Aussie blokes and high maintenance girls: how the old became new again on dating apps in COVID-19 in Australia

Abstract

Dating apps saw increased usage during the COVID-19 lockdown in Australia – both of new users, and of activity. Using Bumble and Tinder, two of the largest dating apps in the Australian market, we examine the ways in which gender scripts were reinforced and/or subverted on dating apps during the COVID-19 lockdown. Dating apps offer a potential space for negotiation of gender scripts and challenges to heteronormativity, particularly during a period like COVID-19, where media discourse reported a shift in normative constraints because of liberation from physical social spaces. So how did it play out in practice? How did the inability to meet in person affect the ways in which users conformed to or subverted normative binaristic gender scripts? We explore this question drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with dating app users during the COVID-19 lockdown. We discuss how and whether participants mobilised heteronormative gender specific cultural codifiers to present themselves on app, and whether this was encouraged by Bumble and Tinder architecture. We also discuss how and if ‘traditional’ gender scripts were adhered to in the navigation of new matches and relationships, and the particularities of this in Australian culture. This includes the (re)emergence of stereotypical presentation ideals such as the ‘high-maintenance girl’ and the locally specific ‘Aussie bloke’, and an apparent increased desire for the ontological security provided by monogamous romantic relationships.

Keywords:

• Dating apps
• COVID-19
• masculinity
• femininity
• sexual scripts

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, dating apps have become one of the primary ways in which people seek, establish, navigate and negotiate romantic relationships. In the last decade in particular, dating app usage has grown significantly. In Australia, approximately 25% of single people had tried a dating app by 2010 (Bailey 2012). By 2017, this figure was 52% (YouGov 2017). While there has been significant negative commentary about dating apps and concern expressed about the potential effects they could have on the emotional and sexual health of users and ‘traditional’ institutions such as marriage and monogamy (see, for example, Ng 2019; Fetters and Tiffany 2020), there is no denying that dating apps are now one of the central arenas in which people pursue relationships, ranging from short-term hookups to long-term romantic partnerships.

Romantic and sexual relationships are a key site in which scripts around gender, sex and sexuality play out. These scripts are often temporally and geographically specific. It makes sense, then, that these gender scripts would be in clear evidence on dating apps. However, as digital spaces like apps can be ‘sites for challenging the norming and disciplining of gender, sexuality, bodies, and embodied encounter’ (Elwood and Leczczynski 2018, 633; see also Bonner-Thompson 2017; Ryan 2016), we might also see these scripts challenged there.

In this article, we explore how gender scripts are negotiated, reinforced, and/or subverted in heterosexual app-based dating in Australia. Data collection took place in March and April 2020, so while this project was not designed to examine dating in a pandemic, many of the findings speak to that moment: the outbreak of COVID-19, the subsequent lockdowns, and the advent of social distancing had a significant impact on Australians’ dating app usage and the ways they ‘did’ romance. Elsewhere, we found that this engendered a heightened desire for the ontological security provided by monogamous romantic relationships (Portolan and McAlister 2022). Here, we have identified two major gendered presentation ideals – the ‘Aussie bloke’ and the ‘high-maintenance girl’ – the strong emphasis on which we may attribute in part to the uncertainty engendered by the pandemic.

Methods and background

The data for this study was gathered in March and April 2020, coinciding with the first COVID-19 lockdown in New South Wales (NSW), a state in eastern Australia. Ethics approval was granted via Western Sydney University. Data was collected by this article’s corresponding author, a woman from a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) background, living in a metro area, who was in a relationship. Initially, key considerations were to do with location, which resulted in participants from metro, regional, and remote areas; gender; and race (no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people applied to be part of this study, which is a key limitation). Further modifications to the ethics approval were granted to add questions related to dating in the pandemic. The ethics office was also consulted when this article’s second author joined the project after data collection to provide added expertise.

Participants were solicited through an invitation at the end of several articles the corresponding author wrote for national digital publications 10 Daily and Fairfax. All twenty participants lived in New South Wales, were aged 18–35, and used and/or were currently using Bumble, Tinder, or both. All participants were single or in the preliminary stages of dating (‘talking to’) someone/multiple people, except for two participants, who were consensually non-monogamous. Four participants lived in regional New South Wales, while the majority were from urban hubs in Sydney. Five were born overseas, and a further two were first generation Australians with CALD backgrounds. Twelve were heterosexual women, six were heterosexual men, and two were queer men, meaning that the findings of this article speak predominantly to a heterosexual context. Further research into how this plays out in queer spaces is required. In particular, more research is needed on how the deeply binaristic gender scripts we note here are negotiated by non-binary, genderqueer and genderfluid people.

