Sexual Objectification, Existentialism And Grindr?
What Grindr taught me about objectification and entitlement in American societyThis story begins with, what else, Grindr. For the uninitiated it’s basically Tinder for men who are attracted to other men. But the biggest difference is that, to quote Ben Kenobi from “Star Wars”, Grindr is a “hive of scum and villainy.” I don’t mind the people who just want to have a good time because responsible sex or dating, in general, is perfectly fine, but it’s those people that ruin it that really get me riled up. It’s those kids who talk constantly during the movie, the people at Starbucks who feel the need to order something that takes 20 minutes to make, that vocal minority that destroys the experience for the rest of us. Those people on Grindr are the men who feel entitled to have sex with you. For the longest time I didn’t know why an unsolicited nude pic enraged me or a guy randomly sending me his address made me uncomfortable. I realized the problem was they didn’t bother to find out what I wanted and what my needs were. They wanted sex and they didn’t stop to think that I didn’t. To them, I was nothing more than an object for their pleasure because they felt entitled to my body.
A quintessential example would be one man who messaged me simply saying, “I want you ur cute.” Putting aside the lack of proper grammar, I couldn’t figure out why the statement bothered me. After all he was complimenting me, so I should be grateful right? I discovered that it was because he, in a sense, denied me my right to choose. You may be saying, “It was just a benign message,” but language is performative. Our words often display, and reinforce, our internal ideologies. Saying, “I’m sorry,” is different than saying, “It was an accident.” Both have similar meanings, but one accepts personal responsibility and the other defers it. He didn’t ask if I wanted him. He could’ve asked, “Hey I think you’re cute, want to hook up?” However, all that mattered was that he wanted me. He then, obliviously, proceeded to send me pictures of his penis. I didn’t want to see his penis, but he didn’t give me much choice in the matter. According to existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, it is considered “bad faith” and the greatest evil to deny someone the inherit right of choice. Ain’t nobody gonna deny me of my right to freedom and question my Jean Paul, so naturally, I proceeded to tell him how inappropriate it was for him to send me pictures without my consent and he can’t just “want” me like some toy. He then called me an as*****. I thought it was somehow me being irrational and too sensitive, but in reality, he needed to reassert his dominance because I toppled his self-important sense of control.
I hope this sounds fairly similar to how some straight men treat women. To feel entitled to woman’s body and attention, to treat them as less than human, and to then blame the woman for his actions because she “dressed too provocatively” or because she “was asking for it.” This is the kind of thinking that perpetuates rape culture and victim blaming. I just get called some mildly offensive names through a phone, but for a lot of people, most often women, it becomes a serious problem of sexual violence or harassment. These people feel awful because our society has taught them to hold themselves responsible, that they deserve it. The more we understand that sex and intimacy is a privilege, not a right, the more of a chance we stand against the cycle of sexual violence and harassment.
www.theodysseyonline.com/sexual-objectification-existentialism-andgrindr
The Perpetuation of Hegemonic Masculinity on Grindr
Masc Only: Subversion and Appropriation of Discourses of Masculinity on GrindrAs society adapts to the widespread use of the internet, an ever-growing numberof means of self-expression have been created, taking advantage of media that lendthemselves to the performance of identity on a scale previously unimaginable. One ofthe ways that technology has been co-opted to facilitate human interaction is in so-called hook-up apps, which provide users with a space to both advertise themselvesand specify what they value in prospective partners. One of the groups that has mostavidly taken to this new medium is gay men, whose active hook-up culture andnuanced notions of identity provide a fruitful source for study. In this paper, I examinethe profiles of users of Grindr, the most popular of these apps, looking at the role ofmasculinity in their content. More specifically, I look at the different types ofmasculinity that these men identify with and the role of hegemonic masculinity andnon-relational sexuality in users’ self-presentation. Because these notions ofmasculinity and masculine sexuality define themselves in opposition to gay men andwomen, the users who self-present as more masculine are expected to display a highdegree of selectivity in their preferences as stated in their profiles. Gay anti-effeminacyas performed by “straight-acting” individuals also plays a role in dictating thepreferences of the men on Grindr, further complicating questions of identity and sexualpreference.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
