Presentation given at Digital Cultures conference, Manchester, July 2010

1. Grindr: Immoderation vs Sin in
the Global Virtual Gay Bar
Dr David Kreps, ISOS, University of Salford
July 2010

2. Agenda

3. Agenda
✤ Introduction - Sexual Social Networking
✤ Foucault’s History of Sexuality
✤ Queer theory
✤ Grindr
✤ Conclusion

4. Sexual social networking research

5. Sexual social networking research
✤ Participant observation
✤ Member of Gaydar (since 2000), Fitlads (since 2004), and Grindr (since 2009), as
observer and conversationalist
✤ Time on ChatRoulette (since January 2010) meeting people from around the world
✤ Post-structuralist approach to concepts of identity, gender, sexuality - specifically
Foucault, Butler, Deleuze (since 1995)
✤ Queer theory since 1990s, challenging hetero-normativity - Weeks, Halperin, Warner,
Sedgwick, Butler - all heavily influenced by Foucault
✤ ‘Masculinities’ - Whitehead’s Foucauldian ‘masculine discursive subject’
✤ Situated within the broader phenomena of online social networking and of sex and the
internet

6. Sexual Social Networking
publications

7. Sexual Social Networking
publications
✤ Kreps, D (2009) “Performing the Discourse of Sexuality Online: Foucault, Butler, and Video-
sharing on Sexual Social Networking Sites” - focussing on Gaydar and Fitlads - at AMCIS 2009,
San Francisco
✤ Due to be published as book chapter in Warburton, S (ed.) “Social Media and Digital Identity”
IGI Global, early 2011
✤ Kreps, D (2010) “My Social Networking Profile: Copy, Resemblance, or Simulacrum? A
Poststructuralist Interpretation of Social Information Systems”, European Journal of Information
Systems 19 p104-115
✤ Kreps, D (2010) “Foucault, Exhibitionism and Voyeurism on ChatRoulette” - at CATaC 2010,
Vancouver
✤ Kreps, D (2010) “Introducing Eco-Masculinities: How a masculine discursive subject approach to
the Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT impacts an environmental informatics
project” - at AMCIS 2010, Lima
✤ Working towards a journal paper on sexual social networking

8. Home porn

9. Home porn
✤ ‘The Swinger’ - Polaroid Camera
✤ 70s phenomenon “instant
photography and instant
pornography”
✤ Production of pornography -> from
broadcast mode to distributed mode

10. Sex on the internet

11. Sex on the internet
Saucy Polaroid now almost
indistinguishable from
professional pornography
Naked photos and videos on
Internet dating sites

12. Sexual Social Networking

13. Sexual Social Networking
✤ Adult Friend Finder - some 20m users
✤ Gaydar.co.uk “the world's most successful online dating
site” (Guardian 2009) - over 3 million members [QSoft]
✤ Niche sites continue to grow while larger ones stagnate [TechCrunch]
✤ Subscriptions worth almost $1bn in US, €0.5bn in Europe
http://trust.mindswap.org/cgi-bin/relationshipTable.cgi

14. Foucault’s Scientia Sexualis

15. Foucault’s Scientia Sexualis
✤ History of Sexuality vols 1,2 and 3
✤ what appears as a "repression" of sexual drives
is a huge increase in the discussion of sex
✤ Discourse on sexuality - confession >
consultation
✤ from the Christian confessional box to the
sexologist’s, in the 19th century, and then in the
20th century the psychoanalyst’s couch
Michel Foucault ✤ Consultation + Web2.0 = Chat: sexual discourse
now the domain of all

16. Scientia Sexualis Videre

17. Scientia Sexualis Videre
✤ More than just
self-advertising
✤ Competitive sexual
exhibitionism
✤ more to do with
communication
about sex
– albeit that that
communication is visual
rather than oral or textual – than it is about sex itself

18. Video-discourse

19. Video-discourse
✤ As Nakamura (2008) has described,
digital images are as open to
interpretation as Foucauldian visual
“discourse-objects” (Foucault
1995:140) as are vocal and written
statements.
✤ the exchange of imagery online
becomes a confessional sexual
activity in its own right, quite apart
from the physical meetings that may
or may not be arranged through the
website

20. The Use of Pleasure

21. The Use of Pleasure
✤ Christian taboos on non-procreative sex
✤ Anything non-procreative considered a
transgression of ordained ‘natural’ activity
✤ Homosexuality intrinsically sinful
✤ Classical pagan concern with moderation
✤ Anything goes but best approach is ‘all things
in moderation’
✤ Homosexuality institutionalised, ‘normal’ but
subject to subtle restraints

