The Moral Careers of Male Tinder Users: An Exploratory Sociological Analysis
##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.sidebar##
Published
Jan 11, 2023
Download
Statistic
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.main##
Abstract
Men’s experiences and behaviors on dating apps are shaped by the gender distribution asymmetry on these platforms, usage patterns and results, motivations of use, and perceived benefits. This study contributes to the understanding of the outcomes of men’s use of dating apps, by identifying the social trajectories of use observed on Tinder. For this purpose, I use the concept of ‘career’, as discussed by Erving Goffman (1963), Howard Becker (1963), and David Matza (1969), to answer the following research question: What are the ‘moral careers’ of male users, and what are the factors that influence their engagement on the Tinder dating app? The study relies on 25 semi-structured interviews with 22 self-identified heterosexual and three self-identified homosexual male users, held between 2019 and 2022, and a sample of 22 online accounts of Tinder use, published on Quora. The analysis shows the emergence of five ‘moral careers’: the serial dater, the relationship-oriented dater, the passive dater, the episodic dater, and the discredited dater, with associated narratives. The findings contribute to the understanding of the dating practices and effects stirred by dating apps, with a focus on Tinder. It also illuminates specific masculine behaviors and goals within the app, with an accent on their dynamics.
##plugins.themes.academic_pro.article.details##
How to Cite
Stoicescu, M. (2023). The Moral Careers of Male Tinder Users: An Exploratory Sociological Analysis. Sociologie Românească, 20(2), 49-75. https://doi.org/10.33788/sr.20.2.3
References
Anderson, M., Vogels, E. A., & Turner, E. (2020). The Virtues and Downsides of Online Dating, Pew Research Center. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/06/the-virtues-and-downsides-of-online-dating/. Accessed on June 23, 2022.
Athens, L. H. (1995). Dramatic Self Change, The Sociological Quarterly, 36(3), 571-586.
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press.
Bergström, M. (2021). The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Blackhart, G. C., Fitzpatrick, J., & Williamson, J. (2014). Dispositional factors predicting use of online dating sites and behaviors related to online dating, Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 113-118. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.022.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2012). Thematic analysis, in H. Cooper, P. M. Camic, D. L. Long, A. T. Panter, D. Rindskopf, & K. J. Sher (Eds.), APA handbook of research methods in psychology, Vol. 2. Research designs: Quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. American Psychological Association, 57-71. doi: 10.1037/13620-004.
Carpenter, C. J., & McEwan, B. (2016). The players of micro-dating: Individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps, First monday. Available at https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/6187/5469.
Castro, Á., Barrada, J.R., Ramos-Villagrasa, P.J. & Fernández-del-Río, E. (2020). Profiling dating apps users: Sociodemographic and personality characteristics, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(10), 3653. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17103653.
Crawford, G. (2003). The career of the sport supporter: The case of the Manchester Storm, Sociology, 37(2), 219-237. doi: 10.1177/0038038503037002001.
Cruz, M.L.S., Bastos, F.I., Darmont, M., Dickstein, P. & Monteiro, S. (2015). The “moral career” of perinatally HIV-infected children: Revisiting Goffman’s concept, AIDS Care - Psychological and Socio-Medical Aspects of AIDS/HIV, 27(1), 6-9. doi: 10.1080/09540121.2014.940270.
Duguay, S. (2017). Dressing up Tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app Tinder, Information Communication and Society, 20(3), 351-367. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168471.
Erevik, E.K., Kristensen, J.H., Torsheim, T., Vedaa, Ø. & Pallesen, S. (2020). Tinder Use and Romantic Relationship Formations: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study, Frontiers in Psychology, 11(August), 1-10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01757.
García-Gómez, A. (2020). Discursive representation of masculinity and femininity in Tinder and Grindr: Hegemonic masculinity, feminine devaluation and femmephobia, Discourse and Society, 31(4), 390-410. doi: 10.1177/0957926520903523.
Garda, M. B., & Karhulahti, V. M. (2019). Let’s Play Tinder! Aesthetics of a Dating App, Games and Culture, 1-14. doi: 10.1177/1555412019891328.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Moral Career of the Mental Patient, Psychiatry, 22(2), 123-142. doi: 10.1080/00332747.1959.11023166.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Hardie-Bick, J. (2005). Dropping Out and Diving In. An Ethnography of Skydiving. (Doctoral dissertation, Durham University). Available at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2734/.