I will be framing the Grindr user’s profiles within awider context of hegemonic masculinity as conceived by Connell (Connell andMesserschmidt 2005) and especially Kiesling (2007). Kiesling characterizeshegemonicmasculinity as established bycultural discourses that linguistically index the most valorized and powerful (hegemonic) masculinity in a given society. Particularlypertinent is Korobov’s research (2006:493) into the way that heterosexual adolescentsnegotiatenon-relational sexuality , the set of discursive and psychological concepts thatare associated with hegemonic masculinity, sexual objectification, voyeurism,hypersexuality, and obsession with physical attraction. While the literature hasgenerally focused on heterosexual men and their discourses of masculinity, the effectsof this hegemonic masculinity on other subjugated masculinities have been the subjectof many fewer studies.Among these, Michael Hall’s (2006) study of online discourse aroundmetrosexuality has particular pertinence to the discussion of gay masculinity, asmetrosexuals and gay men share the same practice of subverting masculinity andincorporating elements of femininity. His findings demonstrate many of the sameprocesses that men appear to use on Grindr, mixing feminine and masculine languageand gender expression, deconstructing both in the process. Also relevant is PatriciaWebb’s (2007) research on black heterosexual male identity in match.com profiles,which used dominant discourse from the culturally venerated white masculinity that ishegemonic in our society.In reference specifically to gay masculinity, Dowsett (2008) examines malediscourse among members of online communities for those interested in bare-backing(unprotected anal sex) and their inventory of traditional masculine language andlinguistic strategies.Clarkson (2006) discusses straight-acting gays that reject effeminate notions ofgay masculinity and criticize media representations (specifically the television showQueer Eye for the Straight Guy) that perpetuate gay stereotypes. Clarkson’s work isparticularly interesting for his subject’s view of heterosexual male masculinity as theonly acceptable means of being a man, a marker of internalized homophobia thatreturns stereotypical gay masculinities to a subjugated status or even a symbolic closet.This imitation of straight masculinities is one of the most curious aspects of theGrindr profiles, a part of the larger phenomenon of straight-acting gay men as explored by Taywaditep (2001), who frames their reaffirmation of masculinity within thecollective psychological experience of many gay men:defeminization , where children inmiddle childhood begin to be gender-policed by their peers, pressuring them toconform to traditional gender norms. Phua (2002) also touches on the anti-effeminate tendencies of gay men in his study of personal ads on Yahoo.com, characterizing thisadoption of dominant discourses as a sort of ‘giving in’ to heterosexism.METHOLODY
The data for this study were collected between the hours of 6 and 8PM on weekday evenings during April 2014. The location for the data collection wasUnion Square West, in a building bordering one of the busiest public spaces in NewYork City, providing a wealth and diversity of subjects. The hours for the datacollection were chosen to maximize the number of people in proximity, giving a samplethat would neither be exclusively working people (as it would tend towards during themiddle of the day) or young people (as it might tend to in the later evening).The object of interest here is the “About” section and the “Headline” on users’pages, usually a few sentences at most. By looking at what terms users choose to put astheir own self-descriptions, the discourses of masculinity that are being employed (orthat are being avoided) become clear. My hypothesis is that a minority (around 5-20%)of the profiles will either directly mention masculinity or employ the kind of languagethat effects a casual styled identity ( guy, dude, bro, man) that index masculinity (Kiesling2007:656).I will also examine the use of negative language in statements of users’ sexualpreferences. In this case, some examples of negative language areno femmes, masc only ,etc. Because conventional notions of masculinity are defined in opposition to otheridentities like women and gay men, and base themselves on the use of homophobiclanguage and misogyny (Kiesling 2001), one would expect more masculine Grindr usersto employ more negative language. Looking at the language used by the masculineusers and comparing it to the non-masculine users, I expected to find a positivecorrelation between self-professed masculinity and the use of negative terms to showsexual preferences.After I initially categorizing the profiles into either the masculine category (basedon user’s explicit self-identification as masculine or on their use of stereotypicallymasculine language such as “dude”) or the non-masculine category (the others), I willlook for several different traits in the profiles: overall length, specific mentioning of sexor sexual characteristics, use of humor and distancing (as a means of negotiating thenon-relational sexuality (NS) characteristic of hegemonic masculinity (Korobov2006:507)), and the use of negative language as mentioned above.RESULTS
Out of a total of 181 Grindr profiles recorded on four different dates, only33 (18.2%) could be categorized as masculine, while 148 (81.8%) remained in the controlgroup. Responses were categorized as masculine if they satisfied the following criteria.1. Use of the terms masculine, “masc”, or similar variations.
2. Use of the terms “bro”, “dude”, “buddy”, or “guy”, signaling male solidarity, acomponent of hegemonic masculinity (Kiesling 2006).
