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. Henry seems to be right about immediacy: my half-hearted Tinder efforts do not generate much data. 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 He could live in one of the apartments upstairs. One especially cute one appears to be within 20 feet but Henry shakes his head. 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. “Grindr is different in New York,” the friend who recommended Whole Foods pointed out. 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. They are similar in purpose but their designs are different. Grindr, which is geared toward gay and bisexual men, came first it launched in 2009. That immediacy makes hookups much more possible than I think Tinder does.”īoth Grindr and Tinder are mobile dating apps that rely on geolocation technology: they propose prospective partners in some proximity to your physical location. “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.
However, Henry – who uses both – is skeptical of the idea that the two apps are comparable. Of the different apps that tried to corner the market circa 2010, Tinder certainly seems to have been the most successful. M y initial hypothesis is that Tinder is the Grindr for straight people.
That your cat? I joke about the caged tiger he is crouching over in one of his. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that’s your brother you’re with, one 32-year-old messages me. Because Tinder simply draws photos from Facebook, my husband is in most of mine. Hey we’re all on here for something, one 28-year-old replies without missing a beat. I tell anyone I match with that I am in this for research as soon as meeting IRL comes up. 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. Henry arrives and we cook up an experiment to try to answer my editor’s question. I wanted to see whether I could come up with something better. I think these stereotypes are both unkind and untrue. 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. They go something like: gay men are promiscuous. Most of them seem to boil down to stereotypes. I’ve heard the question many times before and I’ve disliked every answer.
Why are there not more venues for straight couples to have casual, anonymized, No Strings Attached, sex? 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? 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.īy 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. 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. Who knows who’s in here? The checkout line snakes around the stacked 24-packs of organic beer almost to the door. 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 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. M y friend – call him Henry – thinks that we should start at the Equinox gym.