22. Queer Theory

23. Queer Theory
1. “a conceptualization of sexuality which sees sexual power
embodied in different levels of social life, expressed discursively
Sexuality
and enforced through boundaries and binary divides”
2. “the problematization of sexual and gender categories, and of
identities in general. Identities are always on uncertain ground, Identity
entailing displacements of identification and knowing”
3. “a rejection of civil-rights strategies in favor of a politics of carnival,
transgression and parody which leads to deconstruction, Carnival
decentering, revisionist readings and an anti-assimilationist politics”
4. “a willingness to interrogate areas which normally would not seen
as the terrain of sexuality, and to conduct "queer" readings of Queer
ostensibly heterosexual or non-sexualized texts.”
Stein and Plummer 1996

24. Queer Theory and reality

25. Queer Theory and reality
1. Radical deconstructionism - Sexuality and Identity
“superimposes a postmodern self-concept onto the homosexual
subject, thereby glossing over the enduring institutional organization
of sexuality….”
2. Radical subversion - Carnival and Queer readings
“superimposes a politically marginal self-concept onto the
homosexual subject, thereby grossly oversimplifying complex
developmental processes attendant to sexual identification.”
Green A, “Gay but Not Queer: Toward a Post-Queer Study of Sexuality” Theory and Society, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Aug.,
2002), pp. 521-545

26. Grindr

27. Grindr
✤ Location based service - ‘Gay GPS’
✤ 500,000 members worldwide
✤ iPhone, Blackberry, Android
✤ Who’s online, how many metres away
from you...
✤ Very simple personal profiles
✤ Chat application

28. Restraints

29. Restraints
✤ Steve Jobs April 2010
✤ “You know, there’s a porn store
for Android. You can download
nothing but porn. You can
download porn, your kids can
download porn. That’s a place
we don’t want to go – so we’re
not going to go there.” [Seeking Alpha]
✤ New Guidelines issued by Grindr
shortly afterward - subject of some
discussion online

30. Vancouver attack
This is NOT the boy in question

31. Vancouver attack
✤ Grindr condemned the attack on a 15yr old boy by a
Vancouver 54 yr old.
✤ Police blamed the geo-tagging iPhone app Grindr available on
Apple Itunes for a sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy.
✤ Bren Tynan, 54, from Vancouver was charged with sexual
assault, sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching.
✤ “Grindr strongly condemns the inappropriate and criminal use
of our service and actively cooperates with local authorities on
any alleged illegal activity on our service,” Grindr spokesman
✤ Inter-generational sexual contact becomes an ‘attack’ when the
boy is under the ‘legal’ age. At different times in recent history
this age was 21. In Holland the age is 14, where in this case no
‘criminal’ act would have taken place. This is NOT the boy in question

32. Promiscuity

33. Promiscuity
✤ Does Grindr
✤ promote promiscuity?
✤ facilitate promiscuity?
✤ encourage promiscuity?
✤ celebrate promiscuity?

34. Anti-normalisation

35. Anti-normalisation
✤ Promiscuity one of several ‘kinds’ of sexual activities, including inter-
generational sexual contact
✤ Both outside of hetero-normative behaviours and outside of assimilated
‘gay’ coupling - the healthy economic unit
✤ Associated with closeted individuals: ‘men who have sex with men’
✤ Associated with AIDs
✤ Liberated or libertine culture?
✤ Anti-normalisation post-queer theory simply attempting to allow space
for such non-assimilated behaviours

36. Conclusion

37. Conclusion
✤ Grindr epitomises activities outside heteronormative, assimilated gay
coupling, and attracts opprobium because of it
✤ Neither the Christian concept of non-procreative ‘sin’ nor the more
liberal classical pagan focus upon ‘moderation’ would seem to
approve of the contacts and activities Grindr facilitates
✤ The AppStore iPhone platform contrains at the same time as allowing
Grindr
✤ Niche Sexual Social Networking moving off the web into mobile
location-based services pushing at the boundaries of social
acceptability

38. Contact

39. Contact
✤ Dr David Kreps
✤ Director, Centre for Information
Systems, Organisations and Society
✤ http://www.isos.salford.ac.uk
✤ http://snipr.com/davidkreps
✤ d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk