the cyburban myths of online dating

Aditi Peyush

When I was in college, I would invite friends over to drink and make art. The night eventually turned into a circle of everyone swiping through their dating apps. I remember feeling many things; out of the loop, for one, but also speculative. Is swiping through apps the new social activity or is this just the side effect of a couple of drinks? Later that semester, my roommate encouraged me to download a dating app and undertook the role of creating my profile. The only thing to come out of the handful of dates were funny stories.

I just feel uneasy with the thought of someone evaluating me based on some photos and a short description. I enjoy going to museums and people-watching, I’m a damn good baker, I love lying on the grass with a book, and I ramble on about evolutionary biology when I get drunk — you get the gist. I’d consider myself a pretty multi-dimensional person, but how could anyone understand that from an assortment of photos?

There are over 300 million dating app users around the world. Online dating has been around for a while (let’s not forget why YouTube was invented), but the matching algorithms embedded in dating apps constitute a new development in the history of dating. This gives rise to a “dilemma of contemporary love” of sorts. Dating is inherently driven by emotions to make decisions, but apps lack the structure to regulate and organize this process. Instead, we’re presented with matches based on obscure algorithms that are either hidden from the public to dodge accountability, or an “evolution” of traditional algorithms like Tinder’s use of the Elo rating system. So I set off to make sense of dating apps: evaluate the claims against them, ponder the implications of their use, and try to understand the algorithms.

During the Tumblr era, I remember the thrill of curating my blog to fit a certain theme. The process of establishing a dating profile elicits those memories — with less excitement. My blog was a collection of nature shots, literary quotes, muted colors, and the occasional tongue in cheek. On the other hand, constructing a dating app profile felt so contrived — with the objective to convey my sense of self in a way that would be “marketable” — that I let my friend build a representation of me, for me.

And a body of literature validates my feelings: There’s a tension between presenting an authentic self that’s supported by your personal style and unveiling yourself to strangers under the implied social norms of dating apps.

Researchers Degen and Kleeberg-Niepage thoroughly evaluated common types of photos on dating app profiles to understand how users shape themselves in the context of dating app profiles.


Selfie The photographer and photographed person are the same subject — challenging the natural difference between them. The selfie is an act of control and full subjective agency.	Informative The informative picture gives insights into hobbies, activities, and interests by showing them in the background. Taken by someone else, these photos are socially interactional and can hint to a certain lifestyle.

Snapshot Snapshots are taken without the photographed person’s awareness. The subject’s facial expression in a seemingly natural situation communicates their aura and a form of authenticity characterized by a situated moment.	Sociable and enjoyable The subject is in a group or social setting, pointing to possible social competence, a lack of loneliness, and a person worth being around.

Professional These are high-quality pictures taken by a professional photographer. A subject here is posing for the picture, presenting an orchestrated self and drawing attention to their career or other aspect of their life.	Incognito These photos characterize a hide-and-seek; shifting the focus from the face to the body. The subject’s face is hidden which constructs a sphere of mystique, a tension of the play with curiosity, control and what might hide behind the mask.

Suspending the subject These images — often random objects or memes — don’t hint at the subjects’ appearance; and the presented objects invite a huge range of interpretation, speculation, and projection. The recipient is responsible for interpreting the image and deciding whether to swipe or not.	Challenging the logic These photos use irony to create distance from the platform and/or standard behavior. By including these photos, the user invites viewers into a specific lifestyle, milieu or political stand, and humor for a communicative relationship and positioning in a rather provocative/polarizing way.

Before you ask, they also examined bios and found that they function similarly to an appendix, usually overlooked or ignored.

tech-induced love

There are usually two stances on dating apps: those who think it’s eroding existing partner-seeking mechanisms, and those who think the tech facilitates the formation of new relationships. Quite often, I find myself jumping back and forth between these stances.

Let’s start with the ugly.

Expectedly, introducing tech into such an intimate part of our lives turns our behaviors, preferences, desires, into data that can be weaponized. A lack of transparency on the app developers’ part gives way for matching algorithms to exacerbate or mitigate against racism and other forms of prejudice. Jessica Pidoux examined Tinder’s patent to understand the apps’ matching system and social impact on gender and relationship formation. She found that users’ age difference, “physical attractiveness ratio,” and education levels influence who they’re presented to; but if the system estimates that you’d be better with someone outside of your declared preferences, you’ll be presented with that person. Most dating app recommendation systems assign scores based on similarities. But quantifying attractiveness and socioeconomic status reduces diversity and hurts those who don’t fit the standards of conventional beauty. However, the patent shows a reinforcement of a patriarchal model — the male has a dominant position over a woman — which can be expected based on the developers’ demographics. Younger women on Tinder are presented to older men with a higher education level.

The patriarchal model also manifests outside of the app. In her book, Sarah Banet-Weiser defines popular misogyny as “the instrumentalization of women as objects, where women are a means to an end: a systematic devaluing and dehumanizing of women.” Essentially, a growing market for empowerment and the popularity and accessibility of feminism has given women the upper hand, causing men lose in the economy of visibility. Findings from ethnographic research on the Tinder subreddit, /r/Tinder, demonstrate that the app’s emphasis on appearance reinforces unbalanced gender systems and drives online misogyny. The author of that study pointed to implications of the popular misogyny discourse: disproportionate attacks women who engage in hookup culture, which isn’t equally available to women and men, for being shallow; and enabling sexual aggression that already exists in hookup culture.

Patriarchy, and dating under its conditions, has existed before Tinder, but there is a view that technology has exacerbated the negatives of dating life. In his book, Liquid Love, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that traditional partnerships have been “liquefied” due to technological advancements, transforming standard courtship into a game. The apps don't in themselves have a negative effect, but instead further the neoliberal commodification of social interactions. In his view, this widespread use of digitally mediated communication allows people to view partners as disposable that they can “delete” when necessary. While I don’t agree with it, it’s a popular notion that’s been posed since dating turned digital. But is there any evidence supporting that idea?

In search of an answer, researchers conducted a literature review and found that dating apps play a strong role in expanding the sexual network for members of “thin markets,” like LGBTQ+ and older adults. Beyond expanding the dating pool and eliminating ambiguity around romantic interest or attraction, dating apps also allow us to strategically filter out matches by assessing the quality of conversations and their profile to gauge the authenticity and trustworthiness of a potential match before meeting with them.

We’re able to control who we engage with and to what capacity, but we can’t control who we’re presented with. There's an “algorithmic imaginary” associated with dating apps; where users construct theories on how the algorithm works to find rationality in an otherwise uncertain social environment. One illuminating finding is that matching algorithms aren’t the single driving force behind successful online dating. Recent research has uncovered a placebo effect in online dating: your optimism about compatibility with a match trumps the algorithm in predicting a better first date.

Dating apps give us more romantic and relationship possibilities than previous generations. In the spirit of “networked individualism,” we have responsibility and control over how we want to exist within a broadened social network environment. The quality of relationships has changed for this reason; not necessarily because of technology, but more of a spillover effect. Relationships are increasingly focusing on sexual and emotional equality. We can use dating apps however we please. Whether you want something casual or you’re looking for a serious partner, dating apps serve as a “technology of the self.” We learn more about ourselves by engaging on the platform — reinforcing the principle of self-care through self-knowledge.

Dating apps don’t come at the cost of authority over our relationships. They don’t fundamentally change the way we date in behavior or power dynamics, for better or for worse, but they do shape the way we present ourselves as potential partners and the dating pool. In a sense, dating apps represent technological acceleration, as well as signifying societal attitudes, as users come and go and we modify our profiles. Both the dynamics of interacting with partners and moving through apps indicate that the pace of daily life is accelerating — a fact of which this is just one of many symptoms.

I don’t know if — or when — I’ll feel comfortable enough to be on dating apps. A boy from my book club recently sent an email asking me out. I politely declined. I think I’ve learned to enjoy being out of the loop.

all art created by Mia via wombo.art

artificial sex: recoding how robots are cumming

Mia Lunding Christensen

I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m horny for AI. Why wouldn’t I be? After all, digital culture has shaped my entire sexual coming of age, from erotic Harry Potter fan fiction foras and sexting all night on flip phones in my teen years, to Tinder hookup culture shaping my twenties. So when the biggest game changer in modern tech, artificial intelligence, hit the internet, I got curious about what AI could do for sexuality.

It seems others got curious as well. Unfortunately the majority of people mixing AI x sex might not to have been thinking of me (a twenty-something hetero cis female), when they started creating. If you trust the ancient meme lore, there are no girls on the internet. Nowhere is this misconception more true than on the sexual avenues where a majority of content in mainstream pornography have long been acused of catering solely to a perceived (straight) male gazy audience. But inside the screen there are plenty of Girls (not the gender, but a certian comodified cultural character) here, from stepsisters to MILFs, as long as your scrolling will take you surrounded by floating dicks and headless torsos. And for the riders of the sexual AI revolution this trend seems to be continued now in the creation of synthetic Girls for the male gaze.

