The Grind
Grindr’s 2025 Unwrapped report boasts an average of 15 million+ monthly users. Each year the Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket™ compiles high-level trends from user data and opinion surveys and presents the results to investors. “The internet is fast, but the gay internet is faster”, they say. Pedro Pascal is officially the daddy of the year. Lady Gaga is confirmed to be mother. The message is clear - the company positions itself as the largest cash cow when it comes to data mining and advertising to a gay audience, which is assumed to be more sophisticated and forward-thinking than the average consumer. Slay.
Grindr has been available since 2009 and now has a bigger user base than ever before, yet I feel like it’s been culturally passé for some time. Competitors like Scruff and Hornet have been in the mix for nearly as long, and I have it on good authority that Sniffies has developed some game-changing features that position it as a serious contender in the market. Complaints about Grindr are as old as Grindr itself, but now there’s a pervasive mood amongst users that things are approaching a breaking point. The experience for free users is frequently interrupted by ads for Coinbase, Temu, mobile games and rival dating apps.
Users report a glitchy and dysfunctional app experience that requires many restarts, and a downgrading of features over time. The app is also flooded with bot profiles created to lure users to OnlyFans accounts or sketchy URLs. Many have the impression that the company is doing their best to make the free experience as awful as possible so that users will pay to upgrade. At $70 a month, paying your way to a better experience - viewing more profiles, accessing more filters, the ability to browse without being seen - is not cheap. One paid feature promises “non-stop attention for 24 hours” for a mere $194.99, temporarily boosting the user’s visibility to others.
In August 2025 the company announced its intentions to become AI-native, integrating AI features at every level. Users must now opt-out if they don’t want their information, including chat content and precise location, to be used as training data. Ostensibly for improving user experience (“more authentic, meaningful connections”) the AI permissions that users now grant by default seem to be very open-ended.
Besides the technical issues, the frustrating user experience and the transparently extractive direction the company has taken, there’s also the user base. In the popular imagination Grindr has long represented the worst excesses of instant gratification, low trust, superficiality and discrimination. Ruthless and antisocial behavior is expected. Communication is low effort and penis-heavy. Blocking someone online usually has some weight to it, but on Grindr it can mean anything from “not interested in talking thanks” to "bored of talking now" to “we’ve finished having sex and I’ve just left your house”. In this free-for-all there’s no value in pleasantries.
IT IS STILL POSSIBLE TO HAVE FUN ONLINE
And yet. Having said all this, I’m on Grindr and I find it to be good value. I’m also the sort of person who can’t walk past a skip without having a look inside to see if there’s anything good in there. I was curious about it for years, but was deterred by the thought of being at the vanguard of cisgender women ruining something that’s not for us. It turns out I was flattering myself to think I was ahead of the curve on anything. In a 2017 update (with much press-release fanfare) Grindr added options to be more inclusive of different genders, allowing users to identify themselves as trans, woman, nonbinary etc. and to add their pronouns. Of course women were using the app long before this, including a small number of cisgender women. Early adopters’ stated reasons included being horny and preferring bisexual men (get it sis).
My position is that Grindr is for anyone who’s brave enough. Using it as a women you do get the feeling that you’re swimming against the tide somewhat. Despite the gestures towards inclusivity, the company’s priority is still gay guys and judging from the grid they’re still the bulk of the user base. 2011 saw a failed attempt to launch a sister app along the same lines (Blendr) for a mixed audience, so presumably the company was interested in capturing a bigger audience at one time. The location-based model hasn’t really crossed over to straight-branded dating apps, which is understandable due to safety concerns and behavioral differences between men and women (on average).
I would assume that women and gender diverse people are in the minority on Grindr, or that the company just really doesn’t care about those demographics. Every time I try to update my gender to “Woman” it won’t save. The effect of this is that people who aren’t interested in women are going to see me in their grid because they can’t filter me out. This makes some users really, really mad. In a reddit thread from 2 years ago on r/askgaybros, the gay bros spew vitriol about seeing women on the app. I’m not even going to quote or link it because it’s so trans/misogynistic. Suffice to say that if I had any lingering doubts about encroaching on a male space, I would not give a fuck after reading that.
Anyway, back to the fun part. Grindr reminds me of what being on the internet used to feel like. There’s a sliding scale of anonymity and profiles are often very temporary. People dip in and out at whim. Usage peaks at certain times, after work and around 1am. The stakes are incredibly low and you don’t have to reveal anything about yourself upfront. It’s the best app for chatting shit. When I first got on I would just talk to people about movies and send lecherous guys this picture to see if they’d block me.
The temporal immediacy and the possibility of easily crossing over from online to physical space makes for a lively experience. It’s kind of like Facebook Marketplace, you could be idly browsing from your couch and then an hour later you could be carrying home a microwave. Even without meeting anyone, the frisson of proximity awakens the space you’re in. Profiles will show as 1 metre away from my living room because I live in town near a bunch of restaurants. I see people in the street who I’ve chatted to and avoid eye contact. Sometimes I open the app just to see if there’s anyone on the same bus as me. I like knowing that the world is alive with queer people and queer sex. I want to know where the cruising spots are in Feilding.