Haywood, C. (2018). Mobile Romance: Tinder and the Navigation of Masculinity. doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-50683-2.
Hennink, M. M., Kaiser, B. N., & Marconi, V. C. (2017). Code Saturation Versus Meaning Saturation: How Many Interviews Are Enough?, Qualitative Health Research, 27(4), 591-608. doi: 10.1177/1049732316665344.
Iqbal, M. (2022). Tinder Revenue and Usage Statistics, Business of Apps. Available at https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/. Accessed on May 16, 2021.
Johnson, J. L., & Best, A. L. (2012). Radical normals: The moral career of straight parents as public advocates for their gay children, Symbolic Interaction, 35(3), 321-339. doi: 10.1002/SYMB.23.
Jones, I. (2000). A model of serious leisure identification: The case of football fandom, Leisure Studies, 19(4), 283-298. doi: 10.1080/02614360050118841.
Krüger, S., & Spilde, C. A. (2020). Judging books by their covers – Tinder interface, usage and sociocultural implications, Information Communication and Society, 23(10), 1395-1410. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1572771.
Laner, M. R., & Ventrone, N. A. (2000). Dating Scripts Revisited, Journal of Family Issues, 21(4), 488-500.
Lopes, M. R., & Vogel, C. (2019). Gender Differences in Online Dating Experiences, It Happened on Tinder: Reflections and Studies on Internet-Infused Dating, 31-47. doi: 10.1037/a0017504.Bogle.
MacKee, F. (2016). Social Media in Gay London: Tinder as an Alternative to Hook-Up Apps, Social Media and Society, 2(3). doi: 10.1177/2056305116662186.
Matza, D. (1969). Becoming Deviant. New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.). Transaction Publishers.
Miller, B. (2020). A Picture is Worth 1000 Messages: Investigating Face and Body Photos on Mobile Dating Apps for Men Who Have Sex with Men, Journal of Homosexuality, 67(13), 1798-1822. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2019.1610630.
Montemurro, B. (2021). “If you could just see me”: The construction of heterosexual men’s sexual selves and the hierarchy of desirability, Sexualities, 24(3), 303-321. doi: 10.1177/1363460720939045.
Neyt, B., Vandenbulcke, S., & Baert, S. (2019). Are men intimidated by highly educated women? Undercover on Tinder, Economics of Education Review, 73(July), 101914. doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.101914.
Ogury (2019). Dating App Study ’19 – How lovers ‘match’ in a mobile-first world. Available at https://ogury.com/research/dating-app-study-how-lovers-match-in-a-mobile-first-world/.
Orosz, G., Tóth-Király, I., Bőthe, B. & Melher, D. (2016). Too many swipes for today: The development of the Problematic Tinder Use Scale (PTUS), Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5(3), 518-523. doi: 10.1556/2006.5.2016.016.
Peretti-Watel, P., Beck, F., Legleye, S. & Moatti, J.P. (2007). Becoming a smoker: Adapting Becker’s model of deviance for adolescent smoking, Health Sociology Review, 16(1), 53-67. doi: 10.5172/hesr.2007.16.1.53.
Peretti-Watel, P., Halfen, S., & Grémy, I. (2007). The “moral career” of cigarette smokers: A French survey, Health, Risk and Society, 9(3), 259-273. doi: 10.1080/13698570701486070.
Quora (no date) What was your Tinder experience like? Available at https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-Tinder-experience-like. Accessed on June 25, 2022.
Radcliffe, P. (2011). Motherhood, pregnancy, and the negotiation of identity: The moral career of drug treatment, Social Science and Medicine, 72(6), 984-991. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.01.017.
Ranzini, G., & Lutz, C. (2017). Love at first swipe? Explaining Tinder self-presentation and motives, Mobile Media and Communication, 5(1), 80-101. doi: 10.1177/2050157916664559.
Scott, S., & Hardie-Bick, J. (2022). Moral career. The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, Routledge, 74-84.
Sevi, B., Aral, T., & Eskenazi, T. (2018). Exploring the hook-up app: Low sexual disgust and high sociosexuality predict motivation to use Tinder for casual sex, Personality and Individual Differences, 133, 17-20. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2017.04.053.