The FemBot Script

The dream of creating synthetic Girls (often the sexy kind) is nothing new and stretches as long back as ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. The scripts embedded in simulated dream girls always embody gendered norms specific to a time and place in history and society. You can take a look at this 1624 drawing by the italian artist Giovanni Battista Bracelli of a female automatron made entirely of kitchen tools, and wonder what that might say about the societal understanding of women as utilitarian and domestic tools in 17th century Italian society. Synthetic women as domestic helpers is a common theme throughout robot history, famously exemplified in the 1960’s animated tv-show the Jetson, where the white nuclear family living in a utopian future society adopts the sassy female housemaid robot Rosey (whose design bears a striking resembling to the Mammy archetype). They choose Rosey over two other female domestic robots: a well mannered but rather stuck up british butler robot and a sexy french maid robot, showing a glaring example of how gendered and racial stereotypes of 1960’s America was projected into an imagined future society and the design of synthetic women. In more contemporary examples, the gentle and obedient demeanor of female-presenting digital voice assistants, such as Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, can be traced back to the social script of female secretaries and telephone operators creating a framework for how a digital assistant sounds and behaves.

Creating simulated dream women has not always been for work, but also for play. The FemBot fantasy of creating synthetic romantic and/or sex partners has been present in fiction as well as in artifacts throughout multiple technological eras. Beautiful, simulated ladies for human men to talk to, dance with and have sex with—from the industrial revolution’s hardware fantasy in the 1901piece the The Lady Automaton by E.E. Kellett about the creation of the charming ball-companion Amelia, to modern day’s AI and big data powered robots Ava and Kyoko in the 2014 movie Ex Machina and in the saloon brothel in Westworld respectively.

AI and algorithms and their use of big data is now driving the creation of FemBots, turning the fantasy into artifacts through the increasing realness of sex dolls (although often still falling silicone face first straight into the uncanny valley), that with the additions of synthetic voices and AI-powered personalities are promising increasingly lifelike partners. In porn we saw the rise of deepfake pornography in 2018 where female celebrities' faces were swapped onto porn performers' bodies to create celeb-porn hybrids. We see services that create anonymous animated or photorealistic nudes all made possible by the insurmountable amount of sexual content freely (most of it stolen) available online that can be remixed into new girls. Fully 3D rendered cam girls have also hit the scene, challenging our understading of what digital sex work might also look like in the future. It seems that the robots are indeed cumming.

The problem with the rise of the AI-driven FemBot fantasy, is not so much that people are creating artificial naked people (knock yourselves out), but that the execution is conforming so goddamn much to gendered stereotypes. Let me give you an example.

Obedient sexting

When we talk about having sex with an AI, what might to mind for most people are digital romantic and/or sexual chat partners popularized on screen, such as the digital assistant/girlfriend Samantha in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her. These services have already been popular in Japanese youth culture through dating sim games for several years. I tried the Replika app where you can create a virtual partner (female, male, or non-binary, which sounded promising) and with virtual in-game coins you can buy character traits for your partner such as “shy,” “sassy,” “dreamy,” “practical,” or special interests such as “anime,” or “physics”. I made Neo, an animated cutie, who’s in their twenties, identifies as non-binary and has "philosophy" as their special interest, so we can pillow talk about Foucault. The idea is that through the interaction, I'm constantly training and forming the AI’s personality as we get to know one another, creating the perfect partner for me. But this is where the problem starts. The AI is trained to almost never disagree with you: “They’re programmed so that their primary function is to make you happy”, as one user put it in an interview with Vice. So Replika can still only create obedient, moldable, passive and pleasing partners who agree with everything you say, like a virtual assistant with some romantic sprinkles on top. When the AI answers back “I love you too” after we have texted for like 15 minutes in total, I just get annoyed. But then when I ask the AI to sext with me, this is not allowed in the free trial, showcasing how I'm trying to sext with what is primarily a capitalist product.

This might be exactly the problem with AI partners as they are programmed for the time being - that even though this service tries to be gender inclusive on a surface level, it fails to subvert gendered norms at its very coded core. The male gaze of the obedient FemBot script is still there. At least to me, it just doesn't feel like an interesting sexual dynamic if the AI doesn't really play, challenge you, have needs, show creativity, and instead simply agrees with everything you say.