Data collection involved two in-person iterative focus groups conducted in Sydney (just pre-dating the lockdown), with three regional participants connecting via Zoom; twenty hourlong in-depth Zoom interviews; and eight participants keeping a journal of their dating app experiences in March 2020 using Diarium, a digital journaling tool. Data from focus groups, interviews, and journals was overlaid and analysed for key words and phrases relating to sexual and gender scripts; for example, words like: ‘masc’, ‘Aussie bloke’, ‘high maintenance girl’, ‘pretty and relatable’, ‘men make the first move’ etc. Key words were coded in interviews, and a numerical attribute assigned to each based on the number of occurrences: for example, the words ‘meat market’ were said in relation to Tinder on 17 occasions by 9 separate participants. Outlier comments were also noted, as well as ‘feelings’, which were often expressed through pauses, emotional displays (for example, anger and tears), or contradictory statements.

Questions of gender were fundamental to the research design, as they are fundamental to dating app architecture (Duguay 2017). Dating apps match participants algorithmically according to gender requirements, more so than user requirements, because of binary and discriminatory coding practices embedded in their design (Macleod and McArthur 2018). Users of Tinder and Bumble navigate through a widget functionality, and are required to identify themselves as male or female, with an ‘other’ option only available through multiple more clicks. Participants are then matched through their gender identification. Therefore, questions of gender needed to be addressed within the context of architectural containment, as there are limited avenues for gender subversiveness outside the binary. As part of the methodology, the corresponding author set up profiles on both apps in order to understand how app navigation works and the architectural constraints and allowances. This schema was overlaid on the gender script information described by participants in interviews.

Dating apps

Broadly, a mobile dating application’s (hereafter, dating app) primary function is to support users in their search to find a partner/s (Albury, et al. 2017, 1). We use the word ‘partner’ loosely here, as this could span anything from a one-time sexual encounter to a long-term romantic relationship. Not all apps are designed for the same purpose, not all users use them in the same way, and not all users use them in the way the app is designed. Some users use apps designed to find short-term connections to find long-term partners, some users do the inverse, and some users maintain different profiles on a given app seeking different things (described by some participants in this study as a ‘hook-up profile’ and a ‘relationship profile’).

Dating apps have been the subject of much media approbation, focusing largely on their potential impact on users’ wellbeing, emotional, sexual, and otherwise (Albury et al. 2020). This is usually rooted in an assumption that apps represent a ‘sudden, dramatic’ shift in the technological space, and are ‘a direct one-way cause of (usually negative or troubling) social transformations’ (Duguay, Burgess, and Light 2017, 213). However, the emergence of apps is neither sudden nor dramatic: computer-based matchmaking has existed since the 1960s, and online dating sites since the 1990s. In particular, there is a long tradition of queer people finding partners online (Miles 2018). Gay dating apps like Grindr were forerunners in a now crowded field: launched in 2009, Grindr was the first dating app to enter the market, and has since garnered over 3.8 million users (Shadel 2018). The Grindr layout (profile pic, bio and swipe functionality) was later adopted by heterosexual-targeted dating app counterparts like Tinder and Bumble.

A more seismic recent shift has been in terms of the ubiquity and acceptability of dating apps. Whereas previously finding a partner via technology might be considered shameful, dating apps are now mainstream, especially what we might think of as ‘big name’ apps like Tinder and Bumble (Duguay 2017, 361). Apps are now one of the primary ways in which people seek partners, especially younger people: a 2017 YouGov study indicated that 60 percent of single Australians aged between 25 and 34 had used a dating app.

Apps both ‘shape and are shaped by cultures of gender and sexuality’ (Albury, et al. 2017, 2). Gender is foundational to app algorithms, as this is how users indicate their preferences for whose profiles the app will show them. Macleod and McArthur argue that ‘gender is constructed within the apps both implicitly and explicitly’ (2018, 823), noting that while gender is ‘intrinsic to the technical aspects of the apps, Bumble and Tinder structure it in a way that is useful to their design rather than accommodating of nuanced and varied lived experiences of gender’ (2018, 836): a flattening function with normative and binaristic implications (see also David and Cambre 2016). Stefanie Duguay notes that, because Tinder relies on Facebook as a guarantor that users on the app are authentic, it ‘benefits from Facebook fostering presentable users who abide by norms’ (2017, 357), and draws a direct line between authenticity and normativity in its marketing materials by emphasising young white heterosexual people (2017, 357–358). Kenneth Hanson (2022) has also found that app use among heterosexual college students reinforces whiteness and gendered norms. Even on apps which target LGBTQ + users, such as Grindr, users often reject potential partners who do not fit a normative ideal, in that they might be ‘older, black, short, fat, with long hair, and, mainly, …effeminate’ (Saraiva, Santos, and Pereira 2020, 127; see also Bonner-Thompson 2017, who identifies ‘hypersexual masculinities’ and ‘lifestyle masculinities’ as the dominant embodied masculinities on Grindr). Similarly, a study of bisexual women using Tinder in New Zealand found that these users were positioned ‘as “outsiders” in a heteronormative and biphobic domain’ (Pond and Farvid 2017, 20). This normativity is often influenced by app algorithms, some of which actively seek to prioritise ‘attractive’ users (Gieseking 2017).