3. These terms must be referring to the user and not a hypothetical partner
For the control group, there was a much stronger tendency towards shorterprofiles (constituting 81% of the non-masculine profiles) than towards longer ones. Forour purposes, short profiles are fewer than 70 characters (spaces included) and longones are 70 or more. For the masculine profiles, around 60% were short and 40% werelong, indicating more of a leaning towards long profiles than in the control group.The percentages of profiles that explicitly mentioned sex, sexuality, sexualpractices or relationships are as follows: 33.8% of nonmasculine profiles and 39.4% ofmasculine profiles, an interesting similarity.The humor and distancing (attempts to qualify or otherwise explain the user’spresence on Grindr, or jokes about the format or on other subjects) were present in thefollowing levels in each of the two categories: 34% of control profiles and only 18% ofmasculine profiles.The use of negative terms was significantly more common in the masculine users’profiles than in the others. Masculine users used negative terms 54% of the time, whilethe control group used them only 34% of the time. This pattern follows the predictionthat masculine users would be more likely to put negative statements of preference intheir profiles
DISCUSSION
One a basic level, it’s important to note that a fairly small portion ofthe profiles were masculine, indicating that this group is in a minority within the largercommunity of users. Undoubtedly, this is partially a product of the stringency of therequirements for being categorized as masculine in this study, though the sizeableportion of the sample that did specifically self-identify using the select terms from above shows that this a population worth studying. Because of the small sample size ofmasculine users, these results could represent a skewed distribution, though in generalterms my findings are consistent with the literature.Among masculine users, a majority (60.6%) specifically used the termsmasculine ormasc , underlining the specificity of masculinity (and even of the word itself) to theconcerns of these men in the creation of their online personae. This obsession withmasculinity among straight-acting homosexual men has been described previously as both a use of masculinity as a “toy box” (Dowsett 2008) and as conforming to theoppressor’s rule (Taywaditep 2001). The latter view comes from a psychologicalreading of this type of discourse, explaining it as a product of the defeminization thatmost gay men undergo during childhood. Children that display gender nonconformityduring early childhood, even though most are defeminized during middle and latechildhood, are very likely to identify as something other than heterosexual in adulthood(Taywaditep 2001:18).Regardless of the root cause of this anti-effeminacy and hyper-masculinization,the fact that a majority of masculine users employ the kind of negative (and sometimesmisogynistic, anti-effeminate or racist) talk that often characterizes Grindr (Artrip 2013,Leclaire 2013) supports the existence of a link between self-professed masculinityamong straight-acting gay men and negative statements of sexual preference. Straight-acting gay men’s perform this kind of hostility towards femininity as a manifestation oftheir psychological denial or fear of being labeled as feminine because of their sexualorientation (Taywaditep 2001:13). This hypermasculine performance can even surpassthe presentation of real straight men, an imitation outdoing its original.At the same time that the masculine users try to conform to the language of theoppressor (heterosexual males), they also subvert the very framework that they aretrying to fit themselves (Dowsett 2008). This is done by rejecting key components ofhegemonic masculinity such as homophobia even while reclaiming and repurposing theaggressive non-relational sexuality that is fundamental to cultural conceptions of whatit means to be a man (Korobov 2006). The extent to which this non-relational sexualityis relevant to the users of Grindr depends on their own self-perceived masculinity. AsTaywaditep (2001:21) emphasizes, there is a varying level ofmasculinity consciousness among men, and while some men reject gender conformity and rise above the need to check themselves against hegemonic masculinity, others view masculinity as central totheir identities despite, or perhaps because of, their sexuality.Curiously, the control group and the masculine users’ had very similar levels(33.4% and 39% respectively) of explicit mentions of sex, sexuality, sexual preferences orpractices. This could simply be a product of the medium itself: on a hook-up app, it’sonly logical that a good portion of the users would explicitly mention sex. On the otherhand, it’s also possible that the role of sexuality (distinct from non-relational sexuality)in gay men’s lives makes it a pertinent subject to breach in the profiles for bothmasculine and control group users. Gay men, still being male, are perceived ashypersexual, sometimes even to a greater extent than straight men. This could also bethe potential source of the similarity between the two groups’ levels of sex discussion.One finding that was unpredicted was the preponderance of humor and otherdistancing techniques used by the men to characterize their own views of their use ofthe app, subject of both admiration and disapproval in different circles. The use ofhumor was relatively common within the control group, with 34% of them making jokes or self-referential comments about their use of the app or their sexuality. This wasmuch higher than the portion of masculine users that used humor or trying to distancethemselves from the app, only 18%. Among the masculine users, the profiles that madeup that 18% tended towards distancing rather than humor, as shown in the followingexample
Know what you want. No endless messages, no drama. Let’s just have some fun. Hairy masculine bi Italian HIV neg(tested 12/4/14) looking for no drama NSA fun. Into makingout body contact oral. I’m friendly, educated, open goodlooking and DL! Masculine and chill only. Work in chelsealive in BK. I have a face pic
This user reiterates his desire forno drama, a reference to effeminate gay men andthe kind of messaging behavior that the app is known for.No drama was repeatedseveral times in other profiles, though it was not as common as the requisite focus onpictures, specifically of the face, by the users. Though an understandable concern on ananonymous hook-up app, the obsession with face pictures presents itself nearly always
In harsh terms, marking an aggressive kind of sexuality not unrelated to Korobov’s non-relational sexuality.The humor used by the control group was particularly interesting, representing anumber of motives of use ranging from simply standing out from the crowd to cluing atthe users’ broader identity. There are a number of examples of users that use humor tohelp integrate their personal details without sounding trite:
Ready… for my dude. Yes, Sometimes I look a little hi. Yes, Iprefer Double-Stuffed Oreos over going to the gym. Yes, Iprefer a night in with some white wine, lovely music, andice-cream to boot!
