Anyone who wants to understand human sexuality should read Matt Ridley’s 2003 book, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
As Ridley points out, where mating strategies are concerned, gay and straight men have a lot more in common with each other than do heterosexual men and women. Heterosexual women, likewise, have more in common with lesbians than they do with straight men.
Gay men are notoriously promiscuous. (Here “promiscuity” is defined not in moralistic terms, but as “being open to a wide variety of sexual partners”.) This was even more true in the pre-AIDS era. (If you don’t believe this, research the gay bathhouse scene of the 1970s.)
Heterosexual men, on average, are more promiscuous than heterosexual women. Not to put too fine a point on it, heterosexual men are open to boinking a comparatively large portion of the female population, if the opportunity presents itself.
Lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous, and most lesbians have few lifetime sexual partners. Heterosexual women are selective where their partners are concerned—when compared to heterosexual men.
Now let’s apply this to the economics of dating apps.
It has recently been reported that the heterosexual dating apps are in trouble. Bumble has laid off a third of its staff. Match and Tinder are losing their user base—especially their paying (male) user base.
One dating app, however, is thriving, as reported in a recent article in Fast Company: the gay dating app, Grindr.
Much of Grindr’s recent success is built on a feature called “Right Now”, which is just what it sounds like: a beacon for users who are looking for immediate sexual encounters.
According to a member of Grindr’s management team, “25 to 35% of our weekly active users were regularly going into the Right Now experience at least once a week.”
Fast Company reports this in an article that compares heterosexual and gay dating apps as if it were—or ever could be—an apples to apples comparison.
Simply put, women users are never going to be interested in a Right Now feature. And certainly not 25 to 35 percent of them.
There’s another problem, as well. More from the Grindr management team:
“Our younger, 18-plus cohort wants to be in an environment where there are older people as well. Friendships between younger and older people are much more common in our community.”
Once again, we’re comparing apples to ears of corn. Most 18- to 24-year-old women are horrified by the idea that a man over about 30 might notice them. The dreaded “dirty old man”, the “creepers”.
Nor, for that matter, are women in midlife generally interested in men who are decades younger. To a 50-year-old man, a “younger woman” is a 25-year-old. To a 50-year-old woman, a “younger man” is a fellow in his mid-40s.
“Friendships between younger and older people,” are not common in heterosexual circles, aside from purely platonic interactions. Heterosexual men who hit on much younger women are automatically seen as predatory, and women are seldom interested in romantic matches more than a decade older or younger than them.
Ergo, no meaningful comparisons can be made between heterosexual and gay dating apps.
The thesis of this essay might be, “Women ruin heterosexual dating apps, by being so damned picky,” and some readers will doubtless draw that conclusion.
But any effort to make women more like men (whether heterosexual or gay men), is a fool’s errand. Equally foolish are all efforts to make men and boys more like women and girls—a disastrous trend in education in recent years.
The sexes are different, because God, or Mother Nature, or evolution (whichever you prefer) made them that way. A dating app in which men match with other men, or women match with members of their own sex, is simply never going to possess the same dynamics as a dating app that matches heterosexual men with heterosexual women.
-ET