Sexuality: Hooking up on mobile aps in the era of ‘zero feet away’

I’ve written about the role of technology in our sex lives, but the elephant in the room is Grindr – and the reality of “zero feet away.”

Months ago I was barhopping with friends in  Fort Collins when a member of our group expressed his phone battery was dying, his dismay that his Grindr conversation would come to an all-too-soon stop.

I downloaded the app and lent him my phone so he could enter his own login and have at it again. I wasn’t aware of all the app’s features, assuming it was just another one of countless social media options to connect through, this one for an LGBT audience. I knew used it for love connections and booty calls – but what I didn’t know is that the app zeroes in on the proximity of the individual you’re “grinding” with.

Rather – it tells you the exact distance of all the other Grindr users in your area, making it really easy to identify the most convenient potential date, followed by the most convenient backup plan and so forth. So imagine my surprise when my friend said that someone he was connecting with was “five feet away.”

Grindr has just celebrated its fourth birthday and is used in more than roughly 200 countries worldwide. Up to 190,000 international users are logged into the app at any given moment, the company claims. The implications are controversial.

Drew Nelson, a graduating 21–year-old Colorado State University student, said he’s made good friends using Grindr and keeps contact with them still.

And though many of the app’s users connect to chat or make friends, for others it’s an opportunity to push the limits of social acceptability around sexual propositioning, with less risk of rejection or embarrassment since you can stay anonymous until you find someone willing to move at your pace.

When that happens, apparently everybody speeds it up. According to a New York Community Healthcare Network study, Grindr is becoming a search engine for gay men to find unprotected sex.

“Even though I’ve never actually done it, I’ve been approached on Grindr about it [barebacking],” said Jesse Montoya of Denver.

The study, “Zero Feet Away: Perspective on HIV/AIDS and Unprotected Sex in Men Who Have Sex With Men Utilizing Location-based Mobile Apps” focuses on the direct correlation between applications like Grindr and HIV transmission.

The study found that 80 percent of the 725 respondents admitted to knowing how HIV is transmitted, and that 46.4 percent admitted to having unprotected/bareback sex “sometimes,” “often” or “always.”

In other words, users knew the risks, but many were doing it anyway. And while risky casual meetups are nothing new, they might be getting more common.

“HIV and AIDS is on the rise and that’s alarming,” said CHN Vice President of HIV Programs in a press release regarding the study. “We conducted this study as a result of a seeming correlation between an increasing use of mobile social networking apps designed for men to meet each other and an increase in HIV infections among men who have sex with men.”

Grindr conducted its own study of its users (take its findings for what you will) and reported that 28 percent of those who use Grindr are “most addicted” to it out of any mobile app, ranking it just behind Facebook on mobile, to which 30 percent were “most addicted.” According to the CHN’s study, more than 70 percent of the Grindr’s users said they were comfortable with sharing personal information, including preferences around unprotected sex.

“I know people that use Grindr specifically to find partners in their area that would be interested in having unprotected sex,” Montoya said.

Times sure have changed. In 2013 we have a greater chance of meeting our soul mate online – something that was seen as awkward or unusual a decade ago. The way we meet our sexual partners has changed too, removing barriers around starting conversations that leapfrog over inhibitions. While social networking technology might be a great equalizer between the socially–outgoing and those who are more inhibited, we should consider the consequences of reverting back to a time of great crisis, when HIV/AIDS cases were multiplying rapidly in the 1980s.

Grind safe, friends.