ALSO LOOKING FOR 3 MOREROOMIES FOR 5br DUPLEX.
Architect nerd. Hello boys. Grammar, the little thing thatdifferentiates between “feeling your nuts” and “feeling you'renuts"I define myself. Straight forward, assertive, confident,always gets my attention. I don’t limit myself to a "type”.That’d be like trying to figure out my favorite flavor of Ben& Jerry’s. AND I don’t limit myself to a “role”. I’m equal partsub bttm and Top.
There also appears to be a need to distance oneself from the use of Grindrthrough the text of the profiles, an interesting phenomenon that merits future study.Often these expressions of distancing say that the user has “No agenda,” part of a largerphenomenon of assertions of authenticity that appears as well in the data:
lost all contacts/new account actually interested insomething of substance
Open minded, friendly guy usually with no particularagenda.
No agenda
Do any of you actually want to meet up?
No specific agenda. Sometimes in the mood to chat, sometimes more. I like athletic guys with a laid back andfriendly attitude
The fact that these users feel the need to assert that they have no agendaindicates that even the men who use Grindr associate the app with a particular kind ofsexual practice, namely the anonymous sexual encounters that gay men are notoriousfor (as opposed to an introduction to a longer, more intimate relationship). Users’ needto give a disclaimer about their own use of the app gives rise to the distancing and self-referential humor that the control group’s profiles exhibit disproportionately. Whywould it be that the less masculine users feel the need to qualify their use of the appwith a disclaimer while the more masculine men revel in the negative specificity that itsstructure provides? Perhaps the way that the social relations work on Grindr isevocative of the non-relational sexuality that lies at the core of our society’s definition ofmasculinity.Non-relational sexuality provokes the same sort of distancing and self-reflectivenegotiation (Korobov 2006) that the use of Grindr does. The anonymity of the app andthe objectification that it incites provide an interesting parallel to the non-relationalsexuality that Korobov’s subjects struggle to negotiate throughout their development.The self-reflexiveness and wit of the 15 year olds year olds in his study (Korobov2006:507) is their means to continue to practice non-relational sexuality whilediscursively distancing themselves from it. The non-masculine users of Grindr appearto do the same type of discursive distancing even while using an app that reinforces thesame kind of non-relational sexuality that Korobov discusses.
CONCLUSION
Evidently, there are a number of dynamics that influence the self-presentation of Grindr uses, coming from both the pressures of hegemonic masculinityand the influence of the perceptions the app itself. The men on Grindr show a wide diversity of profiles that associate them with many different groups, though oneparticular group is of interest as an example of the effects of hegemonic masculinity ongay male identity and sexual preference. This group is made up of the most eagerly self-identified men, professing their masculinity and often vocalizing their contempt for lessdesirable (feminine) users of the app. The patterning among this group of men shows apredilection for negative statements of preference, just as the control group of “non-masculine” men shows a tendency to humorously distance themselves from the app.Both of these tendencies can be understood within a framework of hegemonicmasculinity, where the dominant discourses of sex, gender and sexuality create socialrealities which are then re-affirmed by performative activities such as the creation ofhook-up app profiles. The influence of different cultural models of both straight andgay masculinities is also present in the profiles of Grindr users, though theirsignificance is not yet clear and could prove an interesting subject for future study. Thedynamic nature of identity and sexuality play a major role in the construction of theseprofiles. Moreover, the cultural indexes associated with the dominant masculinity canchange over time, necessitating a re-evaluation of gay masculinity and its relationshipto hegemonic masculinity in a time of rapid and sweeping societal change in acceptanceof homosexuality.Very interested the details about profiles text. For them check out in the link below
www.academia.edu/8042376/The_Perpetuation_of_Hegemonic_Masculinity_on_Grindr