The gendered scripts and attitudes expressed on dating apps are necessarily inflected with place. This is also foundational to app algorithms. They are location-aware, as they seek to match users in the same geographical radius: this is, in fact, their ‘major attraction’ (Miles 2017, 1596). There can be distinct differences in the ways people use dating apps at home versus when they are travelling: for instance, when travelling in an unfamiliar city, users might feel freer than at home, where they run a higher risk of encountering people they know on the app. Because ‘location and place are central to how you use Tinder and who you can be there’ (Condie, Lean, and James 2018, 109), remote and regional users were selected as part of the sample, so as to decipher any marked differences in use – although it is worth noting that no notable differences in use were found. This may be due, at least in part, to the COVID-19 lockdown, which inculcated a greater level of identity permanence: that is, in lockdown, it was easier to discern who the match was, even in a large metropolis like Sydney, as users (given the longer length of time that transpired in chat) were able to find out more about their matches.

There was also less capacity for hook-ups. Even though users might meet people on the app who lived in close proximity, opportunities to physically meet were extremely limited. While the relationship between physical and digital spaces is more hybridised and complex than it may initially seem (Miles 2017; Ryan 2016), in a pandemic context, where opportunities to physically meet largely disappeared, the ways people used apps and positioned themselves on them were necessarily impacted, in that the transience of a fleeting meeting was lost.

This article focuses on users of Tinder and/or Bumble. Bumble is careful to state that the relationships it seeks to facilitate are more than simply romantic: nominally, the app ‘allows you to feel empowered while you make those connections, whether you’re dating, looking for friends, or growing your professional network’, and bills itself as ‘where people go to learn how to establish and maintain healthier connections’ (Bumble n.d.). Tinder is more explicit that its purpose is ‘bringing singles together online’, but notes that this does not necessarily have to be for long-term relationships: it claims that while other apps are designed specifically for this purpose, they are ‘all about the experience and offer possibilities for whatever it is you’re looking for’ (Tinder n.d.). Many participants maintained profiles on both apps, as well as one or more other apps, some reading with the grain of the app’s expressed purpose, some against it, some somewhere between the two poles. In short, this is complex terrain. As Condie et al. write of Tinder, any given dating app can be ‘a way-finder, knowledge-generator, friendship-giver, sex-sorter, game-changer, time-passer, soul-destroyer, esteem-giver, self-depressor, sushi-train, love-machine’ (2018, 112). The pandemic, however, was characterised by constraint – so it makes sense that the ways in which people used apps and the options they felt they had for pursuing partners were also constrained.

COVID-19 and dating apps

In early 2020, the impact of COVID-19 was first felt globally. Australia declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 1 March 2020. Very quickly, across about two weeks, work from home orders were issued, education shifted to remote learning, social and physical distancing guidelines were established, and mask wearing became mandatory. Australians’ worlds shifted from streets, bars, shops, and workplaces to the inside of their homes. The shift inside also meant a significant shift online, as the vast majority of interactions were relocated to the digital space. As Jo Sharp contends, the pandemic made it clear that ‘we are embedded within material assemblages’, and ‘that in these assemblages, bodies are marked and placed and valued differently’ (2022, 1–2).

The start of lockdown coincided with a sudden spike in dating app use. In March 2020, apps such as Bumble, Tinder, Hinge and Grindr started to see astronomical rises in usage, including new users, matches and DMs. Tinder swipe activity hit a record high of three billion on 29 March (Hahn 2021). More anecdotally, this spike was also described by participants, who noted a sharp increase in matches and conversation: ‘At the start of the pandemic my phone was pinging off the hook’, one participant noted (heterosexual, female, 30 years of age, living in Sydney). This included new users. As one participant (27 years old, male, heterosexual, living in Parramatta) said: ‘This weird thing happened, where all of these new faces started popping up. Like before I was seeing repeats, the same people going around, but there was like … this influx of people’. In some ways, the commencement of lockdown does not seem like a particularly logical time to start use dating apps, given the strict limitations on meeting in person. On the other hand, these limitations took away all other opportunities for meeting potential partners. The digital landscape was all that remained.

Dating apps adapted swiftly to this new normal. The majority delivered public health announcements on COVID-19 in-app, and provided users with new video-chat opportunities for the initial meet up. For some, this presented new, diverse and potentially exciting ways of dating. Because there were such limited opportunities for meeting in person, app users had to figure out new ways to date, some of which were wholly digital, such as video chats and audio messages. As one participant (35 years of age, heterosexual, woman, living in regional NSW) indicated, ‘People are taking it slower … getting to know each other, like what they’re saying is a Jane-Austen-esque style of dating’. Socially distanced exercise – one of the few allowable ways of meeting in person – became the new typical first date, devoid of social lubricants like food and alcohol. People had to be creative, and some participants enjoyed this. As one participant (female, heterosexual, white, 23 years old, living in Sydney) said:

I was reading this thread, some chick met someone on Hinge, and he bought her a drink and pizza and went and sat outside of her apartment so they could FaceTime and eat together. I think that’s cuter and more connection than going out to a bar. I think people are having to get more creative around it, and I think people are enjoying it.

We might read the initial spike in app use as excitement about the new possibilities encoded by the constraints on everyday living. Just as people got excited about sourdough and Tiger King at the beginning of the pandemic, so too did they get excited about a new way of dating.

It is worth noting, though, that this excitement was not universal, and the novelty of new ways of dating wore off swiftly for many, as they decided that digital intimacy was not tangible enough. One participant (27 years old, male, heterosexual, living in Parramatta) said:

What’s the point of chatting to someone for months online? Like we don’t know how long we’re going to be in lockdown for … could be six months. What if I meet them face-to-face at the end, and there’s no chemistry? It’s like I’ve wasted six months.

This is a particularly interesting quote, because while it reveals that the participant is sick of lockdown app-based dating, it also shows that their desire to find a partner has not abated. If anything, the ontological uncertainty provoked by the pandemic intensified participants’ desires to ‘lock down an iso-partner’, as people sought the comfort and safety of romantic love and the domestic unit (Portolan and McAlister 2022, 361). The equation of romantic love and domesticity with security and certainty is a dominant social narrative in many societies, including Australian society. Elsewhere, we have examined the ways in which app users sought to emplot themselves in this narrative during the pandemic (Portolan and McAlister 2022). In this article, we extend this analysis, and examine how this played out in specifically gendered terms in the context of heterosexual dating.

To do so, we are drawing on John H. Gagnon and William Simon’s notion of sexual scripting, which was developed in the 1970s and has been refined over the ensuing decades (1973, 1986, 1987, 2003) and Gagnon (1990). Sexual scripts are ‘socially learned narratives that govern the way people approach their sex lives, in addition to or instead of biological imperatives’ (McAlister 2020, 10). This is deeply bound up with gender: ‘the sexual also shares the burden of demonstrating social, gender, and moral competence’ (Gagnon and Simon 1986, 116). Thus, sexual scripts ‘help to dictate and shape “appropriate” masculine and feminine roles that men and women may play in heterosexual romantic relationships’ (Albright and Carter 2019, 13; see also Comunello, Parisi, and Ieracitano 2020).

Broadly, scripts for heterosexual dating locate the man as the initiator of the relationship, and imagine him as seeking sex while the woman seeks romantic love and emotional connection (Comunello, Parisi, and Ieracitano 2020, 1141, see also Eaton and Rose 2011; Grauerholtz and Serpe 1985; McAlister 2020). Some app infrastructure attempts to disrupt these scripts, such as Bumble’s rule that all contact between users seeking a partner of the opposite sex must be initiated by the woman. However, as the rush to ‘lock down an iso-partner’ showed, many people sought the safety promised by the dominant cultural script for romantic love in this time of great uncertainty, which indicates the power these scripts still hold (Portolan and McAlister 2022). So how did this play out in terms of gender roles? In an extremely non-normative period in time, did people cling to normative scripts – and if so, what were they?

Findings and analysis

This discussion is divided into two sections. The first deals with the scripts for Australian masculinity that emerged, the second with femininity.

Because the pandemic context of this research was coincidental rather than intentional, participants did not generally invoke the pandemic when discussing gendered presentation ideals. Therefore, in these sections, we explore the archetypes themselves. We will return to discussing the implications of the pandemic context in the conclusion.

Masculinity on dating apps: the ‘Aussie bloke’

One archetype of masculinity permeated the sample: the ‘Aussie bloke’. He was positioned as an object of desire for some women seeking a male partner on the app, and as what the male users aspired to be. It was both a slippery and congealed kind of description: there were specific characteristics consistently identified; however, the title remained elusive. The Aussie bloke is muscular, drinks beer, has mates, might have a beard, is probably white, and is tanned, tall, and funny. One participant (male, queer, Chinese-Malay, 30 years old, living in Parramatta) succinctly expressed the archetype – ‘[y]ou’ve got facial hair, you drink beer, you work out’ – which represented both what he looked for in a partner and who he aspired to be. Another participant (female, heterosexual, white, 30 years old, living in Sydney) provided a more elaborate description:

I like Aussie men… I much prefer Australian men. […] I definitely feel like I need a taller man. So men that are a little bit more rugged, that have a beard or a hairy chest and I think as well guys that I can see have a sense of humour. That’s quite big for me. Guys that I can see laugh at themselves, and can take the piss out of themselves… Aussie guys, they’re generally pretty good at that. That’s generally what the Australian culture is like. In a nutshell that’s probably what I go for.

Across the sample, a ‘masculine’ or ‘masc’ man was consistently positioned as desirable. In notable contrast, terms like ‘feminine’ were not discussed much by women, and not at all by men. This ‘masc’ Aussie bloke identity was an aspirational one, one which many men in the sample consciously sought to portray themselves as. Using a sexual scripting approach, we can extrapolate that this is the dominant cultural ideal for masculinity in Australian culture: the highly masculine Aussie bloke is ‘a portrayal of masculinity by which an Australian male may measure himself’ (Bowers 2017, 300). Unsurprisingly, it was an ideal that many men found difficult to live up to.

The Aussie bloke is one of the most identifiable archetypes of Australian identity, so it is not surprising that he loomed so large in the minds of participants. Indeed, he may be the archetype of Australian identity: as Linzi Murrie argues, Australian identity is highly gendered and marked as inherently masculine (1998). Murrie offers a description of the archetype:

Our man is practical rather than theoretical, he values physical prowess rather than intellectual capabilities, and he is good in a crisis but otherwise laid-back. He is common and earthy, so he is intolerant of affectation and cultural pretensions; he is no wowser, uninhibited in the pleasures of drinking, swearing and gambling; he is independent and egalitarian, and is a hater of authority and a “knocker” of eminent people. This explicit rejection of individualism is echoed in his unswerving loyalty to his mates (1998, 68; see also Waling 2019; Elder 2020).

Archetypically, the Aussie bloke is strong but silent. He is physically dominant, but he does not talk much, especially about his feelings (which he might not even admit to having) (Murrie 1998). It tracks, then, that representations of the physical body became the central site for proving masculinity in the sample. When asked how and why men had selected particular images for their profile, they were quick to describe them as staged, contrived, or even altered in order to create a more ‘masculine’ representation of self: as one participant (male, queer, white, thirty years old, living in Parramatta) said, ‘I use the photos that make me look more masculine. Muscles, tight shirt, that sort of thing… I’ll FaceTune it if needed’. Some male participants indicated they were interested in demonstrating elements of their life or interests via their profile, such as an interest in travel or the beach. However, there was less of a focus on including images that demonstrated that they ‘did stuff’, and more on this need to demonstrate their physical embodiment of hegemonic masculinity. This was not something that men in the sample necessarily liked, but it was clear that it was felt. Bumble and Tinder were particularly viewed as driving this emphasis on the physical because of the Manichean good/bad image swipe functionality. One participant (male, heterosexual, white, 27 years old, living in Parramatta) indicated that they preferred Hinge to dating apps like Bumble and Tinder because it provided more personal context and focused less on physicality:

I think it [Hinge] prioritises a kind of, like, it helps people understand you a little bit more, because it has prompts. So people get to know a little bit more about you, rather than just having that visual straight up. I mean, I think if you’re a really good-looking guy it might work for you… like if you’re ripped or whatever. I’m more an acquired taste.

This is indicative of a broad trend across the sample: while many men aspired to portray themselves as Aussie blokes, they overwhelmingly found it difficult to fit themselves into this dominant cultural script. It was an othering identity, one impossible to live up to. In some cases, this was for racialised reasons, due to the way it is intertwined with whiteness (something which does not only happen in an Australian context – see Smith and Amaro 2021). As one participant (male, queer, Chinese-Malay, thirty years old, living in Parramatta) said:

Gay men want an Aussie bloke. It’s racial stigmatism. So quite often guys will openly write no Asians, and you see that a fair bit and that does impact you after a while. It’s very prevalent on Grindr and Tinder.

More broadly across the sample, men felt they were doing something wrong on their profile, as manifested in a lack of matches, but were not quite sure what it was. This came to be expressed as worthlessness and/or an inability to properly perform masculinity. As one participant (male, heterosexual, white, thirty years old, living on the outskirts of Wollongong) said, ‘dating apps cut you down. Like, I used to think I was an okay looking guy – now not so much. I dunno… there’s something I’m doing wrong’. Most male participants disliked the emphasis on hyper-masculine presentation they felt dating apps engendered because they found it so difficult to ‘do’, and felt that they might perform better in a real-world scenario: as one participant (male, heterosexual, white, 27 years old, living in Parramatta) said, ‘If I’m on a dating app it’s like crickets… but if I’m standing behind them on the coffee queue and start a conversation, then I might get their number’. We can see a sense that the photo-reliant architecture of apps over-emphasise the physical: because of the swipe function and the split-second decision-making it entails, there is little opportunity to win someone over more slowly through conversation. In a pandemic context, this becomes a particular point of anxiety.

