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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   29757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I read the section you're describing (it starts with the last paragraph on page 246 of the thesis, PDF page 259) and I don't think it's accurate to characterize Roth's statements as dismissing the concern as "impossible/problem on privacy grounds." Rather, while acknowledging the possibility Grindr may be "too lewd or too hook-up oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers" he's worried that underage users may still use the platform to network with other peers in ways that don't involve having sex and removing this platform for them to have those discussions. To which point he recommends Grindr take steps to separate the lewd/hookup purpose of the app from the more general discussion platform it enables. One illustrative page:

These accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

I'm also curious how this makes him a hypocrite.

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The idea of using a hook-up/dating app for finding friends is... bizarre to me, to say the least, but well maybe it happens. I can see how maybe it's a thing in the gay community, but I still find it bizarre.

I am told by straight friends that they do this too. Many women seek social interactions on tinder with the lure of possible sex to rope guys in.

I also know of one very hot but socially awkward straight guy who does this. Step 1: display abs and do hookup. Step 2: friends with benefits. Step 3: some of the friends with benefits become genuine friendships. Or maybe he's just buff nerd bodybuilder with a harem, I can't tell.

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I'm confused by don't shit where you eat. Isn't tinder, by definition, randos and not where you eat?

Out of curiosity, what is it you believe is awful about my hot nerdy friend's game? Women get the hookup with glorious glutes guy they wanted. Maybe a friendship develops, maybe not. But it seems like a good shot at everyone getting something of value.

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There's a lot more space in gay communities for the concept of a friend that you like, have fucked or could fuck, but aren't especially sexually compatible with, sometimes to extremes. And Grindr's long pretended it wasn't just a hookup app, but also a local community social media app; I don't know whether this was to avoid getting booted by Apple or a genuine marketing approach, but cfe here for someone complaining that they found more Facebook friends on the platform than fuckbuddies.

There's also an issue that's broader than just finding friends, but broader communication. There's a lot of things that... while not easy for straight people, have broader social transmission of knowledge, in ways that a lot of gay people don't. As bad of romantic advice or that any romantic comedy or agony aunt might be, having Dan Savage's weekly notes is worse. Some are only weakly romantic, and even some of the non-platonic ones aren't very sexual, but there's a lot of awkwardness in any puberty. Worse, a lot of norms for gay stuff are highly regional: the extent it might be appropriate to discuss someone's orientation or gender identity without them having explicitly said they were out in a given context is drastically different from Massachusetts to California to Florida to Kentucky. Many of these are difficult to communicate in mixed-orientation communities or even mixed LGB communities (trivial example: "how do I let down a girl that's hitting on me, possibly without having to come out?").

I agree that Grindr's especially poorly-suited for such purposes, but I think (while poorly written) in that paper "including", here, is meant to modify "services providers like" rather than Grindr, specifically. And while Roth overlooked a few SFW gay-focused online phpBB-style groups that do exist, the high difficulty of maintaining such services in a Discord/Twitter/so on world is pretty hard to overstate.

That said, I'd go further to suggest that Roth is incredibly blithe about the issues such networks face, both obvious and not-obvious. Even non-sexuality-focused social networks face serious challenges (eg: this was the explicit purpose behind the recent report-to-Mojang function for Minecraft). I think Bernd overstates some of the problems the furry fandom has, but they definitely exist, and perhaps worse they exist as much or more in SFW-specific spaces because predators can tell that such a larger percentage of common users are younger. Fighting to keep division of NSFW content from a FFXIV free company's discord is a constant battle. And I'm starting to see signs of a similar-enough pattern happening or having happened in and around VR spheres.

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Not a hypocrite, necessarily, but the three cases of sexual assault he discusses, which were facilitated by Grindr, are:

(1) Threesome arranged by two adult guys with under-18 (doesn't say how much under 18 so could be 17 year old)

(2) HIV-positive guy had sex with 15 year old

(3) Guy sexually assaulted 14 year old, met on Grindr

Roth makes the point (that every sex ed promoter makes) that even if Grindr does try to keep it over-18s there are probably younger gay guys using it, and that they'll be having sex with strangers anyway, so all Grindr can do is try and be aware that there are under 18 users and make it easier and safer for them (and also, yeah, it's up to the parents etc. to keep their kids out of trouble).

That's not necessarily advocating for "sure, adults should be able to hook up with 14 year olds" but like I said, it's the same pro-sex ed message: the kids are gonna be doing it anyway, so all you can do is make sure they know to use condoms and birth control, even if legally 12 year olds should not be having sex.

I'm more surprised you can get a doctorate in philosophy just for writing a paper on a hook-up app. We're not exactly talking Plato's Academy, are we? (or maybe we are, if the attendees of the Academy were also hooking up with younger guys for sex).

I quoted Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance last week and had to look up the exact wording. It was, in fact, Plato arguing for (and against) the special relationship between boy and lover. The broader context is...still incredibly gay.

So, yes.

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