The Databasing of Sexuality

Do our hookup and dating app profile fields accurately describe us, or might they be nudging us instead to conform to them?

Once upon a time, in an era that probably seems like ancient history to some younger people, you had to engage in face-to-face, real-time conversations with someone before connecting for dating or sex. There were no other options unless you perhaps wrote a snail mail letter to someone who placed a personal ad in a publication with the entire back-and-forth process often taking many weeks.

Then came the internet. For queer and kinky people in particular, the internet opened up a smorgasbord of new opportunities to meet others for connections outside of a bar or highly curated private party. Even within mainstream heterosexual culture, the internet has proven to be beneficial in fostering a better sex and dating life. This has been a good thing. Mostly.

I say mostly because I believe that as is often the case in our world, when there are upsides, there are potential downsides.

Rather than people always finding hookup and dating app field parameters that perfectly fit their identities, orientations, or sexual proclivities, they instead simply pick the ones that are closest to who they are and how they feel at the time. I say at the time because I don’t think most of those identifiers or proclivities are fixed inside of us forever. We change. That means our sexualities and identifications change too. I’ve never considered such things static.

What has transpired because of now ubiquitous app-centric hookup and dating options is what I refer to at the “databasing” of sex. Whereas prior to online hookup profiles everyone had to have discussions to establish those sorts of parameters, now we just look at a few fields in a profile and assume we know all we need to know about the person. We don’t. Others don’t know all they need to know about us either. It makes the entire online hookup and dating process far more muddled than it once was.

Not only are such database fields an imperfect means of describing us and others, but I contend there is an opposing effect of the apps creating an atmosphere that nudges us to try to fit our otherwise inexact self-definition into the prescribed set of choices that then change how we see ourselves and certainly change how we describe ourselves to others.

Writer and researcher Kevin Guyan, author of Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion, puts it this was in his article, “Dating app categories could be shaping you more than you know.”

But do these categories provide a more accurate representation of the world beyond the app? Or do they partly construct the world they claim to describe?

I believe they do indeed construct, at least to some extent, the orientation and erotic world they purport to describe. Let me offer an example I’ve observed directly.

One of the advantages of being older, especially having come out into gay, sexual, and kink culture quite young, is that you get to see the long arc of change for many things. One of those things I’ve noticed since the dawn of the internet is that we appear to increasingly emphasize sexual positions and roles as self-defining and sorting mechanisms to the point that we too often exclude perfectly good sexual and relationship partners because they don’t fit such self-imposed categorical boxes.

Back in my early gay and leather bar cruising days in the 1970s and 1980s, I don’t recall nearly as much of an emphasis on declaring one’s top or bottom status as we do today. Most men I knew assumed that the default setting for each man they met was versatile until otherwise indicated. Even in leather circles, where positions and roles are often integral to our fantasies, our view of such things wasn’t very rigid. Barring any specific markers of position like keys or hankies in pockets, we didn’t make position or interest assumptions and even when we saw such things we considered them starting points of discussion and not an indication of any rigid adherence to them.

I once told a story on the Bawdy Storytelling stage (fun shows, check them out) about meeting a man in a leather bar in Chicago in the early 1970s. I was quite young and new to both the gay and leather scenes. He walked up to me with his keys on the left where mine were also hanging and began to engage in some overt flirting. I pointed to his keys and said, “Maybe we’re not a match.” He smiled at me, slowly reached to his left side, unclipped his keys, moved them to the right, and said, “How about now?”

I never forgot that exchange. My gay and leather culture naivete led me to believe the symbols I was just learning about were rigid and set in stone. They are not. It’s one of the best early lessons I could have learned.

In his article, Guyan mentions some scholars “coined the term ‘convergence’ to describe what happens when ‘people get put into categories and learn from those categories how to behave.” That sure seems like what’s happened in the gay and leather/kink cultures in which I navigate frequently. I also play among and mix socially with people of all orientations and sexual proclivities and I’ve witnessed what I believe is the same phenomenon.

My greatest concern about this quirk of leaning so heavily on technology to dictate our sexual meetings and identifications is that those who are just entering into their full erotic and orientation blossoming might misconstrue who and what they should be and do. I’ve certainly witnessed this among newbie kinksters who tell me they have felt compelled to pick a top or bottom, dominant or submissive, camp in which to live and play. Of course, I tell them that’s nonsense, but when you step back from witnessing many of the interactions with gay men’s culture or the leather and kink worlds, you can understand why they feel this way. I think that’s damaging. Anytime we’re coerced, even subtly, into declaring we’re not who we truly are, or have areas of exploration cut off because of such assumptions, it’s a bad thing.

So, the next time you are filling out an app profile, do so with the understanding that you’re engaging with an imperfect interface that will describe you imperfectly. When you read someone else’s profile, remember this too. Maybe it will give you more personal freedom to be yourself and explore what you truly want to explore, and give others the grace to do the same.

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