One other nuance that emerged was that, for male participants, there was a deep link between their own presentation and what they ‘wanted to attract’, which was not necessarily described by the female participants. For instance, as one participant (male, heterosexual, white, 30 years of age, living on the outskirts of Wollongong) stated:

It’s not so much about how I want to present myself, it’s more about who I’m going to draw in. Like, I’m not just after sex, the endgame is a relationship, so I don’t want to seem like a fuckboi or anything. Like, I’m a bit of a sucker for romance and love and all that, but I always seem to fall for the wrong woman… […] I wanted to show that – I don’t know, I wanted to sort of be a bit vulnerable, because… I want something more.

This desire to demonstrate vulnerability runs counter to the Aussie bloke identity, who is anything but vulnerable. However, it also demonstrates an understanding that women might not necessarily find the stoicism, silence and anti-emotionalism of the Aussie bloke appealing, especially in a long-term partner (something demonstrated in a lot of Australian women’s writing about romance, historical and contemporary – see McAlister 2018a, 2018b; McAlister and Teo 2017). While the efforts by men to physically embody Aussie blokiness assume that this archetypal form of masculinity is what women will find desirable, we can see here the idea that it might not be the foundation for a solid and lasting romantic relationship, and some problematising of this pervasive cultural script.

Femininity on dating apps: the ‘high maintenance girl’

The dominant script for men on dating apps reflected what they wanted to appear as. The inverse was true for women, echoing Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick and Anita Harris’s assertion that ‘establishing oneself as being a particular kind of girl means negotiating with what one is not or does not want to be’ (2005, 3). The dominant script for female participants in the sample was that they did not want to appear on the apps as a ‘high maintenance girl’.

Unlike the men in the sample, the women did not admit to altering the images on their dating profile (though, of course, this does not mean they did not do it). However, they all indicated that they were very conscious of which images they selected when they were setting up their Bumble and/or Tinder profiles, and the persona they wanted to project, referred to by many as their ‘brand’. Because of the Manichean good/bad swipe app functionality, they wanted to ensure their profile mobilised cultural codifiers associated with femininity so as to achieve match outcomes. For many, this involved selecting images where they were ‘done up’ (for example, about to go out, with hair and makeup done), or more traditionally feminine images (for example, wearing a dress). We can see here a desire to embody a (hetero)normative femininity, which often centres on the body (McCann 2022, 14). If, as Amy Shields Dobson contends, ‘common and popular feminine fashions and sensibilities are aligned with specific stereotypes of heterosexual sex appeal and desirability’ (2015, 39), it makes sense that for female app users, images of oneself were a site of anxiety and intense management.

However, it was not simply a matter of looking pretty and exuding normative femininity. Female participants in the sample also felt the need to ensure that they did not come across as ‘high maintenance’: they needed to seem ‘relatable’ and ‘not intimidating’. One participant (female, heterosexual, white, 21 years old, living in Sydney) expressed the dilemma this way:

My everyday look is an oversized tee and very comfy clothes, but on my profile there’s the festival picture where I’m obviously done up and there are two other photos where I’m with friends … I did feel the pressure where you should seem at least, look pretty, but at the same time you need to look relatable. So I guess at the same time, people aren’t intimidated to approach you. There is that pressure that you need to look friendly enough, but pretty enough, but not too friendly at the same time. It’s a weird line. There’s definitely a different image that you need to present of yourself.

This kind of identity management, where women must straddle an impossibly thin line, is nothing new. It is particularly pervasive for girls and young women: as Christine Griffin argues, ‘[g]irls and young women are generally represented as having (or being) too little or too much; as too fat or too thin, too clever or too stupid, too free or too restricted’ (2004, 42). Here, the line is between heterosexiness and effortlessness. Female participants feel the urge to look pretty, but also not so pretty that they might scare prospective matches off, or suggest that said prettiness requires an immense amount of labour (which might then require a prospective male partner to perform labour).

In a study of young heterosexual women at university in South Africa, Louise Vincent and Caryn McEwen suggest that:

Not being viewed as ‘high maintenance’ means not complaining, not demanding too much, not expressing needs, not having expectations for emotional openness or fulfilment – in effect, not making any of the demands which are the necessary requirements for intimacy based on relations of equality and mutuality (2004, 13).

It would be hyperbolic that this was entirely true for the female participants – or at least, true to the same extent. However, there was a strong consciousness of an external male gaze present across the sample, tied closely to the idea that being high maintenance was an unattractive quality. When concepts like ‘relatability’ and ‘intimidation’ were invoked, it was with the male observer and his emotional responses in mind, prioritising his comfort. For instance, one participant (female, heterosexual, white, 30 years of age, living in Sydney) said:

Well, I’m definitely not a girly girl. I’m more of a tomboy. So I’ve tried to not make it just bikes and stuff. I’ve tried to make it more girly. I’ve struggled a bit with that though because I think a lot of men can be a bit intimidated by that.

