Do heteros need a proximity detector? Gay hook-up service, Grindr, aims to find out
”It shows the whole range of gay men…. They just want to hook up…. I don’t know that that’s going to work for girls. They can walk into any bar and have that already.”
New York artist Scott Valentine speculating on the usefulness of a heterosexual version of Grindr. Valentines says has been using Grindr to ask its male users to sit for a portraiture project. (Guardian.co.uk)
Grindr is a mobile phone app that is wildly popular among gay men. And the company’s founder, Joel Simkhai, neither takes responsibility for nor denies the result of his service: brief conversations that frequently result in easy and nearly anonymous sexual hook ups. He tells the Guardian that the heterosexual version will have to be different:
”For a straight woman, a guy who is 400ft away from her? So what. It happens all the time. We have got to provide more…. Grindr is very photo-centric. Women obviously want to see someone that they might find attractive, but they need to know more than that.”
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