  Bars require population densities.  They require ability.  They encourage persistent groups of users who have disproportionate levels of control over the atmosphere and aesthetics and desires of the space.  Apps, in transforming us all into individuals interacting with other individuals with no geographic limitations, simultaneously have the potential (though very often not realized due to the structural forces that shape desire) for people to carve out narrower niches than a bar can, as well as exposing people to a wider variety of niches of desire that are not locally available.  A couple years ago, a guy from the small rural town I grew up in in northern Illinois friended me on Facebook.  I no longer identify much with my hometown, but he seemed really nice, and I was interested in chatting with him for a while.  It quickly became clear that he was familiar with the stylized kinky interactions of pup play, and he filtered his flirty conversation with me through them.  To this day, I’m kind of astonished that apps have enabled niche sexual aesthetics to proliferate to the degree that a guy from my tiny, conservative hometown was able to communicate in a language of desire that we share.  Previously, porn was the only mass medium available for communicating and solidifying these sexual forms.  But porn isn’t social in the way hookup apps and other social media are.  It was not just a category of desire we both recognized, but a whole language for stylizing, communicating, and playing around with desire that we were able to share across our vast geographic and cultural distance.  We can (and perhaps should) worry about this mass-mediation as a kind of homogenization of desire, but I think it also opens up new possibilities for sharing.  (Which will bring me to my next topic in this series: Twitter porn.)