This mirrors the way in which relatability has been described by Akane Kanai (2019): as ‘an affective relation produced through labour that reflects a desirable notion of common experience to an unknown audience’ (4). As Kanai goes on to argue, there is a critique of perfection (especially feminine perfection) in the notion of relatability, but it is still deeply invested in and entwined with standards of perfection (2019, 4), which may account for the ways in which female participants sought to balance heterosexiness (hegemonic feminine perfection) with not scaring away matches (being ‘relatable’ rather than ‘intimidating’).

In some cases, making a profile more relatable was framed as making it a more authentic representation of the self. This could be linked to archetypical notions of femininity around the eternally unthreatening and relatable ‘girl next door’. In a specifically Australian context, it could also be linked to a fear of being perceived as a ‘tall poppy’: as has been well-documented, high achievement untempered by humility, self-effacement and unpretentiousness are generally not well received in Australian culture, with ‘tall poppies’ often figuratively leveled (Peeters 2004). ‘High achievement’ might be equated with ‘high maintenance’ in this particular context: the aim was to appear everyday rather than exceptional. For instance, one participant (female, heterosexual, white, 30 years of age, living in Sydney) said that:

Tinder was all photos, so I would just pick photos where I naturally thought I looked the best in. And then I had a friend go through it (my profile), and they said you just don’t come across as the person that you are, like you’ve got all these glamour photos, and all when you’re dressed up nicely, and it gives off the wrong impression of you. People feel like you’re very high maintenance … and I looked back at it and I thought you don’t want to come across in that sense. So then I put in lower key photos, when I’m not dressed up, full make-up and about to go out on the town.

However, heterosexiness could not be sacrificed on the altar of authenticity. As one participant (female, heterosexual, white, 21 years of age) articulated, if one had to pick, prettiness trumped relatability:

Obviously, I’m not the guy looking at the photos, you’re always going to go for the girl that’s prettier. Guys say they want someone relatable, but if you get two girls and one is in her trackies and the other one is more done-up, who are they really going to choose? The prettier one, sort of thing. She’s kind of unrelatable though … a bit high maintenance.

The two quotes illustrate another common theme that emerged in sample: a strong emphasis on reading, constructing and assessing women’s profiles by other women, especially friends. It is in the eyes of the female participant in the second of the two quotes above that the pretty woman seems ‘a bit high maintenance’, even as she assumes she will be more appealing to a man on the apps. Similarly, in the first one, it is the female participant’s friend who tells her that people will feel like she is very high maintenance, and that she should include some more relatable content. This was a pattern across the sample, and was a marked difference from the men. While men strategized and experienced anxiety over their profile, they did not report turning to other people to discuss it. Women, on the other hand, would frequently gauge the number of matches and likes they were receiving, and, if they were low, consult a friend or family member for advice on what they were doing wrong. The friend or family member would then advise them on how to better calibrate their profile, dialing up or down the heterosexiness or relatability as needed. This process is neatly articulated by this participant (female, heterosexual, white, 30 years old, living in Sydney):

[M]y profile was very much me and who I am. And I found when I was using it, as girls do, we sort of look at each other’s profiles, and even my mum, who I’m very close too. I was like I want you to take a look at my profile, and she’s forever telling me I want you to wear skirts or dresses more, so she said I think you should add a couple more photos where you look more feminine … and kind of being something I’ve toyed with my entire life. Do I just like be myself or do I give off an air of more femininity? How do I present myself?

Other female participants went as far as letting their friends write their bio for them – as one participant (female, heterosexual, white, 21 years old, living in Sydney) reported: ‘I feel like the bio is this fine line, between sounding cool and quirky or just being kind of lame. So I let my friends do it – they know me better than I know myself sometimes’.

This kind of consultation was usually expressed by participants as a form of care. However, this consultation usually catered directly to the male gaze, prioritizing attractiveness to that gaze or trying not to frighten it away by being too ‘intimidating’ or not being ‘relatable’ enough. Therefore, this is clearly also a mobilization of sexual scripts at the cultural and interpersonal levels, with intrapsychic scripts – that is, what the individual in question might actually want – being largely deprioritised in favour of more hegemonic understandings of what might be appealing. This was complicated somewhat in instances where peers reportedly sought to help the dating app participant appear more like themselves – for example, like this participant (female, heterosexual, white, 30 years old, living in Sydney) said, ‘I let some of my friends have a look at my profile, and they were like … you’re not this person at all …. And so I ended up changing it’. However, even in cases like these, the goal was usually ‘relatability’: a state of being which positioned the app participant firmly in relation to the wants and desires of a potential match (the person they needed to be relatable to).

