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“Feminine Women Only, No Hook-Ups”: How Lesbians Are Using Dating Apps

Not long ago I noticed a tweet someone I follow sent to HER, the queer women’s dating app, that surprised me.

HER responded:

As a serial monogamist who has never used any dating apps or sites, I am consistently intrigued by this world so many of my friends and community inhabit; the viral space where they connect with each other in the hopes of finding a hook-up, a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. I’ve heard the endless complaints of how there’s “no one” worth dating; no “cute girls;” that dating apps made for women to find other women “suck.” And while Grindr and Scruff are used for similar purposes in the gay male community, it seems that they have way fewer complaints in that realm. Instead, there is scrutiny over the racist, fatphobic, and other insults masquerading as “sexual preferences” on their profiles.

This made me curious about the way queer women use apps like Tinder and HER and if we are, in essence, doing the same things in the way that we specify “no butches,” “feminine women only,” “no ghetto chicks” and other statements in order to ward off prospective partners who we don’t see as “our type.”

“I have seen apps/sites that allow you to specify ethnicity, race, weight preference, etc.,” says Lauren Hamilton, a frequent dating app user. “Personally, I like this feature. I don’t want to waste time sending a message to a woman who prefers skinny, white women when I am certainly not that.”

I asked the founder of HER, Robyn Exton, how many women specify the kind of appearance they are looking for in their profiles.

“It’s a much smaller percentage than you might imagine,” she said. “On profiles, it only appears 0.3% of the time with people explicitly stating what it is they are looking for. In the social feed section of the app, it comes up 0.5% of the time, people looking to chat or hang out with people of a similar type. “

Friends who I polled on this gave me examples where it seems that the most common physical appearance statements are made about height (mostly noting how tall they are, but sometimes adding “no short girls”), and often what their hair currently looks as if it isn’t represented in their photos. On both Tinder and HER, women are more likely to write that they want “feminine women only,” some going as far to say “no manly women,” echoing the sentiments of the Tweet at the top of this article.

“We only have two filters at the moment: age and distance,” Robyn said. “We share a bit more information on a profile including height, sexuality, but you can’t filter by those. As we had so many people looking for friendship, it wasn’t necessary to filter down so much but we’ve been getting a huge number of requests recently for more filters, particularly by sexuality, so I think we’ll be taking a look at that again. “

Nadine, who met her girlfriend on Trevorspace, finds that women list “what type of lesbian they’re looking for. Most times it will be something along the lines of ‘looking for my perfect butch’ or ‘need a femme who’s also laid back,’ but that’s about it.”

TrevorSpace is a dating site that allows you to search as distinctively as you’d like, including 26 different gender options. “You can even search for people by their first names if you really want to be specific,” Nadine says. “When creating a profile, it also allows you to be incredibly specific and caters to every need. The other apps are very lovely, but not all that specific.”

What continues to be the most pervasive issue on dating apps for women is sexual identity. Most women I talked to say they are asked to clarify if they are a lesbian or bisexual, even if it already says in their profile. The biggest complaints are about women looking for something serious and feeling they are wasting time with talking to women who are flirting with bisexuality and are already in a relationship with a man.

Kitty Armistead said she met a woman on HER and started texting with her, until “I discovered that she was using her middle name on the app, and she is married with a toddler. She said she’s bisexual ‘but it’s a situation her husband understands,'” Kitty said. “At first, I was stuck between ‘See how it goes and ‘Hey, maybe I’ll actually have sex,’ until it got increasingly sketchy.”

“The mainstream sites/apps bring in more options,” Lauren said. “But, they also bring in many complicated ladies. No matter what, if you’re a lesbian only looking for another lesbian, you will run into issues on every dating site/app because women are complicated. Match.com actually connects me to the most lesbians. I feel like all of the other apps always connect me with bi, straight, fluid, questioning, poly, or pansexual women. HER connects me with very young women who are bi, pansexual, straight, escorts, etc. I would not suggest this app to anyone who is seriously looking for love. If you want a 1 or two-month fling with a straight or questioning girl, this is the app to use!”

Robyn acknowledges that sexuality is the biggest frustration for users of HER, as it seems to be on all of the other sites and apps that are inclusive of queer women.

“Lesbian women not wanting to meet bi-curious women, bisexual women looking for other bisexual women: I think perceptions are changing about this over time, but we hear a common[ly] held opinion amongst LGBTQ people that bisexual women were more likely to cheat on their partners,” Robyn said, noting it’s a hot discussion topic on the app. “But it does seem like this is slowly starting to shift.”

You may think your clarification of someone’s identity is a safeguard, but it can also be off-putting. Many lesbians also have a lot of bisexual friends and aren’t interested in dating someone who is so specific about not being involved with them, especially if they are just looking for “friendship,” as many say they are.

“One thing I’ve encountered is many women message me right away to make sure I’m not bi,” Caitlin Bergh said. “Which obviously makes me delete them right away.”

There are certainly different uses for dating apps and sites, as some women are looking for commitment while others are more interested in a Grindr-style one-night-stand.

“The main thing we find is that they don’t really know what they are looking for,” Robyn said of HER. “The majority of women join looking for friends and a way to find out what’s happening in their community, but often after they’ve been using the app for a few weeks, they realise that they’re looking for something a bit more and the people they meet could be that someone a bit more.”

Lauren posits that “90%-95% of women” on the apps and sites she uses “are looking for casual sex, a one-night-stand, experimentation, someone to cheat on their partners with, orgies, a make-out buddy, or a rebound. I don’t say this in a mean way at all; it’s true. Even when a woman says she is looking for a long-term relationship, it’s typically not true. Sometimes we don’t know what we want, and that’s just real. I was looking for serious dating with a lesbian woman.”

Listing exactly what you are looking for your in your dating profile might help to attract the kind of women you are looking for, but it also might put them off if they feel you are calling attention to something that gives a little more insight into who you are.

“I always steered clear of the women who said ‘I’m not looking for drama,'” Kirsty Logan said. “I suspect they were the ones who caused the drama.”

While women may not know exactly what they are looking for, they seem to have an ideal of who they are looking for, and for lesbians, that tends to be other lesbian-identified women. Some I spoke to said going out on dates with women who they didn’t find themselves as attracted to worked out better than expected. Kirsty says she met her girlfriend on GaydarGirls, and from the photo, “she didn’t seem like my type.”

“She was wearing a beanie hat, which made me think she was young and perhaps immature,” Kirsty said. “But she seemed sweet and funny in her messages, so I thought we might be friends. Then we went on a date, and fell in love within a week! Weirdly, a few of the dates I had with women whose profiles and photos I really liked didn’t go so well. I liked them on paper, but there was no chemistry. I reckon it’s always worth giving people a chance, both online and in life. Sometimes we don’t really want what we think we want.”

Related: “What It’s Like to Be a Bisexual Woman on Tinder.”

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