Sobieraj, S., & Humphreys, L. (2021). The Tinder Games: Collective mobile dating app use and gender conforming behavior, Mobile Media and Communication. doi: 10.1177/20501579211005001.
Statista Research Department (2022). Distribution of Tinder monthly active users in the United States as of March 2021, by gender, Statista. Available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/975925/us-tinder-user-ratio-gender/. Accessed on May 20, 2022.
Strubel, J., & Petrie, T. A. (2017). Love me Tinder: Body image and psychosocial functioning among men and women, Body Image, 21, 34-38. doi: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2017.02.006.
Sumerau, J. E., Cragun, R. T., & Mathers, L. A. B. (2016). “I Found God in The Glory Hole”: The Moral Career of a Gay Christian, Sociological Inquiry, 86(4), 618-640. doi: 10.1111/soin.12134.
Sumter, S. R., Vandenbosch, L., & Ligtenberg, L. (2017). Love me Tinder: Untangling emerging adults’ motivations for using the dating application Tinder, Telematics and Informatics, 34(1), 67-78. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2016.04.009.
Thompson, L. (2018). “I can be your tinder nightmare”: Harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace, Feminism and Psychology, 28(1), 69-89. doi: 10.1177/0959353517720226.
Timmermans, E., & De Caluwé, E. (2017a). Development and validation of the Tinder Motives Scale (TMS), Computers in Human Behavior, 70, 341-350. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.01.028.
Timmermans, E., & De Caluwé, E. (2017b). To Tinder or not to Tinder, that’s the question: An individual differences perspective to Tinder use and motives, Personality and Individual Differences, 110, 74-79. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2017.01.026.
Tyson, G., Perta, V.C., Haddadi, H. & Seto, M.C. (2016). A First Look at User Activity on Tinder, 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 461-466. doi: 10.1109/ASONAM.2016.7752275.
Waling, A., Kehler, M., Power, J., Kerr, L. & Bourne, A. (2022). “I don’t think my torso is anything to write home about”: men’s reflexive production of “authentic” photos for online dating platforms, Journal of Gender Studies, 00(00), 1-15. doi: 10.1080/09589236.2022.2027236.
Waling, A., Kerr, L., Bourne, A., Power, J. & Kehler, M. (2022). “It’s nice to be appreciated”: Understanding heterosexual men’s engagements with sexting and sharing Dick Pics, Sexualities, 25(3), 198-221. doi: 10.1177/1363460720947297.
Wang, G., Gill, K., Mohanlal, M., Zheng, H. & Zhao, B.Y. (2013). Wisdom in the social crowd: An analysis of Quora, WWW 2013 - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, 1341-1351.
Wouters, E., & De Wet, K. (2016). Women’s experience of HIV as a chronic illness in South Africa: hard‐earned, biographical disruption and moral career, Sociology of Health & Illness, 38(4), 521-542. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12377.
Athens, L. H. (1995). Dramatic Self Change, The Sociological Quarterly, 36(3), 571-586.
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press.
Bergström, M. (2021). The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Blackhart, G. C., Fitzpatrick, J., & Williamson, J. (2014). Dispositional factors predicting use of online dating sites and behaviors related to online dating, Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 113-118. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.022.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2012). Thematic analysis, in H. Cooper, P. M. Camic, D. L. Long, A. T. Panter, D. Rindskopf, & K. J. Sher (Eds.), APA handbook of research methods in psychology, Vol. 2. Research designs: Quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. American Psychological Association, 57-71. doi: 10.1037/13620-004.
Carpenter, C. J., & McEwan, B. (2016). The players of micro-dating: Individual and gender differences in goal orientations toward micro-dating apps, First monday. Available at https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/6187/5469.
Castro, Á., Barrada, J.R., Ramos-Villagrasa, P.J. & Fernández-del-Río, E. (2020). Profiling dating apps users: Sociodemographic and personality characteristics, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(10), 3653. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17103653.
Crawford, G. (2003). The career of the sport supporter: The case of the Manchester Storm, Sociology, 37(2), 219-237. doi: 10.1177/0038038503037002001.