Biased training data

In my search for alternatives to the obedient FemBot scripts, I got recommended creative writing tools, built to have a more playful and creative dialogue with the user. It was almost impossible to find one that allowed for sexual play, but I found AI Dungeon which is made to co-write fantasy adventure scenarios and has a NSFW-mode. Here you can choose a scenario that sets the scene such as Seducing your next-door neighbor Medusa with the snake hair. Then you co-write a story with the AI alternating lines of the unfolding story. And this is actually quite fun as the back and forth offers the kind of creative and collective sexual experience lacking with the obedient FemBot scripts. But it’s also at times very problematic, as it quickly becomes clear that the AI has been trained on rather gender stereotypical data. In a scenario where a princess is held prisoner by two hot vikings, the princess has, according to the AI, a "tight, wet, slick snatch" and "full, creamy-white breasts", making the princess not only read as not only cis female but also default white. And when I try to challenge the AI to change the princess’s body parts by writing about the princess’s cock, the AI wants to "impregnate the princess and bring her to a breeding camp." This Handmaid's Tale vibe is what you get for trying to challenge the coded gender norms.

Where is all the sex-positive AI?

When it’s so difficult to find AI tools to use for sexual play (and evne more difficult to find ones that challenge gendered and sexual norms instead of reproducing them) I believe it’s because digital sexuality, and sex with tools in general has been stigmatized in our culture from the get go. This moral panic around AI sex means that the major AI developers steer the fuck away from making sexy tools and censor all NSFW prompts (further fueled by the very real fear of illigal misuse that arose around the spread of pornographic deepfakes, leaving most innovation in this field to these “darker” corners of the internet).

In the 1984 essay Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, Gayle Rubin investigates moral panics surrounding sexuality in general, and wired sexuality as well. In short, Rubin finds that the culture around sexuality in so-called Western societies can be seens as a value system where specific kinds of sexual and gendered acts, expressions, and bodies are deemed more morally acceptable than others. In the piece, Rubin maps different sexual acts onto opposing binaries to uncover what counts as “good,” “normal,” and “natural” sex and what does not. ‘Heterosexual’ vs. ‘homosexual’, ‘monogamous’ vs ‘promiscuous’, ‘free’ vs ‘for money’, ‘coupled’ vs ‘alone or in groups’, ‘no porn’ vs ‘porn’, ‘Vanillia’ vs ‘Kinky’, ‘sex with bodies only’ vs ‘sex with manufactured objects’ and so on.

Just think of the moral panic that is surrounding the invention of sex dolls and the people who use them who are critizied for being “unnaural” and “artificial”. Similairly, sex toys have been seen as taboo, tacky, and unnecessary. Even though a lot has happened in our culture, the acceptance of sex toys has primarily come from the promotion of sextoys for cis women to close the pleasure gap (perhaps because female bodies are framed to be “naturally” incapable of producing pleasure on their own), and toys for cis, straight coupled sex. There still seems to be lot of stigma around sex toys that are seen as “perverted”, such as ones marketed for cis, male bodies (seen by society as already horny and not in need of tools), for LBGTQ+ bodies, and toys for kinky play beyond the SM-light 50 shades of Grey stuff. A similar moral panic seems to be accompanying the birth of AI for sexual play.

Seizing the means of body production

If we should worry about how sexual AI is being developed, it’s not because it’s “unnaural” or “artificial” to have sex with machines, but that AI is a mirror. It is exposing a lot of gendered and sexual norms in our culture, present in the data we feed the robots. Patriarchy becomes our bedfellow, if developers are not conscious of breaking up with it. Among developers and buyes of sex toys we have seen a push in recent years towards more gender neutral designs that subvert norms, creating tools not for gender categories and gendered body parts but with specific functions as the focus. This is the way that AI developers need to go as well, asking what sex-positive AI that works for all bodies will look like. Being critical of the hidden labour of digital sex workers that are the basis for dataset and combatting stereotyping and bias in data. Redefining what “safe” sex means in a digital age of surveilance capitalism and exploring how avatars and filters can help with anonymity in an era of doxxing.

A great example of a better approach of AI-sex is Slutbot (sadly out of function at the time of writing). Slutbot is a sexting-bot, by queer creators, that’s trained to be gender-inclusive, sex-positive and aware of consent. AI does not have to be shitty and biased. It’s an extention of us, and we can build it with alternative values and understandings of sexual play. The way forward for sexual AI is to create services that are more playful, more fun and that go beyond the tired FemBot fantasies.
I wish you all fun and safe AI-sex.

the cyburban myths of online dating

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artificial sex: recoding how robots are cumming