YOU MIGHT FIND WHAT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR
For someone who values sexual freedom a lot I’m not really that prolific. If someone told me I should get off Grindr because I'm not putting out at a masculine rate, I would actually respect that opinion. I met a man who taught me how to pronounce “Québécois”. I met another man who brings me little gifts and sends me videos of his parents’ dog. Don’t read the following if you’re going to join up and act like an idiot, but yes there are a lot of men on there who are interested in women, and yes some of them are really fucking hot. You can’t find them on the grid (it doesn't allow you to filter by sexual orientation), but they’ll be in touch.
But why would I need to do any of this via a predominantly gay app? As mentioned before, it’s fun, it’s hectic, it’s ephemeral, mystery begets desire, and I have a really thick skin about receiving unsolicited dong. Sex can mean a lot of different things and i think to some extent you get to choose. Sometimes I want it to be sport. I want the field to be level. I want to engage in a robust and fearless way. You know what isn’t fun? All the mainstream apps. I don’t want to think about the endless boy-girl dating discourse about gaslighting, red flags, body counts and male manipulators. Its all so boring. I’m sick of the same SEO keywords that everyone puts in their profile and the little quirks that people are either copying from each other or getting from ChatGPT. You are not a golden retriever and I don’t believe that you are all pleasure doms (and if you refer to your interaction with a potential/lover as “comms” I am going to come into your house at night and release a thousand centipedes).
Personal gripes aside, culturally and politically things have taken a bit of a turn for women. You might have heard about it. The most disgusting retrogressive stuff is overflowing in videos, podcasts and comment sections everywhere. People over the age of 14 are talking about vaginas being loose, and this time it’s with a side of “you’ll die alone”. The good news is it’s not as bad if you actually go outside and talk to people. In some ways I just try to live in the world as I want it to be, and to some extent it works. I will not entertain the idea that having sex with different people is an accrual of use, wear or harm for women. If someone feels that way about their own experience then I am sorry for them, but it’s not part of my world! I’ve been with people who I don’t remember particularly fondly, who nonetheless taught me something about myself or helped me work through some stuff. I’ve had a few partners who were actually pretty despicable, but they still didn’t take anything away from me other than my time.
Violence is real and I’m not reckless or stupid, but it’s also boring to spend your whole life anticipating worst-case scenarios. If you’re doing that then you're already letting something bad happen to you. STIs are also real. You probably have HSV1. I probably have HSV1. I know this because I’m pretty health-literate and probably think about risk more than most people. It’s worked out fine so far.
YOU MIGHT FIND WHAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU WANTED
It’s a cliché at this point, but it’s been interesting and kind of revelatory to see all the different kinds of straight men who use Grindr. Heterosexuality gets extended in a lot of directions and desire can cut across many lines - wanting to have sex with anyone with a vagina (regardless of gender), wanting to have sex with anyone feminine-presenting (regardless of gender or sex), wanting to get head from anyone, wanting to give head to anyone. I guess the cliché is that men are just really horny and there’s overflow sometimes. Sometimes I feel that way about my own bisexuality, but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
Anyway I’ve found it interesting to think about sex purely in terms of what I have (a vagina, feminine gender presentation, an apartment) and what I want (redacted). That might sound reductive to the point of being offensive. Gender diverse people report having a lot of negative experiences on apps of being objectified along those lines. Maybe I’m insensitive and opportunistic for finding any benefit in it, but it feels freeing to think there's a shred of possibility that I don’t have to be any particular thing, and that the things I do when I’m having sex and the way people treat me don't have to be an inevitable outcome of my gender.
When I think of sexual freedom it's not of the many adventures to be had relating to volume or variety. Nor the mazes of acting out transgression and recreating every violation imaginable as farce. Go have fun, but all of this stuff operates for me at the level of Netflix categories and is about as profound. Likewise I don’t think it’s a bad thing that you can think of something you want to do and reach out through the appropriate channels to find someone to do it with, but I don't think it’s liberation either. That’s just shopping.
If I had to nail down a thesis statement the best I can do is "women should fuck if we want to, and it shouldn't be boring". The prerequisites for this are freedom from shame and violence, which are goalposts that seem to be moving further away. If you're lucky enough to meet those basic needs there's still the monumental burden of hetero nonsense and/or other stupid presumptions. I found a crack in the system where I can feel free. I'd like to see the whole thing crack.
Sources
https://investors.grindr.com/news/news-details/2025/Grindr-UNWRAPPED-2025-The-Biggest-Boldest--Gayest-Year-in-Review/default.aspx
https://www.them.us/story/grindr-gai-artificial-intelligence-opt-out
"Being Talked to Like I Was a Sex Toy, Like Being Transgender Was Simply for the Enjoyment of Someone Else": Fetishization and Sexualization of Transgender and Nonbinary Individuals https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33763803/
"Breaking boundaries: the uses & gratifications of grindr" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2632048.2636070