Cruz, M.L.S., Bastos, F.I., Darmont, M., Dickstein, P. & Monteiro, S. (2015). The “moral career” of perinatally HIV-infected children: Revisiting Goffman’s concept, AIDS Care - Psychological and Socio-Medical Aspects of AIDS/HIV, 27(1), 6-9. doi: 10.1080/09540121.2014.940270.
Duguay, S. (2017). Dressing up Tinderella: interrogating authenticity claims on the mobile dating app Tinder, Information Communication and Society, 20(3), 351-367. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168471.
Erevik, E.K., Kristensen, J.H., Torsheim, T., Vedaa, Ø. & Pallesen, S. (2020). Tinder Use and Romantic Relationship Formations: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study, Frontiers in Psychology, 11(August), 1-10. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01757.
García-Gómez, A. (2020). Discursive representation of masculinity and femininity in Tinder and Grindr: Hegemonic masculinity, feminine devaluation and femmephobia, Discourse and Society, 31(4), 390-410. doi: 10.1177/0957926520903523.
Garda, M. B., & Karhulahti, V. M. (2019). Let’s Play Tinder! Aesthetics of a Dating App, Games and Culture, 1-14. doi: 10.1177/1555412019891328.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Moral Career of the Mental Patient, Psychiatry, 22(2), 123-142. doi: 10.1080/00332747.1959.11023166.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Hardie-Bick, J. (2005). Dropping Out and Diving In. An Ethnography of Skydiving. (Doctoral dissertation, Durham University). Available at http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2734/.
Haywood, C. (2018). Mobile Romance: Tinder and the Navigation of Masculinity. doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-50683-2.
Hennink, M. M., Kaiser, B. N., & Marconi, V. C. (2017). Code Saturation Versus Meaning Saturation: How Many Interviews Are Enough?, Qualitative Health Research, 27(4), 591-608. doi: 10.1177/1049732316665344.
Iqbal, M. (2022). Tinder Revenue and Usage Statistics, Business of Apps. Available at https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/. Accessed on May 16, 2021.
Johnson, J. L., & Best, A. L. (2012). Radical normals: The moral career of straight parents as public advocates for their gay children, Symbolic Interaction, 35(3), 321-339. doi: 10.1002/SYMB.23.
Jones, I. (2000). A model of serious leisure identification: The case of football fandom, Leisure Studies, 19(4), 283-298. doi: 10.1080/02614360050118841.
Krüger, S., & Spilde, C. A. (2020). Judging books by their covers – Tinder interface, usage and sociocultural implications, Information Communication and Society, 23(10), 1395-1410. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1572771.
Laner, M. R., & Ventrone, N. A. (2000). Dating Scripts Revisited, Journal of Family Issues, 21(4), 488-500.
Lopes, M. R., & Vogel, C. (2019). Gender Differences in Online Dating Experiences, It Happened on Tinder: Reflections and Studies on Internet-Infused Dating, 31-47. doi: 10.1037/a0017504.Bogle.
MacKee, F. (2016). Social Media in Gay London: Tinder as an Alternative to Hook-Up Apps, Social Media and Society, 2(3). doi: 10.1177/2056305116662186.
Matza, D. (1969). Becoming Deviant. New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.). Transaction Publishers.
Miller, B. (2020). A Picture is Worth 1000 Messages: Investigating Face and Body Photos on Mobile Dating Apps for Men Who Have Sex with Men, Journal of Homosexuality, 67(13), 1798-1822. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2019.1610630.
Montemurro, B. (2021). “If you could just see me”: The construction of heterosexual men’s sexual selves and the hierarchy of desirability, Sexualities, 24(3), 303-321. doi: 10.1177/1363460720939045.
Neyt, B., Vandenbulcke, S., & Baert, S. (2019). Are men intimidated by highly educated women? Undercover on Tinder, Economics of Education Review, 73(July), 101914. doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.101914.
Ogury (2019). Dating App Study ’19 – How lovers ‘match’ in a mobile-first world. Available at https://ogury.com/research/dating-app-study-how-lovers-match-in-a-mobile-first-world/.
Orosz, G., Tóth-Király, I., Bőthe, B. & Melher, D. (2016). Too many swipes for today: The development of the Problematic Tinder Use Scale (PTUS), Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 5(3), 518-523. doi: 10.1556/2006.5.2016.016.
