HETEROSEXUAL PROFILING

Abstract

This article unravels some of the complexities involved for heterosexual women aged 30 years and older using online dating to seek out intimate and sexual relationships with men. Drawing on interviews with online dating users in Canada and from media analysis of women's ‘women-seeking-men’ profiles posted on popular online dating sites, we analyse these data in terms of the discursive and material practices required to ‘become’ and perform heterosexuality within the public spaces of cyberdating. Our broad aim is to show some of the ways in which online dating as a technology and sociality affects, through everyday practices, the production of heterosexual subjectivity as an ongoing process through the life course. More specifically, we argue that ‘heterosexual profiling’, a term that refers to the exigency of online dating to make obvious an otherwise unmarked identity emptied of sexual agency and desire, presents particular challenges for women in what is seen as a dating market for the young. Therefore, online dating and the myriad routine everyday activities required to be successful in finding a suitable man entailed a simultaneous negotiation of sexuality and negotiation of ageing for this group of women, who found both pleasure and restriction in their forays online.

Notes

1. e would like to extend our gratitude first and foremost to the women who generously gave their time to participate in our study. We would also like to acknowledge the financial support from the University of Manitoba and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Several students assisted us with this project—Susan Forsythe, Kris Maksymowicz, Morgan Campbell, and Dianne Grant—and we thank them for their time and expertise. A version of this paper was first presented at the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society in April 2009 in Hanoi, Vietnam. Finally, we wish to thank the editors Mary Holmes, Chris Beasley, and Heather Brook for including our research in this special issue and for the helpful feedback we received from anonymous reviewers.¹ ‘Gabriella’ is a pseudonym, as are all of the names of research participants appearing in this article. While their actual names have been changed to ensure anonymity, most of the details of women's lives remain factual except features altered that might otherwise identify them.

2. Women in their 30s who felt that their reproductive capacities were diminishing expressed a ‘panic’ over their single status. They wanted to hook up while they could still reproduce. Even though the average age for first marriage for women is 27.8 years (Statistics Canada 2006), this does not mean that they are ‘young’; they thought of themselves as ‘older women’.

3. We acknowledge the expertise and help of our student research assistants: Susan Forsythe, Kris Maksymowicz and Morgan Campbell.

4. We acknowledge the generous help of journalists Natalie Armstrong and Tamara King who wrote newspaper articles about our study in its early stages. See Armstrong (2007) and King (2008).

5. The description of online dating sites as ‘public’ is ambiguous in that the sites vary regarding rules of non-membership access to members’ profiles. Most sites now allow members only to perform a search and access the profiles of the dating service's members. When we carried out our research in 2008 this was not the case. Anyone could do a search and was permitted to browse freely through the profiles so long as meeting the criteria set out by the service, such as on some sites women could not search women's profiles, for example. In spite of access rules, the profiles are posted for the sheer purpose of ‘public’ circulation; that is, having other people look at them.

6. At the same time, several women identified and made explicit reference to the sexual performances of men they met online and dated, in terms of problems (sexual dysfunction of older men, or lewd behaviour, for example) and pleasures (flirting, teasing, prowess of younger men, for example).