Dating Online Masculinities

I started using online dating sites in 2005, after I met a woman on a plane who told me she met her boyfriend on a site called The Nerve. She was attractive and cosmopolitan, and I thought that she might be on to something. Since I first visited online dating sites in a search for love and companionship (and continue to do so), I did not expect that my experiences would inform my research. But I’m a feminist philosopher. So when I started having a troubling sense while I looked through profiles, I took it seriously. Profile after profile of heterosexual men depicted that men whose profiles I was clicking didn’t like women, or, rather, they didn’t like femininity. These men had crafted profiles filled with signs of their own masculinity as well as their love of all things masculine. It seemed to me that these aggressively heterosexual men weren’t even writing their profiles for women. They were in a position fraught with contradiction. They had signed up on a dating site with the clear intent to meet women, perhaps even women who would become their partners in long-term, committed relationships, but they seemed compelled to perform from a script of hegemonic masculinity that requires a disavowal of all things feminine.

I was especially struck by the insistent masculinity in these profiles because leading masculinities theorists have claimed that what Raewyn Connell called hegemonic masculinity is on the decline. For example, in Inclusive Masculinities, Eric Anderson, has claimed that at least white, university-attending men are losing orthodox gender patterns and demonstrating more “inclusive masculinities.” Anderson argues that the notion of hegemonic masculinity fails to comprehend the terrain of masculinities in the twenty-first century, when “homohysteria” is on the decline. Anderson advocates a new, more inclusive theory of masculinity that examines the effects of three stages of homohysteria on masculinities in Anglo-American societies: “elevated cultural homohysteria, diminishing cultural homohysteria, and diminished homohysteria.” In the first period, homohysteria operated to reinforce a hegemonic, homophobic masculinity. In the second, which Anderson considers the epoch in which we live, two forms of masculinity are dominant, neither of which exercises hegemony. In inclusive masculinity, Anderson argues, heterosexual men display increased “emotional and physical homosocial proximity”; the inclusion of gay men; the inclusion of heterosexual men’s femininity; and decreased sexism. Finally, in a future age of diminished homohysteria, he forecasts that gender stratification would greatly reduce, as would sexism and patriarchy, and there would be a proliferation of expressions of masculinity and femininity.

Michael Kimmel agrees, announcing in Manhood in America that a new type of masculinity that exhibits “increasing comfort with gender equality – both at home and at work” – is appearing in the twenty-first century. Kimmel claims that we have two competing images of masculinity in dominant positions today. Along with red and blue states, we have something like red and blue gender politics, with half of men subscribing to more traditional notions of masculinity and half to the new, more inclusive ones.

Kimmel offers Barack Obama as a model of the new type of masculinity. Criticized by his opponents as not masculine enough, Obama rose above the insults. Kimmel points to Obama’s “even-tempered affability coupled with his sharp intelligence,” his strong relationship with his independent wife, and his unapologetic commitment to and prioritization of his family.

While Anderson and Kimmel do seem right that expressions of masculinity are proliferating, my experiences online have not indicated that we are witnessing the creation of a space for the feminine. The disdain for the feminine persists in both traditional and newer masculinities, and a sexist form of masculinity has maintained hegemony. In addition, the newer masculinities, while appearing more egalitarian, often remain sexist. While many men may be advocating equal rights for women and forgoing traditional gender roles, many, and often the same men, still express the dominant sexist form of masculinity in their interests and communication styles.

The majority of users whose profiles I visited for this project were white, as 80% of OkCupid users are white; urban, as I was searching in Philadelphia, where I lived between 2005 and 2013; college-educated, as I was looking for someone with a similar educational background to my own; and in their twenties and thirties, because I was looking for someone my own age. In many ways they sit atop the hierarchy of masculinity, which is to say they exercise “hegemonic masculinity” and have more “masculine capital” to spare than many other men. To emphasize that this population of OkCupid users generally self-reports as tolerant, I searched for their responses to the following OkCupid-generated questions: “Would you consider dating someone who has vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people?” and “Do you think homosexuality is a sin?”  To the first question, twenty-one out of the fifty men responded. Only two said yes; two responded that it “depends on which race”; and the other seventeen said no. These results make this sample set slightly less tolerant than OkCupid users in general, of whom 84% answered no to this question, but still comparable with eighty percent responding no. In response to the question regarding sexual orientation, twenty-seven men responded and only two said that it was a sin. The responses support Anderson’s position that we are living in an age of decreased homohysteria. (Thirty-four of the fifty women surveyed answered the question on race, and all answered in the negative. Thirty-eight of the fifty women surveyed answered the question on homosexuality, and all answered in the negative.)

Despite their increased tolerance for gay male sexual orientation, the users I encountered expressed their disdain for the feminine in the content and the style of their profiles. As for content, the profiles I examined mark gender through cultural references, which are a key element of the script of hegemonic masculinity. Many male profile writers’ lists of favorite authors and musicians are exclusively male, and these are often not short lists. Moreover, the central characters in frequently-mentioned books reinforce hegemonic masculinity. In Men and Masculinities, Stephen M. Whitehead discusses the mythical image of the man as adventurer and explorer: the myth of man leaving home, rejecting the private sphere, distancing himself from the feminine. Whitehead offers a few of many examples: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and its film relation Wall Street, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and all of the road films that have followed it. The men on the dating sites tell us that they love Kerouac, whose Dean Moriarty epitomizes this hero. Many profiles I encountered also highlight beat poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, whose alter ego Henry Chinaski speaks of his exploits with women throughout Bukowski’s work. In a search on OkCupid of male heterosexual users between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven in a one-hundred-mile radius of Philadelphia, 3.4 times as many men than women expressed an interest in Bukowski. (To access the heterosexual women’s profiles in order to make relevant comparisons, I made a profile as a straight male user.) In a search of the same population, 115 male users and thirty-four women expressed an interest in Bukowski; seventy-four men and forty-one women stated an interest in Palahniuk; and seventy men and seven women indicated an interest in Kerouac.  Female authors, by contrast, comprised thirty-five percent of the women’s lists, but only seventeen percent of the men’s lists. The average length of women’s musical interests was also shorter than the men’s lists.