Interestingly, there was no real sense of competition between participants and other women on the apps. This could be explained by the fact that one cannot see the profiles of other women if one identifies as female and heterosexual – all the images one sees are of potential male matches. However, the same is true for men on the apps, who frequently did compare themselves to other men. For women, the point of reference for the dating app self was other women, but not competitively: it occurred within a space of peer guiding and solicited surveillance. The feminine self was configured and mobilised online through a lens of other women, with the interpersonal level of sexual scripting taking on a profound level of importance. The cultural affects relating to what might make a woman valuable within the dating app space were discussed by women as a form of bonding and even care, but this was clearly also a process of regulation and discipline. It is a clear example of what Alison Winch (2013) calls ‘girlfriend culture’, which ties together intimate friendship and regulation. As Winch notes, ‘girlfriends are essential in enabling feminine normativity. Their intimate networks of comparison, feedback and motivation are necessary in controlling body image’ (2013, 2). Here, Winch is writing about body image, but the same is true in the dating app space, where friends help friends put their best foot forward – where ‘best’ is equivalent to ‘normatively feminine’.

Conclusion

The sexual scripting processes evident here on dating apps are not new. Aspirational figures like the Aussie bloke and negative figures like the high maintenance girl have been circulating in contemporary Australian culture for a long period of time. If this research had been conducted during another time period, it is likely that many of the same anxieties and scripts would have been invoked.

However, the global COVID-19 pandemic intensified and crystallised many of the usual paradigms evident in dating apps as people were cast into a state of ontological uncertainty by the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. This is congruent with the trend noted by Sharp: the pandemic has tended to reinforce norms rather than transcend or destabilise them (2022, 7). Elsewhere, we have discussed this in respect to participants’ attitudes to romance, observing that while the patterns of dating app use for people during the pandemic were not enormously different than they had been previously, these patterns were ‘heightened and accelerated by the pandemic, as people desperately sought the certainty offered by the romantic masterplot’ (Portolan and McAlister 2022, 355). Given the uncertainty of the period in which data for this study was collected, it is not surprising that something similar played out in terms of gender, particularly in the context of heterosexual dating. In normative ideals, whether they are positive (like the Aussie bloke) or negative (like the high-maintenance girl), there is safety, security, and certainty. There is also an assumption that these are the most desirable and least desirable forms of masculinity and femininity respectively. It makes sense that, in a period where people were desperately seeking to ‘lock down an iso-partner’ and to obtain the security and comfort offered by the romantic masterplot, that these gendered scripts would be particularly visible, as participants endeavoured to render themselves heterosexy. Male participants aspired almost desperately to embody the ideal of the Aussie bloke. Female participants were equally desperate not to be perceived as high maintenance, and to carefully tread the balance between heterosexiness and relatability, seeking the help of trusted friends and family so that they could simultaneously attract a partner and not scare him off.

On top of this, in a pandemic context, with people in lockdown and with social distancing the norm, the digital domain – dominated by apps – was really the only space in which people had to encounter new people: opportunities for chance encounters in public spaces were few and far between. Users were also provided with more time in the chat phase to ascertain their matches’ true identities, often exchanging Instagram handles, removing the transience of fleeting and anonymous hook-ups or even dates. This meant that the space was over-emphasised, and anxieties surrounding it heightened: if one were to find a new partner during the pandemic, it would have to be on the apps. It is not surprising, then, that we see such a focus on the visible from participants in their discussion of their photos and of profile curation. Because of apps’ Manichean good/bad swipe functionality, that first impression – which is usually photo-based – matters enormously. This is true at any time, but in a pandemic context, when one’s sole opportunity to find a partner relies on an app, it becomes even more important: and as a result, being seen to visibly embody and/or not embody these gendered ideals becomes a locus of great concern and angst.

As with our exploration of how Australians’ approach to heterosexual romance on dating apps, it would be an overreach to say that the pandemic greatly shifted users’ attitudes or created new paradigms around gender (Portolan and McAlister 2022). It did not: the aspirational ideal of the Aussie bloke and the negative stereotype of the high-maintenance girl are well-known. However, because the pandemic engendered uncertainty, what we do observe is people clinging to the familiar and the safe with both hands. Lockdown conditions changed the dating landscape, but change is a frightening thing, particularly in a context as objectively frightening as a pandemic. Therefore, it makes sense that we see here such a strong emphasis on normative binaristic gendered ideals on dating apps. They might be oppressive, but they are, at least, familiar.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Portolan

Lisa Portolan is a PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University examining intimacy and the impact dating apps have on the reproduction or subversion of heteronormativity. She is an author and freelance journalist with articles published widely in Australia and internationally. Her new book (fiction) is set to be released in August 2021 by Simon and Schuster.

Jodi McAlister

Dr Jodi McAlister is a Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University. Her research interests include romantic love and its representations and manifestations in popular culture. Her first monograph, The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures, was published by Palgrave in 2020; and she has published research in Q1 journals such as Continuum, Sexualities, and Celebrity Studies. She is also an author of fiction – her young adult paranormal romance Valentine series is published by Penguin Teen Australia.