Dating and hook-up apps have become a fundamental aspect of the gay community. They serve as helpful outlets for sexual and social exploration — but at the same time, they’re plagued with online discrimination. Breaking down the barriers of sexual racism inherent to such apps isn’t just important, it’s something everyone in and out of the gay community can benefit from.

Grindr, launched in 2009, is a mobile app designed to help gay and bisexual men meet other men in their area. As of early 2018, it reaches 196 countries and has 3.6 million users online on a daily basis. The app’s ability to connect gay and bisexual men also unfortunately comes along with demeaning language. Discriminatory “preferences” seem to be as fundamental a part of the app as its iconic notification sound.

Those so-called preferences are often linked to underlying social attitudes about race or sexuality. A study published in the October 2016 edition of the Archives of Sexual Behavior argues that sexual racism is “closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.”

Thomas Passwater, a composition and cultural rhetoric Ph.D. student at Syracuse University, pointed to the relationship between online “preferences” and deeply-held racial and social beliefs.

“It’s important to think about desire and sex in ways that aren’t inseparable from the culture of how we interact with people,” Passwater said. “Your ability to have preferences comes from your not having to live in other bodies.”

While there are people who speak out against these type of prejudicial “preferences,” the bigotry is still widespread. The app has been criticized for not taking sufficient action to prevent the display of offensive, racist and homophobic language by some of its users, but those at the helm have resisted stifling that sort of speech.

In 2014, when asked about offensive and racist speech on Grindr, the app’s creator, Joel Simkhai, said that he “doesn’t like it” but he isn’t “a sixth grade teacher” and it isn’t his “job to police such things.”

Blatant discriminatory preferences speak to the flawed hook-up culture apps such as Grindr promote. That culture, though liberating for many, disregards much of what makes us people. Preferences — physical, racial, sexual and so on — are often dismissed as indelible aspects of sexual identity, but they actually point to broader animosities.

Surprisingly, Grindr announced in September its Kindr initiative, a project to address racist, body-shaming or stigmatizing language within the app.

“Sexual racism, transphobia, fat and femme shaming, and further forms of othering such as stigmatization of HIV positive individuals are pervasive problems in the LGBTQ community,” said Landen Zumwalt, head of communications at Grindr, in a press statement.

While most people would likely condemn racist statements on the app, far fewer take issue with users dismissing racial groups they find unattractive. That disconnect — the inability to realize that language has cultural consequences — needs to change. Kindr’s first promotional video explores that covert racism.

Changing the dialogue about sexual preferences will be unquestionably challenging. But it is something we must do.

Our ability to recognize that we can still express personal preferences while not simultaneously denying other people’s humanity will be instrumental in that change. Deleting your prejudicial preferences doesn’t mean you have to start having sex with people of all races — it simply means that you have helped prevent the proliferation of a destructive racial hierarchy within the LGBTQ community.

While small changes to the way we express our preferences probably won’t trigger the kind of thinking necessary to uproot long-held social stigmas, doing so is a step in the right direction.

“We can’t just remove overt forms of discrimination and say racism is solved,” Passwater said. “But it’s a gesture toward progress.”

Efforts to moderate racist language and stigmatizing behavior aren’t just useful in the gay online dating community, though. Tenets of decency and respect are universal.

Dating, relationships, and hookups are ultimately about forging human connection. Rethinking the ways we speak about our differences allows us to more authentically explore the world around us and engage intimately with the incredibly diverse wealth of people it has to offer.

Michael Sessa is a newspaper and online journalism major. His column runs biweekly. He can be reached at msessa@syr.edu.

Published on October 28, 2018 at 9:07 pm