Men and women’s profiles differ in styles as well. Users express femininity by demonstrating openness and flexibility, and users express masculinity by demonstrating expertise. Men catalogue more interests than women do, often with encyclopedic specificity. They show us by the length of these lists that they have achieved mastery in these subject areas, while women claim that they are open to learning what their partner is interested in. Women’s stated interests are general and broad.

Other research into online dating shows that the aversion toward gay male sexual orientation might be losing its key role in maintaining hegemonic masculinity. For example, Walker and Eller examine how straight and gay men construct their masculinities online. Culling the written portions of 385 profiles of straight and gay men on Match.com, Walker and Eller find that gay men and heterosexual men both value the accrual of masculine capital, though they go about earning it in different ways. Walker and Eller observe that gay male sexual orientation does not bar entrance into dominant masculinities. Rodriguz et. al. also find through their examination of networked masculinities on gay dating apps that “hegemonic masculinity is a macro-level process that informs micro-level processes of inclusive masculinity,” which is to say that even on sites where all participants are gay, men perpetuate hegemonic masculinity.

Walker and Eller agree that what prevents access to hegemonic masculinity is not sexual orientation but rather femininity. Gay and heterosexual men alike filled their profiles with signs of hegemonic masculinity, which included being “laid back” and “easy going”; emotionally strong and levelheaded; athletic, adventurous, and fearless; and financially independent and ambitious. What seems most important to these men is to distance themselves from femininity and emphasize their own masculinity. Rodriguz et. al. question Anderson’s optimism. They investigate “networked masculinities” on gay dating apps and examine a process they call “mascing,” which involves emphasizing one’s own masculinity. They conclude that Anderson’s optimism about decreased homohysteria leading to decreased hegemonic masculinity is misguided insofar as the “digital space of gay dating apps is free of homophobia and is exclusive to users who engage in sex with other men, yet we still see the policing of masculinity” and thus the disavowal of femininity on these sites.

Hegemonic masculinity has always been precarious. It demands homosociality. It demands men identify with other men, seek solidarity with other men, and actively desire these interactions with other men—desire, that is, to be a “man’s man.” It demands that in doing this, men distance themselves from all things feminine. In more orthodox masculinities, there is a tension between the emphasis on male bonding and the strict prohibition of homosexuality—a tension thus between the discourses of male solidarity and heterosexism. The connection between men must be social and not sexual: hegemonic masculinity requires a distance from women but a sexual desire for them, a disdain for all things feminine but yet a sexual desire for the female. But among men who express decreased homohysteria, the aversion toward the feminine persists, maintaining masculinity’s hegemony over femininity.

One might object that we can find homosociality in women’s profiles as well as men’s. I have not seen this. Women do express homosocial desires, but not so much on online dating sites. The homosocial for women has traditionally been a space for respite from a patriarchal world, a space that sometimes becomes a site of contestation against that world. Online, women are more likely to recite from a script of emphasized femininity. Women list many more masculine interests than men list feminine interests. Women’s profiles indicate that they are interested in the Red Sox, NASCAR, and outdoor activities, Palahniuk and Bukowski as well. While I do not want to delegitimize these interests, we may see them as a way for women to approximate the woman they believe men desire. These women may be reciting from a script of “emphasized femininity,” a “form defined around compliance with this subordination [of women] and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men.” Connell argues that there is no such thing as hegemonic femininity, because femininity achieves power or hegemony over masculinity, but “emphasized femininity” is widespread in the media. She calls it a kind of femininity that is “performed, and performed especially to men.” By reciting such a script, women achieve better access to men in positions of dominance, but still as objects of desire for those who have power, not as those who have power as themselves.

In an increasingly fragmented and accelerated world, we have more and more diverse spaces for meeting one another. Online personae allow for a proliferation of gender scripts and arguably less punishment for failure to adhere to the hegemonic scripts. At the same time, online dating profiles present us with a new archive in which to examine the scripts of hegemonic masculinity. While online dating is largely a new site for an old game, what is new in this archive is a continued prevalence of the disdain for the feminine alongside other more egalitarian views. This continued presence suggests that the rise of inclusive and egalitarian masculinities expressed by Kimmel and Anderson is not yet comprehensive. The disdain for the feminine appears to be the most intractable element of orthodox masculinities that continues to pervade even these more inclusive masculinities. Insofar as male homosociality serves to reinforce hegemonic masculinity, it silences feminine as well as alternative masculine ways of being in the world, and the need to give voice to these different, underrepresented ways of being in the world remains.

Dr. Sarah Vitale is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ball State University. Her research focuses on Marx and post-Marxism, especially on the notions of production, labor, and human nature, as well as contemporary feminist theory. She is Co-Editor of the Radical Philosophy Review, the journal of the Radical Philosophy Association, and her recent publications include and “Men Who Love Bukowski: Hegemonic Masculinity, Online Dating, and the Aversion Toward the Feminine” (Peitho 22:1) and “Community-Engaged Learning and Precollege Philosophy During Neoliberalism” (Teaching Philosophy 42:4). 

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.