Peretti-Watel, P., Beck, F., Legleye, S. & Moatti, J.P. (2007). Becoming a smoker: Adapting Becker’s model of deviance for adolescent smoking, Health Sociology Review, 16(1), 53-67. doi: 10.5172/hesr.2007.16.1.53.
Peretti-Watel, P., Halfen, S., & Grémy, I. (2007). The “moral career” of cigarette smokers: A French survey, Health, Risk and Society, 9(3), 259-273. doi: 10.1080/13698570701486070.
Quora (no date) What was your Tinder experience like? Available at https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-Tinder-experience-like. Accessed on June 25, 2022.
Radcliffe, P. (2011). Motherhood, pregnancy, and the negotiation of identity: The moral career of drug treatment, Social Science and Medicine, 72(6), 984-991. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.01.017.
Ranzini, G., & Lutz, C. (2017). Love at first swipe? Explaining Tinder self-presentation and motives, Mobile Media and Communication, 5(1), 80-101. doi: 10.1177/2050157916664559.
Scott, S., & Hardie-Bick, J. (2022). Moral career. The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies, Routledge, 74-84.
Sevi, B., Aral, T., & Eskenazi, T. (2018). Exploring the hook-up app: Low sexual disgust and high sociosexuality predict motivation to use Tinder for casual sex, Personality and Individual Differences, 133, 17-20. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2017.04.053.
Sobieraj, S., & Humphreys, L. (2021). The Tinder Games: Collective mobile dating app use and gender conforming behavior, Mobile Media and Communication. doi: 10.1177/20501579211005001.
Statista Research Department (2022). Distribution of Tinder monthly active users in the United States as of March 2021, by gender, Statista. Available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/975925/us-tinder-user-ratio-gender/. Accessed on May 20, 2022.
Strubel, J., & Petrie, T. A. (2017). Love me Tinder: Body image and psychosocial functioning among men and women, Body Image, 21, 34-38. doi: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2017.02.006.
Sumerau, J. E., Cragun, R. T., & Mathers, L. A. B. (2016). “I Found God in The Glory Hole”: The Moral Career of a Gay Christian, Sociological Inquiry, 86(4), 618-640. doi: 10.1111/soin.12134.
Sumter, S. R., Vandenbosch, L., & Ligtenberg, L. (2017). Love me Tinder: Untangling emerging adults’ motivations for using the dating application Tinder, Telematics and Informatics, 34(1), 67-78. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2016.04.009.
Thompson, L. (2018). “I can be your tinder nightmare”: Harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace, Feminism and Psychology, 28(1), 69-89. doi: 10.1177/0959353517720226.
Timmermans, E., & De Caluwé, E. (2017a). Development and validation of the Tinder Motives Scale (TMS), Computers in Human Behavior, 70, 341-350. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.01.028.
Timmermans, E., & De Caluwé, E. (2017b). To Tinder or not to Tinder, that’s the question: An individual differences perspective to Tinder use and motives, Personality and Individual Differences, 110, 74-79. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2017.01.026.
Tyson, G., Perta, V.C., Haddadi, H. & Seto, M.C. (2016). A First Look at User Activity on Tinder, 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 461-466. doi: 10.1109/ASONAM.2016.7752275.
Waling, A., Kehler, M., Power, J., Kerr, L. & Bourne, A. (2022). “I don’t think my torso is anything to write home about”: men’s reflexive production of “authentic” photos for online dating platforms, Journal of Gender Studies, 00(00), 1-15. doi: 10.1080/09589236.2022.2027236.
Waling, A., Kerr, L., Bourne, A., Power, J. & Kehler, M. (2022). “It’s nice to be appreciated”: Understanding heterosexual men’s engagements with sexting and sharing Dick Pics, Sexualities, 25(3), 198-221. doi: 10.1177/1363460720947297.
Wang, G., Gill, K., Mohanlal, M., Zheng, H. & Zhao, B.Y. (2013). Wisdom in the social crowd: An analysis of Quora, WWW 2013 - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, 1341-1351.
Wouters, E., & De Wet, K. (2016). Women’s experience of HIV as a chronic illness in South Africa: hard‐earned, biographical disruption and moral career, Sociology of Health & Illness, 38(4), 521-542. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12377.