I have never been very successful on grindr. I don’t really know why. My friends think that’s because I refuse to play the game and present myself like a dateable individual. I refuse, indeed.

I lied. I know exactly why I am not successful. First, I am not the most sexual of the beings. For some people, sex is one of their main vital pillars, for me, it’s not. Side note, I don’t think that sex is as important as they make us believe, but coming from a backwards and oppressive society to a more liberated one always breeds the pendulum effect. I do fully endorse sex positivity. – end of sidenote.

Second, I refuse to get into the lingo, I refuse to send nudes, I refuse to submit to its stupid rules. I like to put my own twist on it and I decline the invitation to join the cult of the headless all abs Ralph Lauren buttoned t shirt sun glasses mafia. Mainly because I don’t have abs (I like eating too much), and I don’t have Ralph Lauren t shirts either. Because I have taste. I politely decline to start every single conversation like follows:

Hey
Hey
How are you mate
Not bad mate
Yeah haha good just chilling
Cool same here
Pics?

Like what the fuck is that. The lack of inspiration. The lack of everything. Body shopping. The seasoning of toxic lad culture. The fearsome performativism.

My talent is thinking, overthinking to be precise, and the other day I overthought about grindr quite a bit because couple of things came to my life. One day, randomly I had the need, the temptation, to SPECIFICALLY enjoy the grindr experience. I will elaborate. I was a little horned up, like we all get sometimes, and I did not crave porn, an impersonal product created by a third person, I craved the grindr experience. And I surprised myself almost automatically going into the app store and getting the app. My thumb ice skated all over the pristine screen towards the yellow mask of the gay application. Needless to say, I was horrified, mainly due to the fact that I was almost doing it unconsciously.

Other day, very sad news somehow reached my cornea. Yet another grindr killer got caught.
Grindr is (has been for some time) killing ourselves. Grindr kills gays. How we as queer people put ourselves in danger just to feel validated. The danger that entitles to go outside and meet someone you know nothing about, often not even in a public space, just because this is the kind of intimacy that we been taught we deserve.

Grindr spreads internalized homophobia and deeply affects the mental health of its users. Functioning by its narrow rules, only a handful of profile types are successful, and people are translating this behaviour to the real world.

On the surface, Grindr checks all the boxes of being queer friendly. It promotes the use of all inclusive pronouns and does not limit their users to male homosexuals. This would be great, if would have been implemented in a holistic way. In reality, the radar of the app is led by the ruthless rules of capitalism, therefore becoming a great front of the shop for escorts and dealers. In 2022, you don’t even need to leave your house to meet like minded people. You can find couple of poor unfortunate souls in your phone, bring them around and spice everything up with some chemicals to pretend that you all have social abilities.

Grindr is killing the scene. Phones are killing human skills. Grindr makes the clubs and bars empty. Takes away the necessity of socialising. Now queer people do not need to meet in real life to have sex, they can do it from their houses, while high.

And I don’t think that the software itself is the problem. The idea of it sounds great on paper. An app to make queer people get together. People would have received that with open arms in the 90s. Instead, grindr got an entire generation of gay men addicted to the pathetic convenience of a dick-shopping app, destroyed physical gay spaces and establishments (thereby making Grindr the only option for gay men to find each other), turned gay culture into a one-dimensional parody of itself, and are now profiting from homophobic stereotypes. Grindr has been almost worse for gay men and gay culture than homophobia, since also entitles a lot of users coming to the app without deconstructing themselves in a healthy way.

The pathetic appeals for “better customer service” from a company that profits off the horniness and alienation of their customers are more evidence of this. A company owned by straight people.

Your future boyfriend is probably not on grindr, little gay. That community sense is fake, daddy.

It’s not called “having fun”, it’s called sex. And I don’t even know if I will enjoy sex with you until it happens, let alone have fun with it.

It’s not “partying” if you are smoking tina with three people that you don’t know in your kitchen. That’s the definition of sadness, mate.

Not having an STI it’s not being “clean”. Clean is when you hoover the carpet and mop the floor, things that most of the people on grindr fail to do. But they know how to pose on a jockstrap to showcase their front and their derriere in a game of mirrors that defies Euclidean geometry.

And hey, it might work for you, reader. If you really do have “fun” with it, who am I to stop you? Just try to use it with all this in mind, knowing that the actions trigger consequences that might escape to our control.